When the Duchess Said Yes (21 page)

“The Whitehall Steps,” he said, as if there could be no other reply. “It’s such a fair night, I thought we’d make the rest of our journey by water.”

He climbed down and offered her his hand to follow. He wasn’t jesting: the carriage was standing before the Whitehall Steps, one of the steep stone stairways that led to the edge of the Thames. Lizzie had never gone on the river, as much as she’d longed to. Charlotte didn’t trust the low, narrow wherries for hire that served as waterbound hackneys or the watermen that rowed them, and insisted they always travel by carriage instead.

“Are we going by wherry, Hawke?” Lizzie asked excitedly, trying to see past the steps’ stone walls to the landing. “I’ve always wanted to, you know, but Charlotte said they’re not proper for ladies.”

“They’re not,” Hawke said. “Which is why I’ve arranged something more suitable for you.”

With a footman holding a lantern to light their way, Hawke led Lizzie down the steps, keeping her hand tucked into the crook of his arm. She was expecting that
he’d hired a more substantial waterman’s boat, making sure they’d be the only passengers for the night, but what she saw when they turned the corner made her halt and gasp with amazement.

On the water at the bottom of the steps waited a lavish pleasure barge, lit with hanging lanterns that showed off its gilded, carved woodwork and red-and-black-painted sides. Eight oarsmen and a coxswain dressed in matching white jumpers, black hats, and red scarves around their throats sat ready on their benches aft. To the fore was a small canopied area, hung with striped curtains and furnished with wide cushioned benches and a small table for dining. A servant in gaudy livery that matched the oarsmen’s waited beside a large hamper of food and wines. The prow sloped up into a bare-breasted mermaid, much like the figurehead on a grander ship, with another broad bench piled with cushions and coverlets directly behind her. Pennants fluttered from the flagstaffs, and more bridal-white ribbon rosettes, similar to the ones decorating the carriage, had been added to the canopy and to the gilded mermaid herself. The barge was so elegant, so fanciful, so utterly unexpected, that for a long moment Lizzie could do nothing but stare.

“Might I assume that I have surprised you?” Hawke said, enjoying her reaction.

“Of course you have,” she exclaimed, “which you know perfectly, perfectly well. Where did you find such a vessel?”

“I have loan of it from a friend with tastes as florid as mine,” he said. “It’s not quite the Venetian gondola I would have preferred, but it will do well enough to convey us to the Chase. We have our own river stairs, you know, left from the old king’s convenience.”

“Truly?” She skipped down the last steps with excitement,
not waiting for him to follow. “La, Hawke, it looks more fit for royalty than for me.”

“But you are my goddess, Lizzie,” he said grandly, “which makes you superior to mere royalty. Here, let me help you aboard.”

She took his hand because he offered it, not because she needed his support, and deftly scrambled aboard the barge. As she did, the oarsmen tipped their oars straight upward in salute, sending a shower of droplets that caught the lanterns’ light like falling diamonds. She laughed with delight and applauded as they pushed off from the shore. With her skirts dancing around her legs, she made her way up to the prow, her arms held out for balance on the moving boat, but still walking with ease.

“Come now, Lizzie, there must be no secrets between us,” Hawke said as he joined her. He’d left his hat with the servant, and the breeze from the water had already begun to toss his dark hair around his face. “I was told you were an earl’s daughter, but I vow there must be some of Sailor Jack’s blood in you somewhere as well.”

Laughing, she leaned against the curved back of the mermaid, bracing herself against the boat’s movement. Her unbound hair streamed around her, tangling in the breeze, and the delicate silk of her skirts fluttered restlessly around her ankles.

“I don’t know if I’ve any of Sailor Jack’s blood,” she said, “but our house in Dorset is near the sea, and as a girl I was on the beach and in the waves most days, no matter the weather. I could go aft and row one of those oars quite handsomely myself, you know.”

“No!” he said, pretending to be shocked. “A lady with an oar in her hand?”

“I vow I could, Hawke,” she declared eagerly, sounding as though she wished he would test her. “Mama swears I’m half fish, and she may be right. Next time
we’ll take a two-seat wherry onto the river, and I’ll show you how well I can handle a boat.”

“A two-seat wherry!” he marveled. “I am in complete and utter awe, Duchess. How was I to know you were such a wonder?”

Yet there was something in the way he said it, some faint little twitch to his lips, that betrayed the truth.

“Because I
told
you before, didn’t I?” she said, striving to sound as indignant as he had pretended to be shocked. “You needn’t be in awe of any sort, considering I told you before how much I loved the water.”

“You did?” he said, smiling and forgetting to be shocked.

“I did,” she said, likewise putting aside her show of indignation. “I told you all about it, and that is why you’ve hired this barge for me tonight, isn’t it?”

“Or it could be simply because this is a much more pleasant way to travel from March’s house to mine,” he said, teasing still. He slipped his hand beneath the curtain of her hair to rest his palm lightly on the small of her back, a small, protective gesture that somehow seemed far more intimate than if he’d embraced her outright. “You must agree with that.”

“Oh, I do,” Lizzie said. “There’s much less dust as well.”

That made him laugh, and Lizzie grinned, too. This was a more pleasant way to travel than through the city streets, true, but it was also vastly more romantic. The water around them was dark, reflecting both the moon and the stars and their own lanterns as they glided over its shimmering surface. Having so large a crew of oarsmen meant that their passage was effortlessly smooth, and given the hour, there were few other vessels to crowd their way. The daytime boats filled with wares to be sold or men on their business had been replaced by wherries filled with men and women traveling for pleasure,
from one amusement to another. There were a few other barges on the water, too, and though none was so grand as theirs, some of these had musicians aboard, and the sounds of strings and flutes along with merrymaking and laughter drifted over the water to them.

“Everything looks different from the river,” she said. “But there’s the block of Westminster Abbey, and over there’s the rounded dome of St. Paul’s.”

“Do you see those four spindly towers?” Hawke said, pointing over her shoulder. The servant had brought them wine, and Hawke handed her one of the cut-crystal tumblers. “That’s the old queen’s footstool.”

“The what?” she asked, sipping the sweet canary as she looked to where he was pointing. Drinking wine with him in the prow of a pleasure barge by moonlight made her feel wonderfully worldly, like a true London lady.

“Queen Anne’s footstool,” he said. “St. John’s Smith Square. The story’s that when the royal architect asked Her Majesty what she fancied in a new church, she kicked over her footstool so that the legs stuck upward, and said ‘Like that.’ Which is why it has the four towers, one for each leg of the footstool.”

She laughed, watching him over the rim of her glass. “I should not believe you.”

He shrugged. “Believe me or not, I vow it’s the truth. Now there, right before us, is the new Westminster Bridge. They were still building it when I first left for Italy, and now no one can recall when it wasn’t here. Are you ready to shoot the arches?”

“You mean we’ll go beneath them?” she asked with surprise. She’d assumed they’d turn about, not go through the bridge’s stone arches. “Can we do that?”

“If we wish to reach the water gate to my house, we must,” he said. “The current runs brisk and eddies a bit, that is all.”

He set down his glass and shrugged off his coat.

“Here,” he said, settling it around her shoulders. “There’s likely to be spray, and I want you to be warm.”

She clutched the two sides of his coat together to keep it from sliding away. It was heavy on her shoulders, still warm from his body and smelling of him, too. She liked how the weight of it made her feel snug and looked after, as if he were shielding her himself.

“Won’t you be cold?” she asked, being solicitous in return. He didn’t look particularly cold, standing there with the full sleeves of his shirt billowing around his arms, the white linen luminous in the moonlight. His waistcoat was tailored to perfection, fitting close to display the breadth of his chest and the narrowness of his waist, and everything covered in that exotic leopard pattern, the silver and gold threads winking. She’d never seen a gentleman’s waistcoat quite like it. He looked outright piratical, with his dark hair wild and half untied from its queue. “Though I suppose you’ve that leopard waistcoat to keep you warm.”

He smiled. Faith, he was so beautiful, his jaw and cheekbones hard and strong by the swinging lantern’s light, his mouth full and sensual in a way that made her long to kiss him.

“You like the waistcoat, then,” he said. “You won’t find another like it in London. I chose it today particularly for you.”

“I do,” she said, and she did. It was very much like him, as elegant yet as dangerous as a leopard himself, and it pleased her to think that that was how he wished to show himself to her.

“It horrified Brecon,” he said, “making it an utter success, as clothing goes.”

“A duke can set the fashions,” she said, paraphrasing his own words back to him, “and not be bound to follow any others.”

“Then we’ll be wild creatures together, sweeting, and the respectable world be damned,” he said, his smile wicked. “Here now, take care, under we go!”

He’d warned her, but she still wasn’t prepared for the swiftness of the current beneath the bridge. The barge jumped forward and the deck beneath her feet lurched, making her grab at Hawke’s arm for support. Glistening with damp, the large square stones of the arch flew by overhead, and spray rained all around them, kicked up by the rapids. Her own startled cry echoed back to her, hollow and unearthly, and then, like that, they were on the other side.

“Oh, Hawke,” she said breathless with exhilaration. She swiped the spray from her face, chuckling with delight. “That was wonderful, and mysterious, and
perfect
!”

“I knew you would like it,” he said, slipping his hands inside the coat to find her. “You’re every bit as wild as I, aren’t you?”

Instinctively she’d widened her stance to brace herself against the rocking deck, and now Hawke took advantage of her posture to lean between her splayed legs. He pressed her back against the wooden mermaid, crushing her skirts and making her acutely aware of his size and strength—and aware, too, of how at least part of him wasn’t cold in the least. He pressed hard against that place between her legs that seemed to tremble and swell in sympathy even through their clothes, and as he rocked against her, she fell into rhythm with him and the rush of the water and the rise and fall of the oars.

She forgot to be offended, as an English peeress must surely be. Instead her excitement only grew, as if his cock and the dark river and the flying spray were all part of a different, separate world from the London she’d always known. In this one evening, he’d made her forget all the careful training she’d had from Aunt Sophronia
and Charlotte. He’d freed the untamed, impetuous girl she was supposed to have left behind in Dorset, the girl who ran barefoot across the sand with her skirts held high around her knees and didn’t care who saw her.

“I
am
wild, Hawke,” she whispered, surprising herself with her ferocity. “Because of you, because of this night, and I—I thank you for everything. Not just the pleasure barge, but remembering about how I liked the water and—and—”

“I remember everything about you, Lizzie,” he said, his voice becoming so low it was almost a growl. His hands were gliding up and down her sides over her breasts, never stopping. “Just as you remembered to wear your hair down for me.”

Her heart was racing now, knowing he was about to kiss her. “Charlotte said I shouldn’t have left it down until we were alone, that it should have been a sight reserved for you as my husband.”

“But I see no other when you are with me,” he said. “You blind me to everyone and everything, Lizzie. You are my world, my own.”

He kissed her then with hungry possession, and she kissed him in return, every bit as greedy for his taste. He broke away to kiss her throat, small, nipping kisses that made her gasp and shiver even as his stubbled cheek and damp hair brushed against her skin. She didn’t really know what it was she desired so intensely, yet still she clung to his shoulders as she arched and rolled against him with abandon.

When he pulled down the front of her bodice, baring her breasts, she again felt nothing but the inevitability of it. Her nipples tightened at once in the cool air, only to be warmed as his tongue laved over them, sucking and biting gently at the tender flesh until she whimpered with longing. She tried to flip her hair from her face and breasts, clinging to her skin in sodden tendrils, and randomly
she thought of how she must look the figure-head’s twin, a mermaid of flesh and blood to mirror the one of gilded wood. Truly she was a mermaid bewitched by her lover’s touch, and she’d no wish to be released from his spell.

“Hawkesworth!” The man’s voice was well-bred, raucous, thick with expensive liquor as it echoed across the water. “Hellfire, Hawke, is that you with some damned randy wench?”

And just like that, the spell was broken.