Dukes By the Dozen

by Alyssa Alexander

  A proposal she had been too stunned to accept.

  “Come, Pease Porridge. Let’s give them something real to gossip about.”

  She was still stunned by the calmly casual courage in him. “They’ll look askance at you for this, Beech,” she said, nodding toward the avid onlookers trying to eavesdrop upon their conversation. And she wasn’t just talking about the dance.

  He smiled, unconcerned. “Let them. I have faced down the cannons of the French, my dear Pease Porridge.” He lifted her fingers to his lips. “I know how to survive.”

  Her breath all but left her body. He was such a man. “I’m terribly glad you did, Beech.”

  He squeezed her fingers. “Fortune favors the bold, my friend.”

  “About time something did.” She let him lead her past the astonished lookers-on and was raising her right hand to take his before she realized—

  “Right hand on my shoulder,” he instructed easily, as if she hadn’t nearly made an unforgivably unthinking blunder. “Left on your skirts.”

  She circled her hand down to rest upon the precisely fitted coat of midnight superfine as if she had intended on doing exactly that. Beech slid his good hand into the small of her back, snugging his arm around her waist and drawing her so close she had to lean away to keep her bodice from brushing against his buttons. And then he spread his fingers so that his thumb aligned with the ladder of her spine and found its way through the subtle gather of fabric at the back of her high-waisted gown to brush against the edge of her short stays beneath.

  Everything within her—every thought, every breath—stilled, suspended in time for one long, luxurious moment. And then the taut strains of the fiddles penetrated the silence, and Beech stepped forward into the deeper embrace of the dance.

  She stepped back, away from the intimate interjection of his leg between her skirts, and they were dancing. The firm press of his hand in the small of her back guided her along, forward and back, side to side and around. Around and around and around, spinning into the swirl of the music, following the flow of the fiddles as if they were puppets led along by their heartstrings.

  Penelope closed her mind to her doubts and fears—it was one thing to be silently unrepentant, but quite another to dance with the new Duke of Warwick with her father fuming like a chimney across the room.

  She closed her eyes to the relentless stare of nosy neighbors and let the swirl of the music carry her troubles away. Let Beech lead her where he would.

  Which was strange. She wasn’t the sort of girl who liked to be led. She liked to set her own course—witness her rejection of the arrangement made for her with the last Duke of Warwick. But Beech was…different. The press of his hand against the small of her back made her skin tingle with an awareness that went far deeper than the flirtation she had attempted with his brother. An awareness that was more than infatuation, more than mere physical attraction—this was an affinity for Beech, and Beech alone.

  For the strength of his character. For the warmth of his embrace. For the calm surety that radiated from him like rays from the sun.

  Penelope gave herself the gift of looking up at him, and was both surprised and elated to find him smiling down at her. As if he liked being with her, dancing with her, as much as she liked being with him, safe in his arms, whirling in deliriously delightful circles that would have made her dizzy if she hadn’t abandoned propriety and tethered herself to him with her arm around his neck.

  It was heaven—he was heaven, this calm, assured man who looked like a glowing archangel, one of God’s warriors, armored against the sharp weapons of society with his heroism and honesty and dashing courage. Nothing could injure her while she was with him. She was free—to feel the heat of his chest seep through the intervening layers of her clothing until she was as warm as a flower in the sunshine. To feel awareness skitter across her skin until her chest began to feel tight with need. To feel the cool rush of the air on her cheeks as they twirled and twirled and twirled.

  Until the fiddles drew to a long, closing note, and it was everything she could do to let go and step back. And curtsey. And breathe.

  “Thank you, Beech.” Her voice sounded small, as if it came from far away. “I’d forgotten how much I loved dancing.” And how much she was going to miss it when she was sent away.

  “My dear Penelope, the sentiment is entirely mutual.” He offered her his arm. “I meant what I said before. You really must consider if you won’t mar—”

  “Do introduce me, Warwick.”

  Penelope felt all her warm pleasure wash away like a cold rain. In front of them was Lord Robert Maynard, the same damned impertinent fellow whose earlier attentions had driven her to barricade herself in the library.

  On second thought, perhaps she ought to thank him. But Maynard gave her no chance. “Introduce me so I, too, may dance with the infamous Miss Pease.”

  Beside her Beech stilled, which was not in itself an alarming thing. He seemed to conduct himself with a particular economy of motion—a sort of tensely precise awareness of where his body was in space. But in a man so still and watchful his eyes moved with a power and perceptiveness that was telling, and at the moment Beech’s dark scowl should have sent a cleverer fellow running for cover.

  “I beg your pardon,” Beech said carefully. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  Maynard appeared impervious to sense. “A friend of your brother’s, don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know.” Beech’s tone was as precise and sharp as flint.

  “This is Maynard, Your Grace—Lord Robert Maynard.” Her own tone was as cool as she could manage over the heat of her anger. “Though I haven’t been formally introduced to him either, that didn’t stop him from sending me a smutty valentine—did it, Maynard? No. You’re a credible enough pornographer, but not, I think, a tolerable enough dancer to tempt me.”

  “Now, don’t be like that, Miss Pease. It’s all in good fun.” Maynard laughed and continued in a confidential aside to Beech, “It was a damn good, damnably smutty valentine.”

  A sulfurous combination of rage and mortification gripped her as tight as a noose. “You insufferable—” Her throat was so choked she could not speak.

  Mercifully, she did not have to.

  “You sent a lewd valentine to Miss Pease—a woman to whom you had not even been introduced?” Beech’s question was everything calm and collected, but Penelope could hear the ominous warning in his darkening tone.

  “Everyone knows her.” Maynard winked suggestively. “All about her. And your brother.”

  Beneath her arm, Beech’s grip tightened, as if he feared she might strike the blighter. And she would have—if Beech had not looked so likely to do the honors for her.

  “Maynard,” Beech instructed in a voice as calm and polished as a blade, “kindly remove yourself from my presence, and keep entirely out of Miss Pease’s, before I am forced to put a hole through that obviously vacant brain of yours.”

  Maynard remained as thick as a doorjamb. “What? It’s all in good fun.”

  “Good fun does not consist of taunting defenseless young women.” Beech began to speak slowly, enunciating each word in the deceptively calm tone that ought to have made Maynard’s cods shrink up into his body for cover. “Go. Away. Before. I. Do. You. A. Very. Great. And. Very. Precise. Violence.”

  “I say, Warwick.” An unsure smile curdled Maynard’s cheeks. “Thinking of taking up where your brother left off, are you?”

  In an instant, Beech had Maynard seized by the neck like a rag doll, his thumb pressed hard into the hollow of the blighter’s throat, cutting off his wind.

  Maynard scrabbled at Beech’s hand to ease the pressure, but Beech held fast. “I will kill you”—Beech whispered so cool and low only she and Maynard could hear the lethal threat—“gladly and effortlessly, if you ever utter her name, or so much as look in Miss Pease’s direction ever again. Do you comprehend me?”

  Maynard bobbed his mottled red face in frantic
accord.

  Beech let go and stepped back. “Remember that—and how hard it was to breathe—the next time you think to sully a lady’s name. Especially this lady.”

  “But she’s not a la—” Maynard flinched, throwing up his hands to ward Beech off, before he obligingly scuttled away.

  Beech made an infinitesimal adjustment to his coat. “My apologies. Where were we?”

  “I hardly know.” Every idea was overthrown by Beech’s astonishing actions. Though he was as cool as a summer ice, she was very nearly shaking.

  “Indeed.” Beech spoke into the silence that was the sound of every gossip within the room holding their breath in anticipation what might happen next. “Come, my dear Miss Pease. We need air to rid ourselves of that fellow’s foul stench.” Then he gave her his hand, to lead her away from the gaping assembly.

  She went with him, her father and his apoplexy be damned. A reckless mixture of astonishment and gratitude filled her so full, she thought she might burst into tears. “You really are the bravest bloody man, Beech.”

  “It is only a country ballroom,” he said in his wry way, “not the deck of a man-o-war.”

  “That was more than a dance, Beech,” she insisted. “You must know that.” He had to know that the ballroom, and society in general, was a battlefield for her—that she had already lost upon such ground. “You must know what it meant to me. So, I will thank you for defending me. And for dancing with me.” She came up upon her tiptoes to press a hasty heartfelt kiss to his cheek.

  “And you must know, I would give you more than a dance, my sweet Miss Pease.” His voice was low and all the more earnest because of his quiet. “I would give you the world.”

  Chapter 7

  “Come away with me now—we’ll elope.” Marcus felt the strange, heightened calm before a battle, knowing he was doing the right thing and trusting himself to fate.

  Penelope laughed as if such an idea were surely a joke. “Elope? You can’t mean to run off to Scotland?”

  “Too far. And far too inconvenient,” he returned. “I find I’m a duke, and I ought to be able to persuade a bishop to write me a special license. We can be married tomorrow morning.”

  “Beech, you can’t be serious.” She gaped at him. “And anyway, tomorrow it’s going to snow.” She turned to the darkened window. “See, it has already begun to fall.”

  Now that he had made up his mind, he would allow no obstacles to block his path. “Snow or no snow, I mean what I say. I always mean what I say.”

  But she was unsure—of him, surely, and probably of herself. “Beech. We dare not.”

  “Why not?” He set himself to convince her. “Where is the girl who never refused a dare? Where is my old friend, the girl who went first, jumping off the old bridge into the Avon that summer afternoon?”

  “That girl was thirteen and a monstrous hoyden.”

  “Nothing about you was monstrous. You were magnificent—daring and bold and everything I admired.”

  “That was a long time ago.” Her low voice was full of emotion he could not quite fathom. “We aren’t children now. We can’t jump off bridges or go rushing out into the snow.”

  “Why not? What are you afraid of?”

  “Afraid it will make everything worse,” she whispered.

  “How? I thought you were about to be banished to the hinterlands? How much worse could it be?”

  That put the wind back in her sails—the color rose in her cheeks. “You have a point.”

  “Don’t go to the maiden auntie,” he pled. “Come away with me into the dark and snow and make me happy—as happy as I promise to make you. Please.” He wanted it so badly he ached.

  He ached for her affection. He ached for her simple kind touch.

  So, to convince her he meant every word, he kissed her. But what began in persuasion, soon became something more, something hungrier and more assertive. A hunger they shared—her lips, her lovely, plush, bow-shaped lips—pressed into his again and again as if she could not get enough of kissing him.

  Marcus had never thought of himself as an impulsive man—his youthful brashness had been thoroughly trained out of him by the Royal Navy. But the feel of her delicately boned fingers combing through his beard fired more than his imagination—he felt the heat and promise of her touch like a brand.

  So, he angled her mouth for a deeper kiss.

  She met him without hesitation. Her tongue stroked and licked at him, kindling the fire between them with each blissful touch. She folded herself into his embrace and everything within him, every nerve, every fiber of his being, was reaching out to her with heat and urgency. He left her lips to kiss his way down her neck, to taste the sweet slide of her skin while she angled her head in response, granting him tacit access while her hands raked through his old-fashioned queue, pulling away the carefully wrapped ribbon.

  “Lord, Beech. Even your hair smells divine.”

  She smelled of velvet and winter irises, chilly and fresh, and he wanted to gather her in like a bouquet.

  But it was she who gathered him, her hands at his coat, parting the buttons and pushing it wide across his chest. Her palm sliding through the narrow slit at the throat of his shirt beneath his stock to lie flat against his skin. Her mouth at his nape, putting her lips and teeth to the sensitive tendon at the side of his neck until he was bowing his head to let her have her way with him.

  Until he felt her explore the line of his shoulder, and curve down around his shoulder to his upper arm. Or rather what was left of it.

  “No.” His voice was a fog of strangled desperation—and the relief when she ceased her exploration was so profound it nearly unmanned him. Nearly. Because there was some noise above, at the top of the stair that started them into flight. “Come.”

  They plummeted toward the bottom of the stair, hand in hand in a breathless race, like the children they once had been.

  “Left here,” she directed, navigating the narrow turnings. “And then left again for the door that leads to the stable path.”

  In the darkness of the passage Marcus paused with his hand on the doorknob. “Ready?” If she went with him now, she would be doing more than crossing a threshold.

  She drew in a deep breath before she nodded. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  He pushed open the door to the cold night air and held fast to her hand as they flew across the bitterly cold cobbled courtyard of the stable block. The night wind lashed at them, sending Pease Porridge’s velvet skirts and plain petticoats whipping against her legs, making him regret he had not thought to retrieve his heavy sea cloak from the footmen—she was like to perish in so insubstantial a gown.

  But there were his carriage and coachmen in the yard, already putting the blanketed horses back into harness, mindful that he had instructed them that he would be no longer than an hour and a half at the ball.

  Yet what an astonishingly productive, life-changing hour and a half it had been—he had barricaded himself in a room, made a public spectacle of himself dancing a waltz, throttled and threatened a toad of a man, asked a lass to marry him, and was attempting to carry off an elopement.

  Devil take him, but if he wasn’t in love, he didn’t know what he was.

  “There are fur rugs inside.” He held the coach door for his already shivering duchess-to-be. “Get yourself under the fur.”

  She clambered in, but still he held her hand.

  “Penelope.” Marcus said her name aloud for the first time because he wanted her to know he was serious, and because he had been wanting to say it, longing even, to taste her name like tart sloe wine upon his tongue. “You may trust that I will take care of you, and I will always do everything in my power to do what’s right.”

  “Of course you will,” she answered. “Just as I will take care of you.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  Her smile warmed him far more than any raging bonfire could. And just like that, the cobbled courtyard seemed to move beneath his feet, like the
deck of a ship rising and falling upon the sea. He was upended—as dizzy as the young midshipman he had once been. And twice as exhilarated.

  “Another successful cutting out expedition, Commander?” Penelope held his hand fast. As if she would never let go.

  “Aye.” This was what Marcus loved and had lived for—the excitement of action and command. This was what he missed. All he had needed was Penelope Pease by his side—excitement and adventure seemed to follow her wherever she went. “Worried?”

  She gifted him with a rueful smile. “I’d be a fool not to be.”

  “And you, my darling girl, are no fool.” He gathered her close to his good side.

  “Hardly, Beech—I seem to be a fool for you.” And then to prove it, she kissed him.

  A kiss of such sweet promise and soft passion that the world fell away again, and he was nothing but aching pleasure. Nothing of hurt or pain or loss. Nothing that was not hers and hers alone.

  Devil take him, but she was fine.

  Chapter 8

  Penelope put every feeling—every thrill and every worry—into that kiss. Every inch of gratitude and wonder and exhilaration, until her body tingled, and she felt giddy and strange and afraid.

  Because if running off with Beech wasn’t the most reckless, exhilarating thing she had ever done—and she had done any number reckless, exhilarating things in her life—she didn’t know what might be. Because this was not the Beech she remembered.

  It was Caius Beecham who had been all rash, mad impulse, not his younger brother. Beech had always looked before he leaped, always wanted to make sure the water was deep enough before he took any plunge. He had been a cheerful, fun companion and a thoughtful, wry lad, but the years away had added something more—an experience that put him at a soaring distance. A sort of gravitas that set him well apart from the reckless rascals and heedless swells of her recent experience. A surety, a self-command that showed he truly did not care what others might think of him.

  How steadfast. How ruinous.