Say No to the Duke

by James, Eloisa

Jeremy raised an eyebrow. “Likely the nursery was a lively place and your squeals kept him awake.”

  “Aunt Knowe was right!” she cried, straightening and planting her cue on the floor. “You didn’t pass out. You were merely bored!”

  “Which time?” he asked genially. “Do you suppose if I ring the bell, Prism will send a footman? I could use another bottle of whisky.”

  “Carper is outside the door, waiting to escort me to my chamber,” Betsy said. “You can send him if you like. Why do you bother drinking whisky if it does nothing for you? It leads to dropsy and tremors, and will turn your nose red.”

  Jeremy’s eyebrow flew up. “That seems oddly specific.”

  “Aunt Knowe made all of us read An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits on the Human Mind and Body. Or perhaps it was Human Body and Mind. Are you hoping that liquor will send you to sleep if you drink enough of it?”

  “I wouldn’t be so lucky.”

  She sighed. There was nothing worse than a person who nagged about a friend’s bad habits. For example, her stepsister Viola kept urging Betsy to “be herself,” now that Betsy had proved so popular on the marriage market.

  Won the war of the debutantes.

  Whatever you wanted to call it.

  “You should stop drinking,” she said, because Jeremy Roden was so ferocious that people likely felt they couldn’t tell him the truth. “If not for the sake of your liver, then because Shakespeare said it takes away the ‘performance.’ You don’t want to find yourself in proximity to a nightdress, flannel or otherwise, and be unable to play your part.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You think I’m losing my teeth at this young age? I assure you I can rip silk with one incisor.”

  “You did tell Thaddeus that you had aged.” She rearranged the table, banking a right-angle shot off the left side.

  “You are uncannily like your aunt,” Jeremy observed.

  “I can’t imagine a better compliment,” Betsy replied. “Tell me again why you won’t give me a game?”

  Silence.

  Then a low voice drawled, “I’d be bored.”

  “You’re a brute,” Betsy tossed over her shoulder.

  Jeremy didn’t see any reason to answer that because, of course, she was right. “Why do you like billiards so much?” he asked instead.

  That made Betsy actually turn around, her precious cue—he’d noticed how much she adored it—cradled in her arms. “It takes a great deal of concentration to stand on the back of a moving horse,” she announced.

  “North boasted about your ability to do that. Just think: If all the gentlemen at your feet disappoint, you could join the circus.”

  “It takes even more concentration to play billiards.”

  “The tricky shots,” Jeremy said, nodding. “I have a friend who likes to send the ball backward.” He’d taught Jeremy the trick, though Jeremy didn’t add that.

  Betsy made a scornful sound. “Billiards isn’t about flamboyance; those players lose to anyone who can make six or seven simple shots without making a mistake. I could beat your friend.”

  He had no doubt of that, so in lieu of reply, he stood up and stuck his head out the door. A footman leaned against the wall, eyes half closed. “A pot of tea, if you please,” he said. “You might as well get yourself a cup before you return, as Lady Boadicea will be an hour or two at least. You’re no use to her if you’re asleep on your feet.”

  “Of course, my lord,” the footman said, trotting away.

  It was astonishing to realize that everyone in the castle—from Lady Knowe to a lowly footman—appeared to have concluded that he posed no danger to Betsy. That footman left without a second thought.

  Jeremy could ravish her. Didn’t they think of that? They were putting a lot of weight on loyalty to the Wilde family, if that was their reasoning.

  Maybe the household considered him akin to a Wilde, but that was absurd.

  He’d only met Betsy two months ago. He wasn’t Parth, for God’s sake, who wasn’t related to the Wildes by blood, but a member of the family in every way that mattered.

  He was just a friend of North’s and no more.

  Jeremy returned to his chair. If he tried something untoward, she would ram the billiard cue into his stomach.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe they knew Betsy would defend her honor to the death and they trusted her to fight him off.

  She was bent over the table, lining up the cue and ball, her upper teeth clamped on her lower lip the way she did when she concentrated. She was a hell of a billiard player.

  If they ever played and he actually wanted to win—because the two times she’d bullied him into it, he hadn’t given a damn—he could give her a true match. His father and he rarely saw eye-to-eye, but they had been most civil to each other over a billiard table.

  Now he thought of it, that’s probably why he wouldn’t play her. Too much of an echo of his childhood.

  Of course, the Wildes were right, whatever their reasoning: He would never ravish a woman. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the view from the corner. Every time Betsy bent over the table, he had a delicious view of either her breasts or her arse.

  The fact her skirts extended to the sides emphasized the round swell of her bottom. Her breasts peeked out the top of her corseted bodice, gorgeous handfuls that blushed pink when she was angry.

  A man lucky enough to bed her would probably think up ways to annoy her, just to see that delightful haze of color flood from her bosom to her cheeks.

  Perhaps when she was aroused . . .

  Proving that she had no idea that his thoughts had wandered in a lascivious direction, Betsy bent down, eased her cue forward, and lined up a shot that apparently was meant to go from the left rail to the right, and from thence to the pocket.

  Her eyes betrayed the angle she wanted, but her arm was at the wrong height. It wouldn’t work. And it didn’t.

  One thing you could say for Betsy Wilde: She didn’t give up. She didn’t even sigh, just plucked up the ball and returned it to its place.

  “You’re holding your right elbow too high,” Jeremy growled.

  She immediately adjusted her elbow, one of the rare instances in which she’d listened to him. Then she replaced the ball and tried the shot again. It worked.

  “Now try from this side, but bend lower over the table,” he ordered.

  She obediently moved around the table so her back was to him and bent over to put the ball into place—and froze. She put her cue across the table with a click and turned about, crossing her arms over her chest. “Why?”

  “So I have a better look at your arse, of course,” he said.

  “I should whack you over the head and put you out of your misery,” Betsy muttered, moving back around the table to the other side.

  “This angle isn’t bad either,” he said a few minutes later, after she’d managed to finesse the angle twice. He was beginning to feel slightly repentant about ogling her bosom, though not enough to force him to his feet and out of the room.

  A glimmer of the gentleman he used to be was making itself known, pointing out that he oughtn’t to gawk at a lady’s curves without permission.

  Betsy would never give permission, obviously. She wasn’t Lady Tallow, who shook her bosom in front of him like a bowl full of jelly, reminded him of the castle’s two peacocks.

  Lacking a peahen, they spent their time rattling their feathers open in colorful but fruitless displays.

  When Lady Tallow did the same, he couldn’t even manage a twitch of his cock, a failure she had read in his eyes, given that she’d flounced away before he could refuse her offer.

  Yet his cock twitched every time Betsy neared him. And now, when she was leaning over as if she were offering her breasts for his pleasure, he was far past a twitch.

  It felt damned good to have a hard cock again after months of inertia.

  That had nothing to do with her. It just meant that his body was getting ahold of itself again. He
was healing, the way Lady Knowe kept promising when she poured noxious cups of soothing draughts down his throat.

  Betsy glanced up at him, and apparently realized her breasts were on full view. “You must be desperate,” she said, straightening and hauling up her bodice.

  “Oh, I am,” he agreed, upending his glass. “These old stone walls are crowded with Wildes, each more luscious than the last. I meant the Wildes, obviously, not the walls.”

  “You’re desperate and blind,” Betsy snapped, setting up the table again. Whatever else you could say about her, she was not a quitter. He’d never seen anyone work so hard to master the angles that ruled billiards.

  Blind?

  Surely, she knew how beautiful she was. One of the things he liked about Boadicea Wilde was that she wasn’t nervous about her looks. She wasn’t one of those women who were forever peering into their glasses and poking at their hair or coloring their lips.

  She sailed into every room, the confidence of a beautiful woman hovering around her like an ermine wrap. She was fit for a king, in other words.

  Or a duke.

  “I don’t have proper breasts,” she said, surprising him. “Not like Lady Tallow’s, for example.”

  He blinked but managed to keep his face expressionless. “I can assure you that from a man’s point of view, every pair of breasts is ‘proper.’”

  “I could put on boy’s clothing and no one would know the difference.”

  She was probably right about that. Other women overflowed with fleshy parts, lush breasts so plump that they rose from their chests like overgrown gourds.

  Betsy was perfectly proportioned. Nothing overly ripe.

  Jesus.

  “Not true.” He managed to give the words a touch of contempt, even though the contempt was really about his unruly desire for her. He set his glass down on the floor. Maybe whisky was finally affecting him. “You don’t walk like a boy.”

  What’s more, he couldn’t be anywhere near her breasts without noticing them. Even flattened by the wretched bodices women wore, you could see—

  He wrenched himself back from the edge of saying something stupid and resorted to brutal honesty instead.

  “If a man hadn’t already noticed your breasts, you might get away with it on top. But you wiggle when you walk. Makes a man want to watch your arse.”

  Likely that would shock her. He was tired of prevarication. Talking of men who “passed to a better reward,” for example.

  They died.

  They were buried. Gone.

  After a moment, he wrestled his mind back into the room. Betsy’s mouth had eased. She wasn’t shocked; she was complimented.

  “You hurt my feelings,” Betsy told him, the plaintive note in her voice obviously false. She pursed her lips in a mock pout that made his cock throb against his silk breeches.

  He eased backward in the chair to hide his condition, just in case she happened to glance in that direction.

  “I didn’t hurt your feelings,” he said, taking another swig. “I can tell.”

  “You must play me a game of billiards, or I’ll tell my father that you praised my arse, and guess who’ll be asked to leave the castle?” Her voice was triumphant.

  He’d walked straight into her trap.

  He didn’t want to leave. This shadowy room was a perfect place to wrestle with his demons. And now he had his cock back . . .

  Fine.

  He stood up. “I don’t play without a wager.”

  Betsy shrugged. “What will you wager?” Her voice was confident. Of course, she expected to win. He had sat around the billiard room for weeks, not to play but to brood. Or heal, as Lady Knowe had it.

  That and to argue with Betsy. And watch her play.

  Her bosom and her arse were simple pleasures. Private ones. She had no idea that he could have drawn the outline of her body with charcoal if he wanted. Hell, he could do it in the dark, his fingers tracing her curves.

  Not that he ever did anything about it, even in the privacy of his room. Forget his boasts to Thaddeus about self-pleasuring. He couldn’t remember the last time he touched himself.

  For months he had felt as if his body was merely a container for emotions that he didn’t want and couldn’t get rid of. The fierce pleasure he used to experience from righteous exercise of his favorite body part?

  Gone.

  Instead of raging desire, the kind that reminded a man that he was a man, Jeremy went through the day with a muted, passive lack of interest in anything connected to the female body.

  Perhaps every soldier felt that way.

  But a memory countered that thought. A few weeks ago, he’d walked around a corner silently and come on North in the act, his fiancée hitched high against a wall, her skirts spilling over his braced arms, her legs curled around his waist.

  North had laughed unsteadily as Diana threw her head back and cried out as if—

  Jeremy wasn’t a pig. He had retreated as silently as he’d come, eyes squeezed shut. But that one image was burned in his memory.

  He hadn’t felt even a twitch in his loins, though.

  Until now.

  “What do you want if you win?” he asked. Obviously, Betsy assumed he was a rotten billiard player.

  “An adventure,” she said instantly, propping her hip against the table and staring at him.

  That was surprising. Perhaps that was Betsy Wilde’s appeal: She was surprising, and nothing else in life was.

  “Adventure,” he repeated, trying to imagine what a young lady considered to be an adventure. Going to the theater? Betsy had spent a good part of her life in London; hell, her father had brought in an entire troupe to act the outrageously successful drama Wilde in Love, written about Alaric.

  “Three syllables shouldn’t be too hard for a drunkard like yourself to understand.”

  Jeremy dismissed that taunt. She had caught on to the fact that he couldn’t get drunk. Perhaps Lady Knowe had told her. The duke’s sister was one of the most observant people he’d ever met. She would have made a hell of a general.

  “What sort of adventure?” he asked.

  Betsy gave him a fierce look, nothing like the gentle, sweet gaze with which she mowed down her suitors. “The sort men can have,” she stated. “I want to put on breeches and be a boy for a day.”

  Jeremy’s mouth fell open. “What?”

  His mind immediately presented him with an image of Betsy wearing a snug pair of breeches. What had been desire became a forest fire. He took a deep breath.

  It was very uncomfortable to discover that he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted a woman before.

  She was not the right woman.

  Not the right moment.

  “I want you to take me to London and show me things that only men can see,” Betsy added.

  He scowled at her.

  “Not a brothel,” she said, obviously disgusted. “A gentlemen’s club like White’s or Brook’s, where I can play billiards.”

  “Just billiards?” he clarified.

  She nodded.

  Actually, that made sense. She was obsessed by billiards.

  “That’s it? That’s your adventure? Going to London and playing billiards? You’ll likely beat almost anyone,” Jeremy pointed out.

  “You’re not as drunk as I thought, if you realize that,” Betsy said.

  “Much to my dismay, I never am.”

  “I’d like to go to an auction at Christie’s too, and bid on something. I loathe the fact that women aren’t allowed to place bids.”

  “Why so much passion?”

  She stared at him. “As a woman, I’m not allowed to have my own money. I am required to buy fripperies, but nothing of any import, reflected in the fact that I am not allowed to place a bid at auction. And you ask me why it matters?”

  Jeremy winced. “I apologize for my sex.”

  She gave him a lopsided grin. “So, are you ready to take me on an adventure?”

  “Impossible.” He b
rought out the one weapon he knew would horrify her. “You might be compromised. Forced to marry me.”

  “Nonsense. A woman can’t be compromised unless a man wants to sleep with her.”

  Jeremy narrowed his eyes. It was almost as if she knew that he hadn’t had a cockstand in months, not until this evening. She was treating him like a toothless old dog.

  He rose to his feet and stepped toward her. The fact she brought a footman with her to protect her from male attention went through his brain, along with the fact that she hadn’t blinked an eye when he sent her chaperone away. In fact, she suggested the man leave.

  Damn it, she thought he was neutered.

  “What is it?” she demanded. “My father wouldn’t let the two of us spend so much time together if you were a man who felt—” She broke off.

  Jeremy stared at her, incredulous. “Desire?” The duke himself had declared him castrated?

  Betsy frowned at him. “Are you going to be missish with me? Yes, desire.”

  “I feel desire.” The words growled from deep in his chest.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Betsy cried. “For me, you philistine! I don’t mean you leering at my bottom. I mean proper desire, the sort that makes people behave like fools.”

  “I could be that sort of fool.”

  He was still hard, and exhilaration filled him. He felt alive again, as if his body and mind had clicked back together like a huge puzzle piece.

  Betsy narrowed her eyes, her instincts finally driving her to see him as a man. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, thinking.

  “Of course,” she said, her voice careful. Not tentative, but careful.

  “If I win, I want a night with you,” Jeremy said, staring down at her. “One night and no ring to follow.”

  Betsy’s mouth fell open. “What in the bloody hell—”

  Joy rose within him. He wouldn’t take it, but damn, it felt wonderful to desire it.

  “You don’t want me, and even if you did, you’re a gentleman,” she said.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  Betsy gave a theatrical sigh, but he could see that she wasn’t entirely certain of her statement. From now on, she’d never see him as a toothless old dog again. She’d keep her damned footman within earshot in the future. “If you won, you could never claim your wager,” she pointed out.