by Juliana Gray
Abigail blew another raspberry into Philip’s tummy and tossed him atop the blankets. “You don’t deserve a story, you dreadful rascal, but I’ll tell one anyway,” she said.
A quarter hour later, Philip’s eyes were closed, and his chest rose and fell in the steady rhythm of an exhausted sleep. Lilibet, looking equally exhausted, sank into the bile green chair and gazed with her weary blue eyes at her resting son. “Go back downstairs, Abigail,” she said. “I’ll watch him.”
“And leave you by yourself?”
Lilibet looked up at her with a gentle smile. “Abigail, darling, I know very well that you’re desperate to go back down to that common room. Don’t think I didn’t see the way you were examining poor Wallingford.”
Abigail felt an unfamiliar surge of defensiveness. “I wasn’t. He’s a perfectly ordinary duke. There are princes in Italy, Lilibet. Princes. Much more interesting than dull English dukes.”
Lilibet waved at her. “Go, Abigail. I’m all done in, really. Go, for heaven’s sake.”
A thump rattled the floorboards beneath them. The faint sound of merry voices raised in a scattered and unmistakably drunken chorus, quite improper for impressionable young English ladies. No responsible matron ought to send her cousin into the scene of such iniquity, and yet Lilibet seemed not to notice, or to care. Her eyes remained steady on the bundle of blankets in the bed.
Abigail knew better than to push her luck.
“Right-ho, then,” she said cheerfully, and hurried out the door.
TWO
At least his horse was happy to see him, thought the Duke of Wallingford, though the apples likely had something to do with it.
“A greedy old fellow, aren’t you, my love,” he said, observing the steady disintegration of the apple in his gloved palm. When it had disappeared, he removed the glove and scratched the horse’s forelock. “I shouldn’t be here, of course. It’s liable to lead to all sorts of trouble.”
The horse snorted and pushed at his chest, leaving a dribble of apple specks on his coat.
“Easy for you to say, old fellow,” he said. “You’ve got no balls to speak of.”
A whuffle, low in the equine throat.
“It’s a blessing, I assure you,” said Wallingford, scratching his way down the horse’s forehead, leaving no spot of exquisite sensitivity untouched. The animal stretched his neck with pleasure. “They’re nothing but bother, women, excepting only a few brief and fleeting moments. And with this one, not even that, unless I’m an even greater blackguard than my grandfather makes out.”
Above his head, the rain drummed against the tile roof of the stable, but inside the air was filled with damp warmth, with the familiar smells of straw and horseflesh and manure: simple earthy smells, the smell of youth and contentment.
“I wonder what she means by it,” Wallingford continued, in a low voice. He moved his hand to the horse’s neck and stroked the thick winter coat, its reddish bay color subdued to brown in the dull glow of the dark lantern hanging nearby. “She’s got no business making appointments in the stables. Do you know, she wrote the note in Italian? As if I might think the serving maid had written it?” He shook his head. “I’m a damned fool, aren’t I? Too long without female companionship. Four weeks, Lucifer.”
Lucifer sighed with pleasure and lowered his head.
“Lost my head, I think. Nothing but an ordinary girl. Brown hair, brown eyes. Well, not brown exactly. More of a golden sort of color, dark gold, like sherry. Lighter than her sister’s. And her face! The features are like enough, but it’s a completely different effect, a sort of freshness and delicacy I can’t quite describe . . .”
“Signore?”
The voice lilted through the dusky air.
Wallingford placed his forehead against the horse’s neck and inhaled deeply. “You needn’t bother, Miss Harewood. I know who you are.”
“Oh, dash it,” said Miss Harewood, with considerably less sweetness. “Why did you come, then?”
He inhaled once more, straightened, and turned.
There she stood, the dust motes floating about her, a fine woolen scarf wound around her head. She looked at him inquiringly, her light brown eyes widened into impossible roundness, tilted just so at the corners, exactly the same shape as her sister’s; except while the slant of Lady Morley’s eyes had always reminded Wallingford of a particularly stealthy cat, on Abigail Harewood those eyes took on an elfin grace, a mischievous fairy charm. She lifted the scarf away from her head, and the hair beneath caught the lantern in a gleam of rich chestnut.
“Your Grace?” she prodded.
He shook himself. “I came,” he said, schooling his voice into ducal deepness, “in order to educate you on the wholesale impropriety of making appointments with strangers in the stables. Since your sister, it seems, is unequal to the task.”
“But you’re not a stranger,” she said, smiling. “We spoke for quite an hour at dinner.”
“Don’t even think to match wits with me, young lady.”
“Ooh!” She shivered. “Say that again, do.”
“I said, don’t even . . .” He stopped and folded his arms across his chest. “Look here, what are you really doing here? You know the rules as well as I do.”
“Oh, I know the rules as well as anyone. One has to know the rules perfectly in order to break them.” She was still smiling, still unearthly, lightening the very air around her.
Break them.
Wallingford’s groin, that seat of instinct rather than reason, tightened unto bursting in a single instant.
“Good God.” The words struggled out. “You don’t mean . . .”
She laughed and held up her hand. “Oh no! Not so far as that. I understand that anticipation is vital in these matters.”
“Anticipation?” he said dazedly.
“Yes, anticipation. Of course, you’re the expert, but I think we should go no further than a kiss tonight, don’t you think?”
“A kiss?”
She laughed. “You sound exactly like the stableboy, before dinner. ‘Un bacio,’ he said, in exactly that tone of voice.”
Wallingford took a stumbling step backward. “Stableboy?”
“Oh yes. He was rather startled, I suppose, but he recovered quickly . . .”
“I daresay.”
“. . . and stepped up to the mark quite nicely. I say, is that your horse? He’s a jolly splendid animal, aren’t you, darling?” She brushed past him and took Lucifer’s face between her hands. “Yes, a dear love, a remarkable great beast you are, a splendid, lovely animal.”
Lucifer, enraptured, pushed his nose against her chest and whuffled.
Wallingford shook his head. “Look here, Miss Harewood. Do you mean to say you kissed the stableboy? Here?”
“Yes, and a lovely embrace it was. Much nicer than the stableboy at home.”
“The stableboy at home?” The floor seemed to be dropping away beneath Wallingford’s booted feet. He put out a hand to steady himself against the wooden wall of Lucifer’s stall.
“Yes. Patrick was his name.” She turned to him. “The brother of one of my sister’s housemaids. Oh! Ha-ha. I see what you’re thinking. No, no. I assure you, I don’t go about kissing stableboys willy-nilly, hither and yon. Heavens, no!” She laughed. She had her arm up around the side of Lucifer’s face, stroking him, and Wallingford could have sworn that the animal winked at him.
“Forgive me, Miss Harewood, for jumping to such an unwarranted conclusion.”
“Oh, how forbidding you are! You must keep your brow exactly like that. How did Shakespeare put it? ‘Let the brow o’erwhelm it as fearfully as doth a galled rock o’erhang and jutty his confounded base, swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean . . .’”
“Are you quite mad?”
“No, no. Only a little mad, I assure you. No, as I said, I don’t go about kissing stableboys as a rule. It’s more in the line of an experiment.”
“You are quite mad.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say. I daresay you’ve had the unceasing attention of dairymaids and housemaids from the moment your trousers were first lengthened.”
Wallingford opened his mouth to object, but nothing came out.
“You see? Whereas I, as a gently bred young lady, reached my twenty-third birthday a month or so ago . . .”
“Twenty-three!”
“Yes.” She sighed. “I know, this ridiculous face of mine. In any case, there I was, twenty-three years old, by my sacred honor, and the situation seemed desperate. I determined to find myself a lover before the year was out.”
“A lover? Why not a husband?”
“Oh, I don’t plan to marry. Not unless I’m forced to wed some odious millionaire banker by my evil and impecunious uncle, who has kidnapped Alexandra and dangled her above a pit of poisonous vipers in order to gain my acquiescence . . .”
“A pit of vipers?”
“Or cobras. They’re quite poisonous, I believe. Or one of those snakes native to the antipodes; do you know, I read once that six of the ten most venomous reptiles in the world are found in Australia. It makes one wonder why anyone would live there, though I suppose many of them hadn’t any choice.”
A little silence.
Wallingford cleared his throat.
“And barring such deadly maneuvers, you wish instead to lead a life of infamy, to degrade yourself before God and man . . .”
“Oh, listen to you!” She stroked Lucifer’s ears and smiled again, a little wistfully this time. “Tell me, Your Grace, how old were you when you took your first dairymaid?”
Fifteen. The answer nearly left Wallingford’s lips, so accurately had she assessed him, before he recollected himself and bit it back. Fifteen, and spending the summer at the family seat in the north, his mother convalescing by the seaside from her latest miscarriage and his father drawing his last ragged breaths in the ancient bedroom of the Dukes of Wallingford, done in by drink and excess and a bad fall from a horse that had punctured his already ravaged liver. Fifteen and quite alone, left to himself, his older sister married and his brother staying with an aunt. He had wandered about the estate every day, with the giant specter of impending dukehood staring him in the face, lonely and randy as only an adolescent boy could be. The dairymaid—yes, it was a dairymaid, blast that Miss Harewood—had secured him without any trouble.
Afterward, he had not felt degraded at all, neither before man nor before God. That had all come later.
“Do not attempt that argument with me, Miss Harewood,” he said. “We are not here to debate the differences between men and women.”
“I quite agree. We should be here all night, I daresay, for you seem as thickheaded and stubborn as any man I ever met. In any case, my maid assured me that if I wished to find the best sort of lover, I must try out a few young men with kisses in order to understand what sort of chap I was looking for. I began with John the footman . . .”
“John the footman?”
“And then his brother James, also a footman . . .”
“Of course.”
She was counting on her long gloved fingers. “And then Patrick, just before we left. So you see, it was hardly a campaign of licentiousness, by any means. Merely curiosity.”
Wallingford looked down at her slim figure, the fairylike delicacy of her face, and slammed his fist against the old wooden pillar holding up the roof. “But the risk! Good God! No man wants to stop at a mere kiss!”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no point. It’s nothing but preliminary, which is why respectable young women don’t engage in it.”
“Nonsense. Kissing’s very nice by itself, it seems to me, if done properly. Do you mean to say you’ve never kissed merely for the sake of kissing?”
“No,” said Wallingford, but as the word left his mouth he knew it was a lie. There had been a time, of course, when kissing seemed like the sweetest pleasure known to man. When the dairymaid had drawn him down into the summer-ripened grass of the meadow and brought his mouth to hers, and they had kissed and kissed, and he had not dared even to put his hand beneath her skirts to touch her leg, had not even dreamed of pulling down her dress to see her bosom. No, he had thought of nothing but her mouth, and her sweet little tongue touching his, and they had lain there kissing for an hour until overrun by the cows.
Of course, she had taken his virginity in the hayloft a week later, which quite eclipsed all that came before. But for that first innocent hour, her kisses had been enough. They had been everything to him.
“No,” Wallingford repeated, “and no man stops at kissing, when he can get more, by persuasion or by force, if he’s desperate and blackguardly enough. You were quite out of your depth, Miss Harewood, and it’s a wonder you weren’t ravished and ruined.”
“Why, as to that, Harry Stubbs showed me a tidy little maneuver to render a man unconscious instantly, so I’m quite . . .”
“Who the devil’s Harry Stubbs?”
“One of the chaps down the pub. Kind old fellow, taught me all I know about picking horses. He used to be a forger, you know, before he took up bookmaking.”
Wallingford struggled for air. He wrapped his hand around the pillar and gazed down at the sincere sherry gold eyes of Miss Abigail Harewood, at her full lips curved in a little smile, at her skin glowing like sunlit cream.
“Miss Harewood,” he said, in a voice just above a whisper, “you are quite the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.”
Her eyebrows lifted; her eyes shone. “Why, thank you! I take that as a great compliment. I daresay you’ve met all sorts of interesting people, in your position.”
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment, in fact.”
“Oh, Your Grace.” She turned and placed a kiss on Lucifer’s broad nose. “You have so much to learn about women.”
He felt affronted. “I know all I need to know, as it happens. I know, for example, that you’ve no business skulking about unchaperoned in Italian stableyards in the middle of the night, and ought to be making your way back to your room this instant.”
“I can’t do that.” She tilted her head a fraction and looked up at him from the corner of her eye, and Wallingford was lost, lost, the entire world dissolving around him and leaving only this beautiful and bewitching creature with her turned-up sherry gold eyes, regarding him as if she knew his every secret.
“Why not?” he gasped.
“Because you haven’t kissed me yet.” She turned slowly to face him. “Unless you don’t mean to kiss me at all, of course.”
A wave of rain passed over the stable roof, a distant rumble of thunder. The lantern wavered; the entire building seemed to groan around them. Lucifer shifted his feet, turned his long neck, and trained his pointed ears in Wallingford’s direction.
As if to say, Well, old chap?
There was no question, was there? He had no choice at all. Not from the moment Miss Abigail Harewood had first danced into the shelter of the inn, shaking the rain from her hat in a halo of sparkles.
He took a step forward. “Has no one ever told you, Miss Harewood,” he said, in a growl, “you must be very careful what you wish for?”
She tilted her head back. “Oh,” she said, faintly, rapturously, and put her palms against his chest. “Bergamot.”
“Bergamot?”
“You smell of bergamot. I’m absolutely mad for bergamot.”
For an instant, he gazed down at her face, almost dizzy at the way she strained upward in delight and anticipation. When was the last time a lady had looked at him like that, so natural and unfeigned? He loved her face; he loved her expression. He lifted his hands and cradled her head, his palms holding the curve of her jaw and his fingers reaching up into her hair.
He bent down and kissed her mouth, and quite without warning he—he, the stately Duke of Wallingford—was fifteen again, and the sun warmed the back of his head, and the summer-ripened grass tickled his face with its sweetness, and a girl’s ful
l lips moved ardently against his as if he were an object of priceless value, as if she never meant to stop. As if kissing were all that existed in the world.
But these lips tasted of wine and dessert, this skin smelled of wool and soap instead of cow dung and sour milk. This was Abigail Harewood, enchanted little elf, shimmering with life and youth and imagination enough for both of them, and she pressed herself into his chest, wavering slightly, as if she were standing on her toes in an effort to close the gap between them.
Wallingford lifted his head. “Miss Harewood,” he whispered.
“Abigail,” she said.
He brought his hands to her waist, lifted her, and carried her a few tottering steps to the wall next to Lucifer’s stall. She felt light and supple in his arms, her bones fine and strong beneath her coat and dress and petticoats. He let her slide gently down the wall as he kissed her again, passionately now, running his tongue along the crease of her lips.
“Oh,” she breathed out, and in the opening of her mouth he deepened the kiss.
She lay flat against the wall now, her feet resting on the floor. He brought his forearms on either side of her face, bracing himself as he kissed her, because she met him with such eagerness he could not hold himself steady. Her arms reached up around his neck; her mouth opened up and shivered at the intrusion of his tongue. His legs were planted on either side of hers, and she twined one booted foot around his calf, linking them together at every point.
Dimly, Wallingford heard Lucifer snort in disgust.
“Bugger off,” he said, from the corner of his mouth.
“What’s that?” gasped Miss Harewood.
Lucifer’s nose shoved at his arm.
“I said, bugger off,” growled Wallingford; then to Abigail, “Nothing, darling,” and he set back to work, immersing himself in the caramel sweetness of her mouth, the tender give-and-take of her tongue and lips. At the back of his brain, an alarm was beginning to pound out, that Miss Abigail Harewood was no dairymaid, no restless wife of a foreign diplomat, and he had better obey the sage advice of his own horse and cease this nonsense directly.
