by Juliana Gray
“You’re the sister of a marchioness. It isn’t your business to be re-feathering beds, or feeding goats and chickens, for that matter.”
Abigail turned. “What the devil does that mean? What business is it of yours? I think a great many marchionesses would be improved by feeding goats on occasion. Dukes, too, come to think of it.”
Wallingford glowered down at her. “You’ve no sense of propriety at all, do you?”
“No, I haven’t.” She stared up at him, as fiercely as she could, feeling suddenly small and frail next to the wide heft of Wallingford’s shoulders, the unending length and breadth of him. She’d known large men before, of course, but this was different. Beneath those well-cut tweeds lay a fine latent energy, a seething will. She could sense it roiling inside him, ready to flood all that civilized bone and muscle with the warmongering energy of his ancestors, the ones who had first earned those titles that now trailed after his name and made him so irresistible to women.
All that uncivilized power, with nothing to lavish it on in these civilized modern times.
He stared back at her, quite close, his breath brushing against her face in quick gusts and his midnight eyes narrowed in concentration. His immense hands rose up and closed around her shoulders. “Why not, Abigail?” he asked.
“Why not . . . what?” She was a little breathless. A trace of bergamot drifted from his skin and touched her nose. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Morini’s words were hammering, hammering, a confused tangle of fate and curses and vows of undying love, but she could not quite keep them straight.
Wallingford’s voice deepened and softened, both at once. “Why haven’t you any sense of propriety?”
“Because it gets in the way.”
“In the way of what?”
She tried to think. “Of becoming an interesting human being. A real person, instead of a cleverly dressed doll.”
“No one,” said the Duke of Wallingford, lifting the back of his hand to her cheek, brushing her with his knuckles, “no one would ever mistake you for a doll, Miss Harewood.”
Oh yes. Never mind the boathouse and its wine and candles. Never mind the possibility of a mistress in the village. Never mind Morini’s silly curses. This was perfect. This was the moment, as the sunlight flooded the window and Wallingford’s handsome face looked down at her with exactly that expression of longing and passion.
Oh yes.
Abigail put her hands on his chest and went on her toes.
His lips brushed hers, as soft as goose down.
“Oh,” she said, and “Oh!” more like a gasp this time, when his hands slid up to her jaw and his mouth nudged again, so gently.
“Abigail,” he murmured, kissing her, cradling her.
She wobbled, stepped backward to catch herself, and tumbled over the burlap sack of goose down.
Wallingford followed her, catching her, and somehow they were on the hard stone floor and not caring a bit, kissing madly, her hands tearing at his buttons and his hands tearing at hers. “Oh, Wallingford,” she said.
“For God’s sake,” he growled, from somewhere in the hollow of her throat, his fingers popping apart her bodice, “it’s Arthur.”
“Arthur?”
“Arthur.” He pulled open her bodice at last and breathed into the lace of her chemise where it frothed above her corset.
“But I can’t possibly call out, Oh, Arthur! in the throes of passion.”
He looked up. “What the devil do you know about the throes of passion?”
“Nothing at all, except that one doesn’t share them with chaps named Arthur, if one can help it.” She wiggled herself comfortably underneath him and lifted her head for a kiss. “But don’t worry. I’ll think of something. You don’t mind if I call you something else, like Wolfgar or Tristan or . . . well, even Roland is rather nice for purposes of passion, but that would be awkward . . .”
Wallingford lifted himself away. “It would be bloody awkward!”
“Oh, come back here. You mustn’t mind me. I’ve a habit of saying unruly things like that. Just ignore me. Arthur’s fine; really it is. I’m sure I’ll get used to it straightaway.” She reached for his jacket, unbuttoned at last, and pulled it over his shoulders.
He opened his mouth to object, but his eyes fell back on her bosom, and his head followed. His fingers brushed along the lace, tugging it downward, raising sweet little goose bumps of anticipation on her skin.
“Oh, Arthur,” she said, experimentally, and then, “Oh, Arthur!” with forced conviction.
“Abigail, you’re so lovely, you’re like a fairy, my own lovely fairy. I’m afraid to touch you,” he whispered, kissing her again.
Oh, he tasted so delicious. She kissed him back, ran her hands over his shoulders. “Arthur,” she said again, because she was determined to get used to it. “Oh, Arthur. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed winning a wager so much.”
Wallingford’s body froze above her.
She gave his shoulders a little push. “Arthur?”
His head lifted. “What did you say?”
“I said, Oh, Arthur! Didn’t I?” She thought back wildly.
“The wager. You said you’d won the wager.”
She smiled and touched his beautiful lips, which were so soft and full, so incongruous in that hard, glowering face. She loved his lips. “Oh yes. Isn’t it lovely? Such a silly idea, that wager. I’m so glad it’s off the table, so to speak.”
Wallingford jumped to his feet. “What the devil’s going on here?”
Abigail blinked. She sat up, letting her bodice sag shamefully to her waist. Her hair had come loose from her pins and tumbled about her shoulders and down her back. She felt rather deliciously like a strumpet. “Isn’t it obvious?” she said with happiness. “We’re making love. At last!”
Wallingford’s brow compressed to its most thunderous scowl. His beautiful lips thinned. He reached for his jacket. “You did this deliberately, didn’t you? Who put you up to it? Lady Morley, I suppose?”
“Why, no one. No one suspects a thing. They believe I quite hate you.” She pushed her hair away from her cheek. “What’s the matter? Why are you putting your jacket on?”
He was already fastening the buttons with his dextrous fingers. “I perceive I am being made a fool of,” he said.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” Her skin was still tingling, the tips of her breasts aching against the uncompromising pressure of her corset. She was filled with want, filled with desire, and the impossible object of her need was even now straightening his collar into impeccable lines, erasing all signs of the man who had whispered passionately in her ear a moment ago and called her his lovely fairy. Abigail opened her arms desperately. “Come back here. I told you I’m given to unruly comments. There’s no need for . . .”
“Feathers,” he said. “What an idiot you must think me. I daresay you meant to shame us all into leaving the castle entirely.”
“That’s not true. I’d die if you left.” She scrambled to her feet.
Wallingford stared at her coldly. He reached for her bodice, and she gasped, thinking he meant to rip it from her body and start anew, but instead he pulled the ends together. “You look like a strumpet,” he said, and began fitting the buttons through their eyelets. Abigail was too stunned to stop him. “What a sacrifice you planned. Noble creature. Were you planning to take things to the ultimate conclusion, or are your friends even now waiting outside, ready to burst in and interrupt us in flagrante?”
He fastened the last button with such a violent jerk that she took a step backward. She crossed her arms over her chest. She was flushing all over, not with desire now, but anger. An unfamiliar sensation: Abigail hardly ever felt a genuine temper. Fury was as foreign to her nature as jealousy. She had no experience of dealing with it, no way to control the red-mist film that covered her sight and the words that tumbled from her mouth.
“I was planning to make you my lover,” she said. “I was planning to make you the gift—a gift, yo
u stupid man, I can only give once—the gift of my innocence. I was hoping it meant to you what it did to me, that this moment was as beautiful to you as it was to me, but I see I was mistaken. I see you’re nothing more than the coldhearted seducer of reputation. I see I ought to have chosen Mr. Burke, or dear old Penhallow, except I’d never do that to my friends, and oh! Now you’ve made me cry, you dreadful duke, and I never cry!” She grabbed the sack of feathers.
“Wait, Abigail . . .”
“I hope you never find someone to love you. I hope you die alone and childless and miserable!” She took the sack by the bottom and let loose the contents at his head. “It’s no more than you deserve.”
Abigail did not stop to admire the results of her handiwork. She turned and marched out of the Duke of Wallingford’s bedroom, not even bothering to hear the apoplectic shouts that followed her down the hall, muffled by goose down.
* * *
There were feathers in his eyelashes. Feathers in his hair, feathers in his jacket, feathers in his mouth, which he had foolishly opened to remonstrate with her, even as the cloud of goose down swept upon him.
“Abigail!” Wallingford roared, or as much as a man could roar with a tiny speck of goose feather tickling the back of his throat. He spat it out and tried again. “Abigail!” he roared, a proper ducal roar of the sort designed to bring opposing armies and rebellious tenants to their trembling knees. The very stones of the castle should have bowed in obeisance before the authority in that roar, but Abigail Harewood did not stop, probably did not even hear him.
She had disappeared without trace into the shimmering spring air, like the fairy he’d called her.
Of course he hadn’t meant to call her that. Like everything else this morning, it had slipped from him without conscious thought, as if he’d been inhabiting another life. For the past several weeks, he’d done his rigid best to avoid her, to accost her with scowls when meetings were inevitable, to close his mind to the very idea of her. He had come dangerously close to forgetting himself earlier in the stableyard, and he could not allow that to happen again.
He must not slip. He must not weaken.
But all those considerations had fled from his brain at the sight of her, of Abigail, of the delicate bones of her clavicle just peeping from the collar of her yellow dress and the black eyelashes lowered over her impossibly large eyes. And then those eyes had risen and taken him in, had regarded him with such teasing warmth, such innocent knowingness, and he was finished.
Oh, she had said, and Arthur, and the sound of his given name on her lips had melted his ears and the brain beyond; the sight of her skin, of the tender smoothness, the promising plumpness rising above her corset, had driven him wild. His lovely fairy, his angel-perfect Abigail, arching and sighing beneath him. Damn the wager, and damn his grandfather, and damn the whole world except this one stone room and this one absurd and exquisite woman, designed just for him.
And then, amid her moans and sighs: I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed winning a wager so much.
It had all come crashing down. His pride, the budding, nameless feelings in his chest, the words he had been about to say.
She had played with him, set him up, used him.
Him, the Duke of Wallingford.
He stood in the center of the empty room, raising a small flock of scudding feathers with every heaving breath. Everything neat and in its place, except the bed, and the feathers, and his own disordered brain.
His scowl deepened. The door of his room seemed to mock him, standing open to reveal the yawning hallway into which Abigail had disappeared in a swing of yellow dress, and the glimpse of a window overlooking the verdant new-spring valley below.
Wallingford growled, deep in his throat. He started forward, swept through the door in two long strides, slammed it closed, and locked it. He paced to the stairs and leapt down them, making for the door, his riding boots striking like flint against the stone floor.
Dukes, after all, were not made for contemplation.
* * *
Abigail sat on the rocks with her arms clasped about her knees, watching Wallingford’s long white arms propel his body across the lake.
He was quite naked. She glimpsed his lean back sliding just below the surface, his churning feet, even the flash of his buttocks at various points in his progress. Unfair, that a man with every advantage of birth should possess such a fine and perfect figure, such a graceful power of motion. With every fiber, Abigail longed to unbutton her dress, to unfasten her wretched stays and her chemise, all the civilized layers of clothing that separated her from Wallingford. She longed to dive into the water and join him, to see his face when she did, to force him to acknowledge the truth that lay between them.
But she did not. She went on sitting quietly, half shaded by the nearby olive trees, the sunlight warming her skin in tiny patches. In the distance, she heard a few childish shouts: Lilibet and Philip, probably, having a lunchtime picnic, avoiding the temptation of Lord Roland.
Why did Wallingford’s silly vows mean so much to him? What was he really struggling against?
There was no great secret, she realized. There were no clandestine articles hidden among his belongings, no secret mistresses in the village. The Duke of Wallingford simply meant to test himself, and the motivation lay entirely within his own skin.
Wallingford had nearly reached the opposite shore now. She could no longer make out the details of him, the black gleam of his head in the sunlight, but his arc of movement remained as rapid and vigorous as ever, as if he could swim all day in the chilly early-spring waters. She gazed at his striving body with tenderness, with an entirely unaccustomed possessiveness, with pride in his strength as if he had pledged it to her.
They were all a little broken, weren’t they? All six of them, not quite whole.
She rose from the rocks and shook out her skirt, and then she skipped up the path through the terraces and into the castle, where she found Signorina Morini at the broad table in the kitchen, sorting an enormous pile of beans for the evening soup.
The housekeeper did not look up. Her attention remained focused on the beans, her red headscarf radiant in the subdued colors of the kitchen.
Abigail sat down next to her and reached for a handful of beans. “All right,” she said. “I believe you. Tell me how I can help.”
EIGHT
As schemes went, it was certainly more promising than the time Abigail had disguised herself as a young man in order to take the entrance examination at Merton College.
Then, she had not gone half an hour out of Paddington Station before the nervous perspiration between her crushed breasts (like her sister, she had inherited the legendary Harewood Chest) had developed into such an intense and irritating rash that she was forced to disembark at Chiltern and take the next train home. The housemaids (who had chipped in with cast-off clothing from brothers and cousins) and the cook (who had packed her lunch with such care) had all been so disappointed at her early return.
But this scheme did not involve crushed breasts and stolen trousers. She and Signorina Morini were merely facilitating the proper course of nature, bringing together ladies and gentlemen who were falling in love already.
Abigail looked across the table at Lord Roland, dear and handsome Lord Roland, his hair picking up gold from the candles and his expressive hazel eyes gazing dreamily into a nearby dish of olives. Why, he was already expiring for Lilibet. He would be grateful for the friendly nudge of Abigail’s helping hand.
Wallingford’s fist interrupted her reverie with a brutal plate-rattling crash against the table. “Look here, Burke. Haven’t you heard a word of this?”
Abigail glanced at Phineas Burke. She could hardly blame Alexandra for her fascination with him. Such a handsome fellow, too, with his great height and radiant color and perfect bones, almost an architectural duplicate of . . .
Abigail set down her wineglass and looked back at Lord Roland, and then at Wallingford, and then back at
Mr. Burke.
Good God.
“I’m afraid I haven’t,” Mr. Burke was saying. “I’ve a problem with the battery to sort out, and all this ranting of yours isn’t a bit of help. Penhallow, my good man, may I trouble you for the olives?”
Lord Roland gave a little start. “Eh what? Olives, you said?”
“Olives, sir. To your left. Yes, that’s the one. Good chap.”
Wallingford struck the table again with his judicial fist. “Burke, you insufferable sod . . .”
“Really, Your Grace!” said Lilibet, in properly shocked tones.
“. . . I beg your pardon, Lady Somerton, but the man deserves it. It’s his own miserable hide I’m attempting to protect.”
Abigail watched Wallingford drink his wine, watched him shoot a fierce glance in Mr. Burke’s direction. Fierce, and yet protective, too; why hadn’t she noticed that protectiveness before?
“My hide is in no danger whatsoever, I assure you,” Finn said.
Alexandra set down her knife and fork. She was sitting next to Abigail, so her face was invisible, but Abigail could imagine how it looked: skin smooth, eyebrow cocked, eyes gleaming with confidence. She said to Mr. Burke, in her bewitching drawl, “His Grace thinks I mean to seduce you, in order to win this silly wager of yours.”
Abigail cleared her throat and spoke. “But that’s absurd. If you seduced Mr. Burke, successfully I mean, the wager would technically be a draw, wouldn’t it?”
Everyone turned to her, faces stretched in astonishment, as if they’d forgotten she existed, as if she’d said something to explode every known law in the physical world. She looked from one to the other. Had this fact never occurred to any of them? It seemed rather obvious to her.
Mr. Burke spoke at last, in a stunned voice. “Yes. Yes, I believe it would.”
Abigail turned to Wallingford and gave him a smile of particular meaning. “You see? You may put your mind entirely at ease on the subject of seduction, Your Grace. No reasonable person would contemplate such a scheme. Two advertisements in the Times! It wouldn’t do.”
