No Dukes Allowed

by Grace Burrowes, Kelly Bowen, Anna Harrington

  A permanent arrangement, however, was all too appealing.

  The closer they journeyed to Genie’s doorstep, the quieter the neighborhood became.

  “Was your duke so awful as all that, Genie? Did he put you off speaking vows ever again?”

  That Mr. Morecambe would admit to missing her, that he’d come straight to see her, warmed her heart. That he’d think to ask this question earned her respect.

  “Ladies are to desire the married state above all things,” she said. “Marriage to a duke is the best married state there is, supposedly, but I was lonely and often bored, despite being run off my feet with obligations. I’m only now realizing my late husband was likely in the same situation—lonely, bored, run off his feet with obligations. He was expected to marry profitably, and he accepted that duty, but failed to get all the consideration promised in the bargain.”

  To have some sympathy for Charles was a great and welcome relief.

  “One doesn’t think of dukes as merely mortal,” Mr. Morecambe said. “But they are, I suppose. You’ve dodged my question.”

  His question about marriage. Well. “I am considering my answer and pleased that you’d put such a conundrum to me. How does your search for a property come along?”

  “Slowly. Brighton is a busy market, in terms of properties changing hands, but merely because I have coin and know well how to care for a building doesn’t mean I’m a suitable buyer in the eyes of many.”

  His London club was nicknamed the Blackball Club for a reason, apparently. “Use an intermediary,” Genie said. She was about to offer her solicitor’s services—hadn’t she come from asking Mr. Vernon to look for a suitable property in Derbyshire?—but remained silent as Mr. Morecambe touched his hat to a pair of beldames daundering toward them.

  “What day would suit for a visit to the Pavilion?” she asked, when she was sure she could not be overheard.

  “Friday. I haven’t any other appointments then, and you’ll give me something to look forward to.”

  He was flirting. He was definitely, subtly, wonderfully flirting, and they were nearly to the gate. How on earth was she to flirt back?

  “Could I tempt you into a cup of tea, Mr. Morecambe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Splendid.”

  “I’ve also been plagued by a few questions regarding the wallpaper in your sitting room. I cannot recall the exact pattern, but think something like it would go well in the cardroom at the club. Perhaps you’d be good enough to allow me another peek?”

  He held the garden gate for her, and Genie preceded him up the walk. “You may have more than a peek, Mr. Morecambe.”

  The housekeeper took Genie’s cloak and bonnet, and Mr. Morecambe’s hat and walking stick. Genie led him to the steps, and they got as far as her sitting room before she pinned her guest against the closed parlor door and kissed him witless.

  * * *

  Adam had had a revelation on his London trip.

  Journeying to Brighton previously, he’d resented the need to leave the London work site. The ring of hammers was music to him. A load of gravel or stone crashing onto the walkway was akin to the tolling of a steeple bell, summoning the faithful for the opening hymn. He loved being in the middle of a building in progress, loved the sweat and cursing, the gradual blossoming of a stately edifice where all had been disorder and noise.

  Now, he loved Genie, Duchess of Tindale, and that was a problem.

  In the normal course, he would have allowed his master mason and his builder to argue and discuss, and sit down over several pints to debate the need to switch plasterers. This time, he had given them fifteen minutes each to state a case and then chosen the plasterer who was available soonest. That his choice was more expensive than the alternative should have given Adam nightmares.

  Instead, his dreams had been filled with images of Genie, curled on a blanket, moonlight gilding her smile. Genie, waiting patiently for him to finish sketching some pile of Mr. Gibbons’s carved musical instruments. Genie, licking her fingers after finishing an apple, the core of which she’d fed to the lowly piebald mare.

  And now, here he was, all but asking permission to court the woman.

  And here she was, all but unbuttoning his shirt.

  “The door…” he muttered against her mouth. “I’ll not have your reputation put at risk—”

  She smiled. “Diana and Belinda are away from home. Look to your own reputation, Mr. Morecambe.”

  He picked her up and carried her to the bedroom, and she kept her arms around his neck when he settled her on the bed, drawing him over her.

  The rest was a blur of loosened clothing, soft laughter, and pleasure every bit as intoxicating as he’d recalled. Genie lay on the bed, her legs over the side, her skirts frothed about her waist. Adam remained standing, and the fit was perfect. He wanted to linger and admire—he wanted to use his mouth on her—but she got her legs around his waist, and her urgency overcame his restraint.

  Almost. He withdrew and spent into a handkerchief, while Genie lay panting with repletion beneath him.

  He crouched over her, confounded by what had passed between them. He was an architect, a man of plans and diagrams, schedules and budgets. A boring fellow, but accomplished in his humble way. How much more pleasurable to be the lover of a duchess who all but dragged him into her boudoir and had her lovely way with him.

  “I’m falling asleep,” she murmured, fingers trailing through his hair. “You will think very ill of me, indeed.”

  “I think you serve a luscious cup of tea.”

  She laughed, her belly bouncing beneath him, and Adam smiled against her neck.

  “Will you believe me if I tell you I honestly did want to see the wallpaper?”

  Not until he’d been following her up the steps, her derriere at his eye level, had his wayward thoughts crested into the beginning of arousal. Until then, he’d merely been daydreaming.

  “Will you believe me,” she countered, “if I tell you that you’re the first man I’ve kissed since my husband died?”

  Adam straightened, took one last admiring look at the duchess in dishabille, then twitched her skirts over her knees and assisted her to sit up.

  “Why would I have cause to doubt you?” Though a part of him did. She was attractive, widowed, had means, and moved much in high society. Aristocratic men were accustomed to having who and what they wanted. As a widow, Genie should have been having who and what she wanted too.

  “Because polite society isn’t always so polite,” she said, hands in her lap. “The London newspapers would expire for lack of tattle if that wasn’t the case.”

  He sat beside her, and the glow of the encounter faded. “I’ll not be tattling, Genie. I’d rather be proposing.”

  She tucked her hands under her arms as if cold. “You hardly know me.”

  Lately, Adam hardly knew himself. “Every couple becomes better acquainted after the vows are spoken. I realize I am presuming to raise such a topic, but I cannot countenance sneaking about alleys or hiring some cottage in Kent for clandestine trysts. My intentions are honorable.”

  Are yours?

  Adam had worked too hard to rebuild his father’s business for anybody to cast his good name away on the basis of rumor—or fact. The other consideration was that he had fallen in love, and if his sentiments were unrequited, then he’d given a duchess the power to break his heart—a heart he would have said had been quarried of good English granite. Bad enough a duke had brought Papa’s standing so low. A duchess dallying with Adam then tossing him aside wasn’t to be contemplated.

  “I had not taken you for an impetuous man,” she said. “I like your boldness, but you must understand that I have never been impetuous.”

  She rose from the bed and stood by the window. Her hair remained tidily pinned, but for one lock curling over her neck. Adam sat on the bed while she repinned that errant curl in exactly the place it belonged.

  “Never been impetuous?” he asked softly
.

  The smile she aimed over her shoulder was chagrined. “Before I met you. The common perception is that titled women produce heirs and then set about taking lovers. I never produced the heirs, I never saw a man who took my fancy, and I’d promised Charles both loyalty and fidelity. Then too, given my experiences as a married woman, why on earth would I—?”

  A blush crept up her neck. She untied the curtain cord and retied it to exactly match its twin on the other curtain. Then she squeezed the sachets hanging from the cords, sending a hint of jasmine into the air.

  Poor Charles had been an idiot. “Shall I speak to the present duke, Genie?”

  “What has Augustus to do with this?”

  “He’s the head of your family.” Also a complete stranger to Adam, who’d likely not spare an upstart architect so much as a nod in the churchyard. “If I seek to court you, then I should at least make his acquaintance.” Distasteful though the prospect was.

  “I leave Augustus and his new wife as much in peace as I can. A dowager duchess trying to hoard consequence she no longer has by hovering about the ducal successor is pathetic.”

  An architect proposing to a duchess might be as well, and yet, Genie’s regard for him seemed genuine.

  “I have been precipitous,” he said, rising. “I apologize.”

  “You have been honest. I treasure your honesty, but you’ve also surprised me. For five years, I’ve been all but invisible, except to my friends. I encourage the nervous debutantes, intervene when I see a bad match in the making, and dance with the shyest of the bachelors. The old Genie, the one who sits smiling among the potted palms night after night, is not a confident creature.”

  A glimmer of understanding pierced Adam’s disappointment. “You would like to be wooed?”

  He could do that. More outings to bucolic locations, more strolls about town—more picnics.

  “Charles and I never courted. His papa’s solicitors met with my papa’s solicitors. Charles and I were permitted to dawdle about the lime park on several occasions while at least three aunts all but followed us with spyglasses. Some wooing would be lovely, but you must tell me: How do I woo you?”

  He did not dare join her at the window, for there was no telling who might glance up from the alley or garden and see a man side by side with the duchess in her very bedroom. Instead, he held the door for her.

  “Wooing doesn’t work like that. The gentleman does the escorting and paying calls and reading to his lady in the garden.” Of that much, Adam was confident.

  “We’re discussing my wooing,” Genie said, as they gained the corridor, “and I’m done sitting in the parlor with a book, waiting for the gentleman to run matters to his exclusive satisfaction.”

  He paused with her at the top of the steps, glanced about, then stole a kiss to her cheek. “I hope the lady was satisfied with our inspection of the wallpaper?”

  “You are awful. I was not satisfied for more than two minutes. I want you naked in my bed, and I want to do wanton things with you.”

  “What manner of wanton things?”

  She started down the steps, and she was blushing again. “I don’t know. I’ve never done them before, and Charles declared certain shelves in the library unfit for a lady’s delicate sensibilities. I do believe there are places a gentleman likes to be kissed other than on his lips.”

  “This gentleman does.” As best Adam could recall when his mind was a muddled hash of desire, amusement, and hope.

  Genie paused on the landing and turned a serious gaze on him. “You are concerned for your reputation, and I respect that. I have no wish to see my personal business bruited about, and you are every bit as private as I am. But I ask myself: What would make your situation right?”

  The afternoon sunshine beamed through the window, bringing out her freckles. He wanted to kiss them—them too.

  “My situation is enviable,” he said, “in the eyes of many. I have means, an education, a thriving business, and a favorite duchess.”

  She fluffed the lace of his cravat. “Enviable, yes, and likely to grow more so, but you are also discontent—over that business with your father. What would lay that matter to rest for you?”

  Adam offered his arm and accompanied her down to the family parlor, which looked out over the garden. All the while, he considered her question.

  “You aren’t asking about revenge.”

  She tugged a bell-pull and took a seat in a reading chair. “I might be. That’s for you to say. I’m asking about how to untangle yourself from the harm done to you and your family. Putting an old enemy in his place might be part of that.”

  Her question seemed to have significance beyond the obvious. “I cannot call out a duke, Genie. For one thing, the scoundrel did his damage almost fifteen years ago. For another, he’s an old man, and he could ruin me with a curl of his lip.”

  “So the damage he did echoes to this day.”

  It did. Adam was having trouble even making appointments to see certain properties. Though the various agents and solicitors were polite, they were also subtly unwilling to do business with him. Perhaps they were unwilling to do business with any commoner. He had no way of knowing.

  “To answer your question, what I’d seek in an ideal world is vindication—for the truth to be known. My father would never cheat a client, and the duke lied when he claimed otherwise.”

  Adam hadn’t put that together for himself, that what he wanted was simply for the truth to be known—not such a radical outcome.

  “The truth can be problematic,” Genie said. “I agree in principle: Better to be judged honestly than pilloried by rumor and gossip.”

  As Adam swilled tea and inhaled sandwiches, he wondered idly if some aspect of the past still bothered the duchess. She seemed to have made her peace regarding her late husband, but she’d also spoken honestly: Adam did not know her well, not yet, and everybody had regrets.

  Perhaps he’d learn some of hers when they spent an afternoon exploring the Pavilion, and perhaps he’d kiss her someplace other than on her lovely lips.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  Genie was on excellent terms with the staff at the Pavilion, having lent her domestics to King George on any number of occasions when His Majesty was hosting some lavish entertainment. She knew her way around the building, or thought she did, and had already chosen several linen closets, dressing rooms, and stairways where she might have stolen a kiss.

  Mr. Morecambe refused to oblige her.

  If Carlton House was King George’s personal art gallery, the Pavilion was his architectural peacock. Minarets and onion domes topped a palace both thoroughly modern—the kitchen was a marvel in itself—and luxurious beyond imagining.

  “I do wonder about that roof,” Adam said, taking one last look at the ornate ceiling doming the banqueting hall. “But I have reached the limit of what my sensibilities can absorb here. Shall I walk you home, Your Grace?”

  The house steward stood by, having courteously escorted them from room to room—and closet to closet—answering Adam’s endless questions.

  “Thank you, yes,” Genie replied. “One doesn’t appreciate the size of this edifice until one traverses every corridor and stair.”

  Adam repeated his thanks to the steward and confirmed an appointment to tour the equally lavish stable the next morning.

  “Will you come with me tomorrow?” he asked when they were strolling arm in arm along the walkway.

  “I think not,” Genie said. “My interest in a certain architect remains undiminished. My interest in ventilation, drainage, bearing walls, and supporting beams has been sated.”

  He patted her hand, a slow stroke of glove over glove. “My interest in those subjects is what keeps the roof over my own head, though I suspect even were my means abundant, I’d still be an architect. If you were not a duchess, what would you be?”

  Happy. That reply would not do, not even for Adam’s ears. “I would certainly bide in London much less
than I do. I’d make more effort to see my family, rather than exerting myself to launch the daughters and nieces of every woman to claim an acquaintance with me. I would knit, and raise my own sheep, and spend more time by the sea and in the countryside.”

  “You enjoy Brighton?”

  They wandered back to the house, with Genie expounding on the advantages of a simpler life, where gossip wasn’t a constant threat to one’s peace and expenses were reduced.

  Adam held the garden gate for her. They’d come up the alley, in part because Genie preferred the quieter approach, but also because Dunstable was still in Brighton, doubtless up to no good.

  “Does Tindale begrudge you your portion?” Adam asked.

  “He would not dare,” Genie said. “Augustus did not expect to inherit and couldn’t care less what I do with my money. He was a mere cousin to the ducal line, and Charles was young and in good health when he died. Then Charles’s younger brother got into that awful accident, and Augustus was left with the title. I am quite well fixed, but one doesn’t speak of that openly.”

  Adam’s gaze was serious—more serious than usual. “You are circumspect about your wealth because of the fortune hunters. I’m not after your money, madam. I can provide comfortably for a wife and children.”

  “The fortune hunters are a constant plague.” As was a certain marquess, who any day now would once again insinuate his hand into Genie’s coffers. “Do you return to London soon, Mr. Morecambe?” For if Dunstable remained kicking his heels in Brighton, Genie would return to Town.

  “I’m a failure as a suitor, aren’t I? Shall we sit?” He gestured to a marble bench before a circular fountain with a swan eternally gliding at the center.

  Genie let him assist her onto the bench—another lingering touch of gloved hands—and realized what all the holding doors, taking her arm, and standing near her the livelong afternoon had been about.

  “You are a very attentive suitor. I am a failure as a blushing damsel. All I could think about was accosting you in a linen closet, while you were doing the pretty.”