My Fair Duchess (A Once Upon A Rogue Novel Book 1)

by Julie Johnstone

  The sound of trickling water was his only returning answer. Determined to find her, he strode around the grounds, and after a few minutes, he stopped in front of the small maze his aunt had commissioned last year to replicate one of the larger ones at her country home. A woman’s parasol lay open on the ground. He smiled and slipped into the maze and followed the path toward the center. Once there, he peered into the opening and breathed deeply at the sight of Amelia flapping a blanket in the air. Stepping back so as not to be seen, he soaked in the pleasure of simply watching her.

  Her lovely melodic voice filled the air as she sang softly, and he smiled when she wrinkled her nose because she couldn’t seem to get the blanket to lie on the grass exactly as she wanted it. She got on her hands and knees and ran her hand over the quilt until all the wrinkles were out, all the while her delectable bottom waving invitingly in the air. His desire had heated his blood by the time she sat down and opened a book, instantly laughing.

  Taking a long measured breath, his chest filled with painful emotion that partially made him want to move forward and gather her in his arms and somewhat made him want to turn around and leave for fear of taking this step. He could not remember ever being afraid of anything in his life, but he was now. She laughed again as she turned the page, and the sound was so sweet, he could not stop himself from moving forward to be near her.

  The smell of cut grass and shrubbery filled the mildly warm air, but Amelia’s fragrant scent also lingered. He breathed deeply as he walked toward her. She was so engrossed in her book she never looked up. “Amelia,” he called very gently.

  Startling, she dropped the book and gazed up at him. “Colin, whatever are you doing here at this hour?”

  He kneeled down beside her, so near his thigh pressed against her leg. Her gaze lowered to where they touched and then raised to his.

  “Did you want to talk to me?”

  He glanced around the maze, only just registering the fact that they were completely alone. “Where is your lady’s maid?”

  Amelia frowned. “Do you really care?”

  “No. Except for the fact that it means I have you all to myself.”

  She batted her eyelashes at him just as he had taught her to do. By damn it had the desired affect he had instructed. He instantly became hard.

  “Do you want me all to yourself?” she asked innocently.

  Every second. Every minute. Every day, hour, and week. For the rest of her life. But first he had to say the things that needed to be said.

  Kneeling and facing her, he cupped her face in his hands and ran the pad of his thumb over her lips. “You’re so very beautiful.”

  She shook her head, her eyes flitting away from his.

  His gut clenched, and he swallowed the lump in his throat. “Look at me, please.” His voice was husky even to his ears.

  After what seemed entirely too long, she focused her trusting, blue stare on him. He threaded his hands deep into her hair, glad she had not put it up this morning. The silk tresses glided between his fingers. “You are beautiful. I should have never tried to change you. Like most men, I was an utter fool and did not truly look at you when I first saw you. You did not need me to make you an Incomparable, Amelia. You already were one.”

  She raised her eyebrows questioningly, as if she were trying to decide whether to believe him or not.

  For once in his life, he was going to give to a woman for purely unselfish reasons. He was going to give Amelia confidence. “Amelia, I have known a great many women.” More than he wanted to recall. “You are the most beautiful I have ever encountered, not only inside but out.”

  No words came from her, but her eyes shimmered with unshed tears. His heart lurched, and he brushed a very gentle kiss across her lips.

  She grasped his hand and pressed a kiss to it while peering shyly at him from under her lashes. “When I was younger I was teased mercilessly about being too tall. I took to slumping and slouching to appear shorter. Your words make me want to stand straight.”

  Something in him broke, snapped, came unclasped like a heavy iron chain being cut, and all the pain he had held at bay filled him. His past was trying to break the surface and destroy his future, but a kiss from her would stop the pain. He was sure of it. He captured her lips with his own and kissed her with all the mastery he had gained in all the years of bedding countless women. He would bring Amelia to writhing ecstasy with his kiss. He knew he could. He could make her want to bed him tonight, and then she would be his forever, unable to turn away from marrying him, chained to him by raw desire.

  He’d seen the trust in her eyes. He had trusted the first woman who had ever used him and been burned for it. Changed. Scarred. His blood rushed in his ears, and his heartbeat joined the cacophony like a drum of desire, pain, and rage, mingled and beating a steady never-ending rhythm. Searching for some unknown something, he increased the pressure of his mouth until Amelia cried out and pulled away from him.

  Her eyes were round, her breathing labored. The world around him seemed to stop, the pain of his past colliding with the hope of a future he did not know how to reach for or let himself have. Bitterness curled his hands into fists. He trailed his gaze to her lips, swollen and red from his savage kiss. Shame curled in his gut. Was this what he had to give her? Rage and shame? The need to cry out made his throat ache. The fear in the pit of his heart crept out and took hold of him. He was dirty, damaged, and unable to properly love another. Even now, when it was all that he wanted.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Determined to get away, he rose quickly, but she captured his hand and stood.

  Grasping his face, she tugged him down to her and pressed her lips to his, the kiss tender and light as the summer breeze blowing around them. “Please don’t walk away from me,” she whispered. “No matter your past, I won’t judge you.”

  His body went rigid. He wanted to believe her, but it seemed unfathomable. He held her unblinking gaze. “You won’t say that when you know all the details.”

  “I vow I will, Colin. Trust me.”

  He took a deep breath. “I was fourteen when the woman who wanted revenge against my mother first offered herself to me.”

  Amelia gripped her throat in horror. “Fourteen? But you were so young.”

  He smiled a merciless smile. “I was a lad, much enthralled by the idea of bedding an older woman. I thought myself special.”

  “But she used you,” Amelia whispered.

  “Yes, but at the time I thought she loved me. I eventually understood she didn’t.”

  “Oh, Colin,” Amelia started and reached for him, but he stepped back and shook his head.

  “No. That’s not it. I slept with her, and then there were others that following year, all while I was still bedding her.” He glanced up at the bright-blue sky, thinking it should have been dark and cloudy to fit his mood. “There were four women when I was fifteen. Each of them used me. I got quite good in bed. Developed somewhat of a reputation. Around my seventeenth birthday, I realized the reputation could turn the talk in the ton away from how my mother was cuckolding my father with every man she could get her hands on. So I threw myself into cultivating my reputation. It wasn’t hard. There were plenty of women, married and widowed, lined up to sleep with me and use me for various reasons.”

  She gasped, but he kept his gaze on the sky. “I told myself it was all for my father, but in the dark of night, I know I enjoyed feeling as if I were getting revenge on all the women who wanted to use me but not love me.”

  He forced himself to glance over at her. Tears streamed down her face. He did not attempt to wipe the tears away. She would likely jerk out of his reach, if he tried. “This is the man I was. No matter what I do in the future, the stains of my past cover me. We both know you deserve and want better.”

  “Lady Amelia!” Amelia’s maid Lucy stumbled into the clearing and gaped at them. After a moment, she spoke. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Lady Langley says to come back to the house
immediately. Lord Edington is here, and she’s quite sure it’s to ask for your hand.”

  Amelia scowled and glanced between Colin and her lady’s maid before focusing on Colin. “Please don’t leave. I―”Amelia shot an annoyed look at her maid and then faced Colin once more. “You simply cannot go. Those are no last words to leave by.”

  “No, they are not,” Colin agreed, his chest feeling as if it had just cracked under the pressure of his love for her. She would likely tell him she could never love him, knowing his past, but fool that he was, he had to stay. After everything, the hope that she would love him in spite of himself was there.

  He nodded. “I’ll wait for you.”

  Amelia hurried through the terrace door toward the foyer, determined to dispatch Lord Edington kindly but quickly and return to Colin. By the look on the daft man’s face when she had left him, he did not yet understand that she loved him with all her heart. As she rounded the corner into the foyer, she stopped in her tracks with a gasp. Great hairy willow herb filled the room so completely it was as if the flower had become part of the wallpaper and the fragrant scent one with the air. Rushing to the foyer table where she saw a card, she plucked it up and opened it.

  I hope to always give you your favorite things.

  Colin

  Her heart nearly wrenched out of her chest at the sweet gesture.

  She found Lord Edington in the parlor, and after listening to his proposal with as much patience as she could muster, she very gently told him she did not think they would suit. Once she saw him out, she rushed back toward the terrace and down the steps to go finish what she and Colin had started. As her shoe touched the grass, a voice called out behind her, “Lady Amelia!”

  Botheration! Amelia paused in her rushed flight while gritting her teeth. She had hoped to slip away without her lady’s maid accompanying her, but either Lucy had taken it into her own head to do so, or the maid had told Lady Langley that Colin was here and his aunt had insisted Lucy accompanied Amelia out to the maze. She did not care one bit for propriety or her reputation at this moment, all she cared about was returning to Colin. Alone.

  Amelia planted her hands on her hips. “Did Lady Langley send you to me?”

  “Yes, my lady. She―”

  A burst of annoyance lit through Amelia like a spark taking to flame. “I am perfectly safe speaking with the duke in the maze without your chaperoning me.”

  Lucy gave Amelia the oddest look and lifted her hand to point behind her toward the house. “But the duke is in the parlor, my lady. I only came to tell you so.”

  Now Amelia was confused. She studied the maze in the distance. Colin must have gone inside as she was speaking to Lord Edington. “Oh, I see. I’ll just go in to speak with him, then.”

  “You’ve no need to come to me,” a male voice cut through her whirling thoughts. “I’ve come to you.”

  Twisting back around, she frowned at the sight of the Duke of Scarsdale. This was untimely indeed. He was early. “Your Grace, the Duke of Aversley is here.”

  He quirked his eyebrows. “Is the plan working?”

  She could not help but laugh nervously when she recalled the stormy kiss of moments before, but then the memory of Colin’s anguished confession made her frown. “I think so,” she said, darting a glance at Lucy. Unwilling to have this conversation with her maid, so obviously interested in every word they said, Amelia pointed to a bench far enough away that Lucy could observe them but not hear. “Please do wait over there, Lucy.”

  The maid bobbed a quick curtsy and scrambled off to settle herself. As Amelia faced the Duke of Scarsdale he said, “So is my work here done?”

  “About the work,” she murmured. “I have a feeling it would behoove me to know as much as I can about Colin’s past, and my brother was not willing to tell me what caused your and Colin’s, er, disagreement.”

  “You mean the cessation of our friendship,” the duke said blandly.

  “Yes.” If he didn’t care to mince words then neither would she. Directness would get her back to Colin sooner.

  “I bedded his mother, and he found out.”

  Amelia tried not to flinch, but really, it was impossible. For one thing, that was utterly disgusting, more so of Colin’s mother than anything, especially since the duke had to have been close to the same age as Colin, since they were school mates together. Amelia swallowed hard.

  “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen and damn well old enough to know better. I don’t offer you excuses because I don’t deserve to, but I was lonely. So very lonely.”

  The way his voice cracked made Amelia’s heart squeeze.

  “My parents had died the year before, and I hated everything about life. Frankly, I did not want to live, and you are going to find this impossible to believe, I’m sure, but neither did Aversley’s mother. I was visiting for his birthday, and one night when I could not sleep, I stumbled upon her in the gardens. She was weeping, and I knew that gut-wrenching sound came from deep loss.”

  The duke didn’t say how he knew, but Amelia was sure it had to do with his parents’ deaths.

  “We talked all night and the night after, and on the third night, she drank entirely too much at the big celebration. I knew she had, and when she stumbled up to bed, I went to check on her. That’s when she invited me in. She was swaying and kept calling me Alexander, her husband’s name, and then she undressed me, and I let her.”

  As he made a sound of disgust in his throat, Amelia tried to picture such a young man in so much pain, and Colin’s mother, obviously wracked by her own demons.

  His Grace caught her gaze. “I’m sure you can deduce what happened next. That’s all the sordid details. I’m disgusting, and I lost my best friend for what I did, and I also lost the friendship of your brother. Rightly so. Your brother has forgiven me, thankfully. I don’t expect Aversley to do so, but I wanted to help him find some happiness since I know I had a hand in helping to cause him years of pain.”

  Amelia did not even realize she was crying until warm tears trickled down her cheeks.

  “What’s this?” the duke said, surprise evident in his tone.

  Amelia sniffed. “There is so much pain, and it’s so tragic what’s happened to you, Colin, his mother and his father.”

  His Grace wiped her tears with his hand, which lingered on her cheek. “If I were a free man, and you had so obviously not already given your heart to Aversley, I’d be very crushed when you walked away from me in a moment.”

  Seemingly from out of nowhere, Colin loomed behind the Duke of Scarsdale. Before Amelia could make a peep, the duke was jerked around and all Amelia saw was Colin’s fist connecting with Scarsdale’s nose. Blood instantly appeared, but he did not raise his fists to retaliate, much to Amelia’s relief. Her heart thundered as she stood there.

  Colin’s burning gaze cut from her to Scarsdale.

  “Don’t you ever touch her again,” Colin snarled.

  “Why?” the Duke of Scarsdale growled back. “Because you love her and want to marry her or because you have to marry and figure she’ll do just as nicely as any other debutante?”

  Amelia’s split second of worry for the Duke of Scarsdale’s safety at pushing Colin too far was swiftly replaced by confusion. What exactly did he mean by have to? Was he referring to Colin needing an heir? Before she could utter a question, Colin’s fist flew through the air again, and in the next instant, the men tumbled to the ground, arms flying and legs tangled. Their bodies rolled left and then right as, punches and grunts punctuated the oppressive silence.

  She moved forward to try to stop them before they killed each other, but a hand clamped on her arm. Swinging around, she stared up into her brother’s grim face.

  “Let me.”

  He let out an ear splitting whistle that caused both men to pause momentarily in their attack and when they did, Philip swooped in and tore them apart. “Gentlemen,” he said, in a stern tone one would use with a child, “there are better way
s to solve your differences.”

  As the men struggled to their feet, disheveled, bloody, and panting, Amelia stepped toward Colin. She resisted the urge to wipe away the blood trickling from his nose. First things first. “What exactly did the Duke of Scarsdale mean about you having to marry? He is referring to the fact that you need a wife to beget an heir, correct?”

  Colin said nothing immediately and his narrowed gaze shifted from her to her brother to Scarsdale. Why wasn’t he simply confirming what she had asked? Suddenly, her knees trembled, feeling quite rubbery, but she locked them in place and stood while her heart took to roaring in her ears.

  “I don’t know exactly what Scarsdale was referring to,” Colin said quietly, “but I have to marry and not just to beget an heir.”

  Her throat was terribly dry, but she forced a swallow.

  “What do you mean? Please tell me you did not lie to me, even after I specifically asked you if there was anything else you should reveal to me.”

  She winced at the pleading note in her voice.

  When Colin stepped toward her, she stumbled backward out of his grasp. “Don’t touch me,” she whispered in a choked voice. “Tell me the truth if you even comprehend it.”

  “My father’s will stipulates that if I don’t marry by my twenty-sixth birthday I will lose almost all of my money.”

  The ground she stood on seemed to tilt, but yet she stayed upright. Somehow. Someway.

  “You…you…you lied to me. I’m so stupid.” She blinked because it seemed the world around her was closing in and shrinking. “I thought you might be falling in love with me.”

  “Amelia, I am,” he started, “I did! I do love you! I want to marry you, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with the will.”

  Colin grabbed her arm, but she wrenched it away. Her stomach clenched. How she had longed to hear him say those things, and now she could not be certain if he did truly love her or if marrying was just so he could keep his money.