A Duchess a Day

by Charis Michaels

  She stopped walking. She pivoted back. “Perhaps now I can see that it may have been . . . poor form to portray the lesson in flirtation. Oh, Declan, I’m so sorry.” She bit her lip until it stung.

  Declan stopped short and stared at her. He began shaking his head.

  “What?” she demanded.

  He walked around her.

  “Do you reject my apology?” she called.

  “No, I don’t reject it. I—” He made a growling noise.

  “You what?” She followed him.

  “You are too trusting,” he said. “And too honest.”

  They were striding down Oxford Street at a fast clip. Declan must have realized their appearance and paused, ducked his head, and allowed her to precede him.

  “This was a mistake,” he said to her. “You shouldn’t have apologized. It was better when we were at odds.”

  “Who is better off without an apology?”

  “Look,” he sighed, “Lady Helena, our plan can continue—obviously we have no choice now but to see it through—but you and I? We cannot be so . . . so enmeshed.”

  She missed a step, momentarily unable to comprehend. “What do you mean, ‘enmeshed’?”

  “It’s my fault,” he said. “I’ve indulged too much. I . . . I never should have touched you. And I’ve revealed too much. If we quarrel, we quarrel. There’s no need for apologies. Perhaps we simply do not get on.”

  Helena was speechless. She rolled his statement around in her head.

  “Do not get on?” she repeated blankly. “Is that what you think?”

  “I think it’s best if we do not examine it from every angle. Instead, we restrain. We cannot touch, my lady. Ours should be a very simple groom-charge relationship.”

  “But you are not really a groom, and I’m not really your charge. We have this very important thing we are doing, and . . . and there is more. Do you deny there is more?”

  They’d reached the busy corner of Oxford Street and Bloomsbury. To their left, the museum sprawled like a marble plateau in the center of an expansive lawn. Carriages and wagons clattered around them. The museum grounds milled with the lazy day-trippers. Declan gestured to the looming building and led them along the network of walkways to the front steps.

  Helena followed, eyes narrowed, heart pounding. A knot had begun to form in her throat, cinching tighter and tighter with every step.

  When they were up the steps, Declan led them down the front colonnade and ducked behind a marble column.

  Taking a deep breath, he said, “Let us simply start again.”

  “Start this conversation again?” she asked. She was so confused. She knew he was angry but she hadn’t expected him to proclaim them “ill suited.” Helena had waited half her life to feel as connected to another person as she felt to Declan. He validated her intelligence and humor and desired her. They were of the same mind. Her attraction to him was physical, yes, but it was also in her heart and in her head. After a lifetime of sprinting uphill to escape, she finally felt like she was coasting downward to arrive somewhere. She was falling in love with him.

  And now this?

  Declan repeated, “My lady—”

  “Can you not call me Helena?”

  “My lady,” he repeated, swallowing hard. He paused.

  Helena waited, studying his face. He no longer looked angry, he looked . . . anguished. Helena could relate, she also felt anguish; she felt anguish and heartsick and the cold fear of losing him. But she would not stand in the shadows and silently stew about it. She reviewed the conversation in her mind. What had he said? He’d said he’d indulged, that he never should have touched her, that he’d revealed too much.

  She cleared her throat, banishing the tears. “You said,” she began, “that you’d ‘revealed too much.’ About what, exactly, have you revealed so very much? You share cryptic details of your mysterious life in drips and drabs, usually in an odd moment in a crowded street.”

  “You’ve just said you chose me on instinct,” he countered. “Why should you know anything about me at all?”

  “Instinct said you would take notes at a party,” she shot back. “Which you did. Don’t oversimplify. We are—” A deep breath. “Surely we can agree that now we are allies. At the very least. Is it not common for allies to know a thing or two about each other? Certainly I have been an open book. And that says nothing of the other ways we are . . . connected.”

  Declan said nothing, staring down at her.

  She amended, “No—forgive me, not ‘connected.’ ‘Enmeshed.’ ”

  He let out a deep breath. Finally, he said, “When I discuss my life, it draws us closer.”

  “Oh no, not that.”

  “Exactly. Not that. It leads nowhere, Helena. Not for us. I can reveal a handful of personal details to you if you like. But there’s very little to say. My life is very meager and plain compared to yours.”

  “I live in the forest,” she said. “I tend an orchard. I am not put off by meager.”

  “You are the daughter of a wealthy earl, Helena. I am your servant. Honestly, that should be the end of it.” A long pause. “And the physical intimacy must stop. Every time I touch you, I am crossing a very dangerous, very significant line.”

  She blinked at him, trying to understand. Crossing a line? Was she the line? Had she behaved so inappropriately in the presence of Miss Keep? Did he simply not fancy her? Or not fancy her enough to risk being discovered?

  She looked away. Her heart lodged into her chest and slid down, slicing her open. She wanted to sit. She wanted to run. She wanted her grandmother to tell her what to do.

  She took a deep breath. She would neither sit nor run, of course. And she had no one to counsel her but herself.

  She looked up to Declan and said slowly, “I’ve been terribly thick, haven’t I? Clueless, really. You are handsome and strong, and you agree to my plans and validate my need to escape Lusk. You collaborate and praise and make me feel as if I matter. You exude confidence even in that ridiculous yellow livery—and you should be confident. You are so very proficient and clever and thoughtful. You look out for me as no one has.

  “Taken altogether,” she said sadly, “I’ve misinterpreted the situation. I didn’t know. I’ve . . . I’ve rather hurled myself in your direction, and you don’t like it. And now you are trying to pull away. The . . . er, ardor I feel is not mutual.”

  The pain of realizing these words, and in nearly the same moment she expressed them, was almost too much, and Helena held out one hand as if to stop the march of time.

  She added, “I understand. I am relentless but not without pride.”

  She took a step back.

  She finished, “How foolish. Of course. Of course.”

  Tears of humiliation and hurt had begun to blur the blue-gray shadows of the colonnade.

  “Helena, stop,” he said firmly. He set down the stack of books and the plant and stepped to her. He placed her outstretched hand on his chest, just over his heart.

  “Hmm?” said Helena, wiping her eye.

  Declan took a deep breath and began again. “Congratulations. You’ve said the one thing that would cause me to take it all back. Well, take most of it back.”

  “About crossing the line?”

  “About not apologizing. About being better off at odds.”

  “Am I the line?” she whispered.

  “You, my lady, are the compulsion. My compulsion. You are the reason I go through my day—what I wish, and what I do, and the person about whom I cannot stop thinking. You are my first thought in the morning and the dream in which I make love at night. My desire for you is a fierce, pounding wave against a rock. You are not the line, you are the thing I’m risking my future to protect. But I will not ruin your future along the way.”

  “What?” Helena’s breath lodged somewhere in her windpipe.

  “As reversals go,” he said, “this feels very comprehensive.”

  “What?” she repeated, higher, airier.
Had he just professed himself to her? She wanted to call back his words and examine the meaning of each one.

  He wanted her. She was his day and his night.

  “I am not pushing you away because I do not like you, Helena,” he said. “I am pushing you away because—”

  “Don’t say it.” The words gushed out. Suddenly, she knew. He was about to offer an excuse as old as time. Shakespeare must have said it. Likely, Adam said it to Eve before she offered him the apple.

  “Because,” he continued, “I like you too much.”

  He said it anyway.

  She fought the urge to take him by the lapels and shake him. Instead, she said, “And why is it wrong to like me so much? In the day and in the night, et cetera, et cetera?”

  “Helena.”

  “No. Now I urge you to say it. I want to hear the words.”

  “What future have we?” he asked, his eyes grim and serious. “A mercenary and an heiress.”

  “I am a farmer,” she corrected.

  “You are engaged to a duke.”

  “A duke who I am about to pass off to some other unlucky girl.”

  “And then your parents will betroth you to someone else.”

  She was shaking her head, but he continued, “Heiresses do not build their lives with mercenaries, Helena.”

  “This heiress will not marry a duke,” she said firmly. A shimmer of hope rained in Helena’s chest.

  She pressed on. “I have vowed not to marry him from the beginning. If I can manage not marrying who I want, then I can manage the opposite.” Helena realized this sounded dangerously like a wedding proposal. She felt her face flush red. There was challenging and then there was stalking.

  She cleared her throat and said, “My parents arranged my marriage to Lusk when I was scarcely nineteen years old. I have made the five ensuing years pure hell for all of them. They will not do it again. Depend on it. When this betrothal is finished, they will not care what I do. They will move on to Joan—or Camille, God save her. I am too much work.”

  “You think you want me, Helena, but you’ve been blinded by the thrill of escaping Lusk. We are dashing through markets and slinking away from your parents. It is exciting. I am a diverting adventure. You will not want me for all time.”

  “Do. Not. Tell. Me. What. I. Want,” she said. “I am so very weary of other people informing me how I feel or what I want. I am not a child. I know my own mind and my own heart.”

  Declan jerked off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. He said, “There are obstacles in my . . . my situation that you do not know,” he said. He turned in an agitated circle.

  “So tell me,” she said, trying to tamp down what felt like growing euphoria. What more about his “situation” could matter if he’d admitted he cared for her? She repeated, “Tell me.”

  He was shaking his head. “It’s tied up in this job and my father and the future. There’s already enough pressure on you to end the engagement. My problems are not yours. My problems are so very far beneath you. I refuse to pile on to your worries.”

  “More than the money?” she repeated. She reached out and put a gloved hand on his biceps.

  He nodded. The worry in his brown eyes cracked her heart. He said grimly, “More than the money.”

  Helena nodded. His expression said, Leave it. For the moment, she would leave it. She held his arm, digging her fingers in. She wanted to rip the yellow sleeve from his tunic and lash him with it. But she did not press.

  “But . . . mostly this is about my rank?” she asked quietly. She let her hand slide away.

  “The differences in our lives are colossal, Helena. No matter how well we get on.”

  “If you were the son of an earl and I was, say . . . the governess or a nursemaid, would you proclaim it impossible for us to . . . enmesh?”

  “It’s not the same, and you know it,” he said. “Nor is it our situation.”

  “Perhaps not, but I am one-half of our collaboration, and I’ve been completely honest with you from our very first meeting—”

  “Too honest.”

  “—and so I’ll be completely honest with you now. I do not subscribe to your fears about the future. Not about you being a mercenary and myself an heiress, and not about being blinded by adventure. But even if I was afraid—which I am not—I would never allow fear to stand in the way of . . . of our potential. I hope I do not overstep by saying that I believe we hold very great potential.”

  “And what if I said that I am the other half of this collaboration, and I have an opposing view?”

  “I would say that I am the person on the receiving end of your rejection, and I don’t like it.”

  “That is the heiress talking, giving an order—pronouncing what she wants.”

  “I will say what I want,” she countered. “You’ve not found issue with this until now, and here is my point. If something about me—my outspokenness, my tendency to march people around, my small feet, my black hair . . .” she grabbed her braids with both hands, “. . . is not to your liking, then fine, say this and detach yourself. I can accept actual rejection if it is founded in distaste. But I cannot abide the other way.”

  “Helena,” he sighed, “wouldn’t you like to fall in love with a reasonable gentleman, someone who can provide you with the sort of life to which you were born? Who will inherit a beautiful home and pass it on to your children? Who will see them properly educated and guarantee their standing in the world? Not every aristocrat is as pitiful as Lusk. I’ve served in battle with many honorable, decent men of rank. You’ve never had the opportunity to meet a reasonable gentleman.”

  “I don’t want a reasonable gentleman,” she said, stooping to snatch the potted apple. In her head, she finished, I want you.

  She wouldn’t say it. She’d said enough—too much. But at least now she knew. He was not angry or disinterested, he simply could not see a way out.

  Helena had spent her entire adult life searching for ways out. There was always a way.

  She took a deep breath. “Look, I do not mean to dismiss your worry for my future or your esteemed plans for my children, but I reject your caution. And I reject your rejection.”

  “I didn’t reject you, Helena.”

  “You tried to, and I cannot accept it.” She stepped around him and then turned back. “But one thing at a time, shall we? First, I must consider this poor girl and dangle the dukedom in front of her. If I can foist Lusk off on someone else and not hate myself for it, dealing with your fear of heiresses will be a summer’s day.”

  And then she whirled around and strode to the door of the museum.

  Declan forced himself to be vigilant in the dark catacombs of the British Museum. His brain was in a fog. Helena wound her way through windowless corridors and up dim stairwells, the black smoke of lanterns snaking to the ceiling. His thoughts traveled a similar circuitous path.

  What had just happened?

  He’d begun the day indignant and determined to put her at arm’s length. Now he was spouting declarations about days and nights and dreams—and it was almost as if he’d issued a challenge to her. He’d all but dared her to believe in a future together.

  At least he’d not told her about the threat of prison. If their plan didn’t work, or if Girdleston found out, at least she wouldn’t have the added pressure of keeping him out of Newgate.

  It was one thing for her to develop an . . . an affection for a mercenary, quite another for her to fall for a convict.

  Helena held a map of the museum to a lantern, studying the route to the Egyptian Hall. She didn’t ask for his help. She wouldn’t need it, and also reading a map together would feel very forced in this moment.

  Poking her head through an open doorway, she frowned at an exhibit of ancient crockery, and strode out down an opposite hall.

  “We’re very close,” she whispered, brushing past him.

  Declan followed, replaying their conversation. What he had expected? That she would simply agree
with him? When had she ever simply agreed? She’d had too many people dictating her future for too long. She wanted to decide. She should decide.

  But it felt shortsighted and unsustainable for her to settle on him.

  She was headstrong and knew her own mind, but could she conceive of the life he could give her—or (more accurately) not give her? Compensation for mercenary work was decent—a living wage to be sure—and he demanded a very high fee, but his savings had vanished. If he was fully exonerated (and that was a significant if), he would start again from nothing. She was strong and resilient and claimed to have her own living, but could he saddle her with a husband who would rebuild from nothing? If he was not locked away forever?

  No, I cannot, he thought, watching her slender back as she wound through the dark halls.

  He’d not pry her from Lusk only to bind her to a possible convict who could not feed his horse.

  And anyway, “binding her to him” was a very great assumption. She desired him, of this he had no doubt. She did not want him to push her away—she’d made that perfectly clear. But did she wish to marry him? Was he the future that she saw for herself? Or was she caught up in fierce attraction and untried desire?

  Did she want him forever . . . or simply for now?

  He dared not ask. He didn’t want to know. If she was wise—if they would both use their heads and not their . . . and not any other parts—they would concentrate only on now.

  And keep their hands off.

  Now she’d located the Egyptian Hall, a long, dim room flanked by sphinxes and a labyrinth of glass cases containing mummified bodies. Helena strode boldly forth, seemingly unphased by the vaguely human-shaped cocoons lying still beneath the glass. A handful of other museumgoers milled in the distance, studying the placards or holding guidebooks to the lantern light. Helena stuck her head inside anterooms and book-lined alcoves until, at last, she came upon an open door that led into what appeared to be an off-limits staff room, illuminated with high lantern light and dominated by a long table, strewn with open books and unfurled parchment.