Fourteen
“Alban,” Lady Eliza said, stretching out her free hand to her nephew as he approached. “Tell Kittie that she must not mind me and must get some fresh air, if that is what she wants.”
“Mrs. Douglas, I concur with my aunt; you must get a breath of fresh air if that is what you require.”
“She does; she was just telling me that she is feeling a little warm and headachy, and asked if I minded if she took a walk on the terrace.” Lady Eliza smiled slyly and raised her eyebrows over her milky eyes. “Perhaps Alban will accompany you, my dear,” she said, squeezing Kittie’s hand.
Alarmed by such an obvious ploy to confine the duke and her to close space—Lady Eliza was obviously still concerned that her nephew and companion did not get along well—Kittie was about to spew a list of reasons why that was not necessary, but when she met the duke’s gaze, she was speechless.
With a more open expression than she had ever seen, he said, “Will you allow me, Mrs. Douglas?”
“Go,” Lady Eliza said, giving her a push.
The duke accompanied her to the terrace and guided her to a stone bench that overlooked the sloping lawn, silvery green in the moonlight. Candlelight from the room they had left behind spilled through the open drapes into a pool on the terrace stone. The night air smelled of the coming autumn and a breeze rustled through the bushes, scattering leaves across the stones of the flagged terrace. He sat down beside her, radiating male heat in suffocating waves. He laid one arm across the terrace wall behind her.
“It’s a lovely night,” he said, his tone low and quiet.
A shiver raced through her. “It is.”
“Why do you think my aunt sent us out here together like this?” he asked.
She turned to him, amazed by his perspicacity. She had long thought she was the only one who could see through the lady’s sometimes devious machinations, but then she should have realized the duke had known her his whole life and he was, besides, an intelligent man. It was just that she had thought that kind of perception was a feminine province. “I think she is concerned,” Kittie said, driven to honesty, “by our seeming inability to get along as two rational adult people.”
“Do you think we don’t get along?”
She remained silent. She didn’t know how to answer him, and since she had no real reason for her antagonism toward him other than his suspicion of her, she had nothing to say. He touched her shoulder with his large hand, rubbing her shoulder blade with his thumb. It was a good thing he was not privy to her internal working, for she was surely melting inside. She cast him a look of exasperation, and he stopped.
“Pardon me, Mrs. Douglas, for my familiarity.”
She caught a secretive smile on his handsome face. Did he have some idea after all of how she felt? It was a thought that shamed her back into speech. “I am ready to be friends if you are, sir.” She held out her ungloved hand and his engulfed it.
“I would like to be your friend . . . Kittie, if I may call you that as a friend. What a sweet name. How did you happen to be named that?”
“My mother’s dearest friend was a lady named Katherine, but she died young. I think my mother always missed her, and so named me Kittie, her dear friend’s diminutive denomination.”
“My wife tried to convince her friends to call her Kitty, but to no avail.”
He had never mentioned his wife in her presence. “Why would they not go along with her request?”
The duke’s expressive mouth quirked into a sideways grin. “Her closest friend—a woman very much like your friend Lady Severn—said it was impossible to even consider because it was a little too apt. A kitty, she said, was a soft little creature that had the most unexpected needle-sharp bite when all you wanted to do was pet it.”
Kittie smiled. “Was that true?”
Alban, grim again, stared off into the darkness. “I suppose.”
“I’m so sorry for all the pain you suffered. It must have been a dreadful time,” Kittie said, tentatively touching his sleeve.
“I don’t wish to discuss it, Mrs. Douglas.”
So, he had retreated to formality. “I was not discussing it, I was merely offering condolences.”
“There are none needed.”
“Condolences are never amiss. You must be sorry she is gone, and so my offering of sympathy is for your pain.”
“There is none, ergo, your sympathy is wasted.”
Infuriating man! He had clambered back into his hermit’s cave and was brooding again, she could tell by the beetling of his dark brows and the grim set of his lips. “Why do men do that?” she said, not realizing what she was going to say until her mouth was open. But, in for a penny— She turned to him on the bench and glared at him. “Why do men pretend they have no feelings, that they are cold and without human emotions? I don’t understand it. I will never understand it. My husband did the same thing when his mother died, pretending he wasn’t grieving, though he was.”
His chilly veneer cracked. “Why, if we are to point fingers, do women insist on scrutinizing every little expression, every word, every minute detail of a man’s speech for meaning? Can you not for once just accept that we are telling the truth when we say we don’t wish to talk about some things?”
“I accept that you don’t wish to talk about it, but what I do not accept is that that is necessarily the correct way to behave.”
“Oh, so even our behavior is remiss now? I could say the same. Women are prone to puzzling bouts of tears and hysteria at the most inopportune times.”
“And men deliberately shut themselves off from all feeling, unwilling to do anything but . . . but bet on which snail will cross the path first, or which raindrop will hit the bottom of the window ahead of the others.” She threw her hands up in the air and then clasped them on her lap. “Trivialities. Utterly inconsequential to life.”
“Now you are being deliberately vexatious. What some idiotic men do has no bearing on the rest of creation.”
They stared at each other, and Kittie wondered if this is what his wife saw when they argued, this implacable coldness.
He turned away. “There is nothing to be gained by opening one’s heart, merely to have it stabbed and milked for every drop of red blood.”
Kittie drew in a long breath. The raw pain in his awful words hung in the air like an odor. “Alban,” she said, putting one hand on his sleeve. “That is what talking is for, to heal that wound so the soul can regenerate. If it were not for my friends after Roger died, I would have . . . I would still feel empty as I did when he passed.”
“But I would wager that he didn’t betray you and then laugh about it,” Alban grated out, his teeth clenched. “He didn’t . . .” He shook his head and turned away, hitting his fist on the stone bench. “I don’t wish to discuss this, Mrs. Douglas. It is over and done and in the past.”
“Is it? Is it over?” Kittie said gently. She removed her hand from his sleeve and gazed down over the moonlit grass. “Is it ever over? I loved Roger to the day he died. It wasn’t until after that I found out how badly he had misused our funds, to the point of leaving me destitute. He gambled. I still don’t know if he couldn’t help himself or if he just didn’t care. If he had loved me as much as he claimed, would he not have made some provision, kept some money safe, as he promised?”
Slowly, uncertainly, Alban turned back toward her. “Do those thoughts plague you?”
“They did for a long time.” She crossed her arms over her belly and hugged herself. “I had to forgive him and do my best to move ahead. For a while I wasn’t even living. I was suspended in time; the rest of the world moved on, but I stayed caught in the trap of my . . . my own pain and grief.” It hurt to think of that again, and how long she wasted in anger and hopelessness and defeat. She felt his arm steal around her. How good it would feel to allow herself to let go for once. She swallowed and let his warmth steal through her. But when she turned to him it was to find his lips so close, his warm breath fann
ed over her face and she involuntarily closed her eyes.
The moment of his lips meeting hers was like the first heady fragrance of a rose, ineffably sweet, impossibly fragile. The warmth molded them together and every particle of breath was drawn from her body, consumed by a flame of need. She put her arms around his neck and pressed herself to the hard wall of his broad chest, her fingers threading through his dark curls and cradling his head.
A tiny part of her was asking, pleading, to know how this had happened. Why was he kissing her? Why was she allowing it? But the other part, the larger part that had longed for this delicious sensation, hungered for it, imagined it a hundred times even before meeting him, urged her to surrender and give herself over to the powerful desire that wound through her body.
And then what?
She pulled away and his dark eyes searched hers, the glaze in his a clear indication to her of his desire and how he imagined this would end. It occurred to her that he had kissed her to avoid thinking of what he needed to conquer, his anger and grief at his wife’s desertion. Kissing her was one more way of pushing away and stuffing down difficult emotions.
How very male to let lovemaking override other more difficult emotions. Roger would always, when he wanted to avoid talking about their money problems or things she wanted to know, seduce her with his kisses and soft words. But she wouldn’t be used that way, not now that she knew the price.
“I had better go back in,” she said, rising and moving away.
“Wait! Kittie . . .”
But she could not turn back and listen to him. Vulnerable to his beguiling mastery of the art of seduction, she had to acknowledge her weakness for him and be strong enough to walk away.
• • •
Alban, unwilling to beg her to come back, watched her walk in and felt a thread of irritation wend through him. How could she just walk away when they both knew she wanted to go on? She was vulnerable to him, and it wasn’t just his superior position as it was with some women. He had been a duke’s heir and a duke long enough to understand the difference between a woman dazzled by his power and position and a woman genuinely entranced by his skill at seduction. But she had walked away. Attracted to him, wanting him, she had still walked away. Women, as always, were a mystery to him.
The young baronet, Sir John Fitzhenry, slipped out of the terrace door from the drawing room. “Lord, I want a cigar,” he said, strolling across the flagged terrace as he took a couple from an inner pocket. “Would you like one, your grace?”
Alban took the proffered cigar.
There was silence for a few minutes as Sir John dealt with the complicated flint and tinder process to light their cigars. “Somebody will have to find an easier way than this to simply light a cigar,” he grunted. “There must be something.”
Alban shrugged. “It has always been that way. I don’t see the need for change.”
“Don’t you?” Sir John said, glancing sideways at the duke. “I think there is always room for improvement in everything, don’t you think so?”
Alban considered it, but it wasn’t more ease in lighting cigars that occurred to him. Room for improvement. Had he been ignoring that need in his own life? He knew there were many people who wanted him to marry again, but he had not been able to come to any decision regarding that frightening prospect. He had vowed his next wife would be a meek little miss fresh in her first Season. He wanted one who would be so awed by his position that she would never even consider feeling ill-used if he went his own way and did things other than how and what she wanted. Not like Catherine, who had wanted his time and attention.
And yet it was possible that he could have prevented the whole calamity that his marriage became by just such a little attention. And therein lay his anger. He would never have the chance to mend it. Catherine had not only left but died, and he found that outrageously unfair. He should have prevented it. There were problems between them that he ignored for far too long, and in the end they turned away from each other. He should have prevented her leaving, which would have prevented her dying, and so it was his fault, really.
Wasn’t it?
“Your grace? Is the cigar satisfactory?”
“Yes . . . uh, yes. Tell me, do you truly think that . . . what you were saying before. That there is always room for improvement?”
The younger man nodded. “Not that the old ways are not fine, but—”
“But change is necessary.”
“For life, yes. Consider . . . we don’t remain children, we grow and change, and so do our needs. Everything around us is like that, don’t you think? We used to believe that it was all right to own other people and to force them to work for us. We don’t do that anymore—”
“We do in our colonies.”
“Yes, but change is coming there too,” Sir John said eagerly, his voice quickening, his tone heightened. “People are resisting change, yes, but soon there will be no need, because there will be better ways to harvest sugar and cotton. Manufactories! Soon, work that took days will take hours. Stockings that used to be knit by hand are now knit on looms, swifter and better!”
Alban smiled at the zeal expressed in the young man’s slim body, bent forward, his hands moving in the air as if to create pictures of vast, efficient manufactories. “Will it really make everything better? What about those who make their living from the old ways?”
“They’ll be free to get a better education, to learn and study, to think and do better for themselves and their families.”
They had moved far beyond the personal application Alban was placing on Sir John’s statement about advancement being necessary for life. He saw problems in the baronet’s theories, drawbacks to such an idealized world as he imagined, but he would not stamp on the young man’s enthusiasm. Others could do that. Without idealists like Sir John the world would be a dreary place.
And without women like Kittie Douglas, a cold one. That unbidden thought danced into his brain, but he pushed it away. “If they can find a better way to light a cigar I will consider it miracle enough,” he said.
Sir John chuckled. “I know I become overenthusiastic sometimes. It is a failing.”
“No, never consider it a failing. There is time enough in your life for cynicism. Besides, I’m sure it is your enthusiasm for life and your vigor that Lady Severn appreciates so much.”
The young man flushed. “She’s wonderful, isn’t she?”
“I suppose you could say that.” Though he wouldn’t.
“She is so intelligent and forceful. Like no other woman I’ve ever met.”
Alban regarded him closely. “Why did you come north with us? Who are you following here, myself or Orkenay?”
Instantly the younger man retreated to his usual demeanor of calm, cool amusement. “Your grace, why would I need any other reason to come north with your party than the excellent hunting?”
Hunting indeed, but what are you hunting? Alban wondered. And why did you follow Lord Orkenay in his amorous adventures? “I think I shall rejoin the others. Will you come with me, Sir John, or are you going to enjoy the night air for a while longer?”
With a sly smile, the baronet said, “I’ll be in in a moment. Or, if Lady Severn comes out, in a half hour or so.”
“I’ll let her know you’re waiting.”
Fifteen
“I will admit she is a puzzle to me, your companion,” Alban said to his aunt the next morning as he took her walking along the high fell. His enjoyment in the walk was mostly in watching his aunt relishing the wind on her face and the striding walk they were able to share because of his own long-limbed frame.
“You have never been one to enjoy a puzzle. You always said they were tiresome and pointless, where Bartholomew would work at one for hours until he had solved it.”
“Ah, we are to canvass my failings again, are we?”
“Why do you think I view it as a failing? When did you become so sensitive to criticism or even simple comment, Alban?”
“Admit that she interests you,” Lady Eliza finally said, sounding breathless. She stepped carefully, placing one booted foot deliberately before shifting her weight. “May we stop walking for a while, Alban? I dislike admitting it, but I’m getting tired. Not used to this.”
They stopped and sat on a rocky outcropping. Alban stared down the sloping fell at the zigzag of stony fences punctuating the sloping green and a herd of black-faced Swaledale sheep in the distance.
“She does interest you,” his aunt repeated. “Come, Alban, don’t be silent with me. I do not have my sight; please give me conversation, at least.”
“All right! Yes, she does interest me.”
“Would she not make some man a splendid wife?”
“Some man. She has great beauty of a certain kind, earthy and voluptuous. But she is very countrified and too plain-speaking.”
“By that you mean contrary and stubborn, an indictment from you, indeed, who are the very soul of compromise.” She let that lie, her sarcasm, knowing he would get her meaning. “There is more, though. You think she is not sophisticated enough for London,” Lady Eliza said, her tone blunt.
“She’s not. They would toy with her and then consume her like a cat does a mouse.”
“Do not mistake her calm and lack of frivolity for simplicity. It is my opinion that Kittie Douglas could easily grace the most elegant of ballrooms, and would adjust her manner accordingly.”
Alban eyed his aunt, wondering if she was implying something more than her words, on the surface, would seem to indicate. He had first learned from her that communication was never a simple art, built, as it was, from many layers of meaning.
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