Seductive Starts

by Courtney Milan

  The truth would sink him in their minds. Instantly and without question. Confirming a commoner as one of their own was one thing, if they begrudgingly admitted he had the bloodlines in his distant past. Confirming a near illiterate? It would never happen. They’d legitimize her brothers in an instant. She should have been singing for joy.

  So why did she feel like weeping instead?

  He gestured at the table. “One of my men is copying out the book Mark is writing,” he said quietly. “I keep hoping that somehow, after everything I’ve accomplished, this time the words will come out right. I promised Mark, after all.”

  A flicker of emotion crossed his face—something powerful and vulnerable at the same time. The look of a man who had been knocked down but was determined to get up as many times as necessary to march on ahead.

  “Besides,” he added mulishly, “I heard that until Parford’s setback, he spent hours in the evening in his study.”

  A hint of jealousy, too. She could take this opportunity to insinuate doubt into the conversation—something to magnify the vulnerability she saw on his face. It wouldn’t take much. A sentence. A few words, even, to plant seeds of uncertainty in his mind.

  That seemed a shabby recompense for what he’d given her.

  Instead, Margaret took his hand. The cut across his palm was a brief line of red—not even bleeding. His fingers were warm and dry, and as she touched him, he lifted his eyes to hers. For all his vulnerability, there was an unquenchable relentlessness in his eyes. He wouldn’t give up, no matter how much doubt she planted. And she didn’t want him to give up on her.

  She stood and silently tugged him to his feet and led him out the door. In the gallery, she dropped his fingers, lest a passing servant spot them. She padded through the columned space, Ash’s footfalls echoing behind her.

  She stopped at the door before her father’s bedchamber and fumbled with her necklace.

  The master key was still threaded through the chain, the iron skin-warm where it had lain against her breasts. The door opened inward on silent hinges.

  “The duke’s study,” she announced. “Not currently in use.”

  He stepped inside; Margaret took a lamp from a nearby side table before entering herself. The light flickered unevenly as she walked.

  “This,” Margaret said, gesturing at a large wingback chair settled to the side of the room, “is the seat where Parford spent many an evening.” She looked Ash in the eyes. “Sit,” she commanded.

  He sat.

  “There, to your right, in that cupboard—those are the books Parford studied of an evening.”

  Ash glanced at her and then at the ornate brass knob on the carved doors. He hesitated.

  “Go on, then. Open it.”

  The door opened silently.

  Inside, her father’s decanter stood next to three cups of cut glass. The glasses gleamed in the light. Amber liquid reflected the rays streaming from her lamp, setting colored lights to dancing about the room as she placed that lamp on the table.

  “These books,” Margaret said dryly, “you, too, could study.”

  “Oh.” He glanced at them again and then back at her.

  Margaret crossed to stand before him and then leaned and took a tumbler. She poured an inch into the glass and held it out to Ash.

  “Here,” she said. “This is the education most gentlemen receive at Oxford.”

  He stared at the glass in her hands for a few moments, and then shook his head. “No. I don’t believe I will. I’m no Dalrymple, to put pleasure before duty.”

  She’d almost become inured to those comments about her family. “A shame,” she said calmly. “I am.”

  “Putting pleasure before duty?” he asked quizzically.

  No. A Dalrymple. But the moment passed, overtaken by her hesitation. Instead, she raised the glass to her own lips and took a sip. The taste of brandy overwhelmed her—dark, tawny, heady. The alcohol volatilized in her mouth. She swallowed, and it burned on the way down. Just one taste, but it was enough to sweep away her last lingering inhibitions. She set the glass down.

  Before he could say anything, she leaned over him in the chair. She set her hands on the linen of his shirt, feeling the roughness of the fabric. She could feel the whisper of his breath, and it was sweeter and more invigorating than her sip of spirits.

  Last night, she’d kissed him because he’d made her smile. Tonight, she kissed him to make him laugh. Her lips found his. He exhaled as she did so; she felt it, more than heard it, felt his chest heave under her hands, his lips part beneath hers. His hands came to her side, clasping her waist.

  The kiss last night hadn’t lasted long—just a brief, heated exchange of air, their lips mingling for a few seconds. This was more. His lips parted for her. His tongue slipped into her mouth.

  He was a heady mixture of taste and scent. She could feel the hard planes of his chest, the muscles beneath her hands. She forgot about everything that had transpired between them. She forgot that anything stood between them, besides the fabric of his shirt, separating her hand from the thud of his heart. The brandy had entered her blood, and it rose, warm and pounding, to flush her cheeks.

  Another caress of his tongue on hers. His hands drifted up her sides, awakening a deep yearning inside her. It was a want so fundamental she could not imagine how it had remained dormant in his presence until now. A need to have him close. To press herself against him.

  He drew her down to straddle him in his chair. Her skirts tangled about her; her knees brushed his thighs through her petticoats. It shouldn’t have been possible, but her want intensified to a primal thing, one that couldn’t be satisfied by just his caress against her ribs.

  As if he could taste her desire on her lips, his hand inched up, slowly, until he cupped her breast. Thumb and forefinger rolled; she felt that touch clear through the layers of fabric. A shot of pleasure went through her. It was almost too intense, too intimate for her to bear. She pulled away, just so that she could steady her hands on his shoulders.

  He stared up at her, and then slowly, slowly, he gave her a brilliant grin—one that lit the darkest corners of her wary soul. He was all light, no darkness. It was Margaret herself who cast shadows.

  “I take it,” he murmured, “this means my secret is safe with you.”

  She couldn’t answer. Instead, she reached out and placed her fingertips against his lips. His breath heated them with a kiss. Before he could do more than give her a gentle nibble, she took them away and curled her hand into a fist. As if she could somehow protect that newfound intimacy from the cold world out there.

  “I can’t read books,” he whispered, “but I have other skills. An instinct, if you will—this ability to know things, people, in the blink of an eye. It’s how I made my fortune. It’s how I knew, when I first saw you…” He trailed off, and reached out and deliberately ran a finger down her arm. “I knew I could trust you,” he explained. “Instantly. Irrevocably.”

  But she had made no promise.

  Her heart constricted. How could he make her feel so warm and so cold, all at the same time? She gazed at him, her thoughts floundering somewhere between desire and despair. And then, because she had no answer for him, no answer even for herself, she leaned down and kissed him one last time.

  I TAKE IT THIS MEANS my secret is safe with you.

  Even half an hour later, seated alone in the tiny garret she’d adopted, Margaret could feel his body pressed against hers, his mouth on hers.

  Until that evening, she’d never quite understood his smile. She’d thought his expression arrogant, overly familiar, assuming. Against her better judgment, she’d also found it attractive. But until that evening, she hadn’t understood precisely how much uncertainty he hid behind it. She’d never before realized how much vulnerability he harbored.

  But with her lap desk laid atop her knees, she was about to puncture those vulnerabilities, to betray that trust. The steel nib of her pen stood poised above her paper, rea
dy to spill his story in India ink. A drop balled on the tip and fell to splash, deep black, against the page below.

  Dear Richard.

  Her brother. Her own brother. She’d grown up beside him. When she had been still in pinafores, his friend had called her a scraggly little thing, and Richard had punched him. If anyone in the world deserved her loyalty, it was Richard. She had to write this letter.

  The next sentence would have been so simple.

  Mr. Ash Turner is essentially illiterate.

  If only she could write that down, her life would right itself. The Act of Legitimation would pass. She would be Lady Anna Margaret once more, and the dowry she’d been supposed to receive from her mother would be hers again. She could rejoin society; even if she never married, she need not live as her brothers’ dependent for the rest of her life. A few droplets of ink, a little sand… Such tiny things could not amount to a betrayal. Not when it was her own brother she fought for. She dipped her pen with trembling hands.

  Dear Richard,

  There is something you need to know about Ash Turner. He is—

  She set her pen to the paper to form the next word. But the nib would not move. A dark blotch of ink formed at the tip and spread, little threads of black weaving into the paper, mocking Margaret’s inability to continue.

  There was a reason she couldn’t finish her sentence. It was because it wasn’t true. Oh, the letter would be composed of entirely true things. But the import—that Ash Turner was incapable of serving as a duke—would be entirely false. It felt disloyal for her to reveal what he’d told her. It would have been wrong to betray his trust. Not when he’d looked at her and seen…everything.

  I want you to paint your own canvas.

  The paper waited patiently, ready to absorb her words. Whatever she wrote next, she would be painting it over, indelibly declaring her loyalty. It seemed utterly wrong to fill this space with lies about Ash. After all, he’d told her that she mattered.

  He’d trusted her.

  He’d broken her into pieces, and with one smile, he’d knit her back together again. There was no path of honor for her to tread, no way to be true to both her brothers and her own burgeoning sense of self-discovery. There was nothing left for her but a little defiance. Nothing left but to tell the truth. But whom would she defy? And, if she was picking amongst truths, which one could she pick for herself?

  She stared at the inkblot spreading on the page, hoping to see some secret in its tangled darkness.

  And when she dipped her pen again, what she wrote was this: Ash Turner is a more conscientious man than Father ever was.

  She hadn’t intended to write that sentence until her pen moved. But there it was, in solid letters on the page. It was truer than anything else she could have written. And she wasn’t going to take it back.

  In his first three days here, he solved that awful land dispute between Nelson and Whitaker. The land steward reports that he has already come up with a plan to modernize planting procedures. I know you hoped I would uncover some grave deficiency on his part, but we must face the truth. A man capable of building a financial empire from nothing has little to fear from the demands of the dukedom.

  In fact, Margaret was beginning to entertain the sneaking suspicion that Ash would be a better duke than her eldest brother. Richard had always assumed that the ducal mantle would one day settle upon his shoulders; Ash had worked for everything he’d achieved. Richard believed that the running of the duchy was in his blood; Ash had no such preconceptions.

  One could push a pack of truths together to make one despicable falsehood. She’d seen it, when it was done to her. Society had torn her reputation to tatters, starting with the truth that she was a bastard, and ending with whispered conversations, just loud enough for her to hear, stating, “I always knew there was something wrong with her.”

  Margaret set her pen down and shoved her lap desk to the side. This cramped room, practically in the rafters of the manor, was the best she could expect for her future, if her brothers’ suit did not prosper. Duke’s daughter though she was, she would likely have to enter service. She would become a governess, a companion, a nurse in truth.

  There would be no fine dresses. No house of her own. She stood and walked to the window. It was a tiny slit, cut out like all the servants’ windows from atop the roofs. Up here, the pigeons woke her in the morning with their squabbling.

  It was night, and from the window she could see nothing but the thick velvet of mist, blanketing the rose garden her mother had loved. It had broken her mother’s heart to discover that her son would not inherit these lands.

  And yet Margaret thought it would break something even more fragile inside herself to betray Ash’s secret in that horrible way, to expose it—and him—to the censure of Parliament. She could live without society’s blessing. She could not live with her own condemnation.

  Betraying Ash’s secret would be like spilling dark paint on the picture of herself that she was only now beginning to comprehend.

  And so she ended her letter to her brother with another truth—and a different kind of betrayal.

  I’m sorry, Richard. I can’t help you as we had hoped.

  Chapter Ten

  DISCLOSING HIS SECRET INCOMPETENCE had made Ash feel more determined, not less. More determined that this time, if he tried hard enough, he would break through that hazy barrier of symbols, that he would see words and sentences instead of a shifting mass of ink. He’d finished his affairs for the day, and now it was time for more vital business: keeping his promise to his brother.

  Everything he’d ever set out to accomplish, he had done. And while he hadn’t been able to muster up the will to plow through an agricultural text, today he’d received something far more important—Mark’s book, the copy finally finished.

  Mark was different from agriculture. His book would naturally prove different. And Ash had made a promise. If he wanted it, he told himself, he would simply make it happen. There was no other choice.

  Thus far, the force of his will had only managed to give him a raging headache. It shifted behind his eyes, the letters sliding off the page before he could pin them down, until all he wanted was to sleep—and he’d only managed to comprehend the first three syllables.

  Well. Never mind with the title page—that wouldn’t matter. It would all be better once he got to the meat of the argument. He flipped to the second page, ignoring the fact that it was filled with even more dauntingly squiggled ink.

  He felt as if he were trying to catch pigs in the rain using only a pair of metal tongs. He barely recalled what each symbol stood for. Piecing them together into some semblance of coherent understanding was impossible.

  It took him two full minutes to get through Chapter. One. Chastity. Is.

  Before he could find out what chastity was, he heard footsteps behind him.

  “Ash?”

  Margaret’s voice. Oh, hell. Ash inhaled in mingled hope and desperation. God knew it would take a miracle for him to bull his way through even the first page of Mark’s book. He’d surely never manage it if Margaret distracted him with her lithe figure and the promise of more kisses. He shut his eyes, as much to ward off the incipient headache swimming behind his vision as to try to fend off that extra frisson of vitality he felt in her presence.

  Behind him, he could hear her breath, could imagine the swell of her chest, rising and falling.

  Shutting his eyes didn’t help. He could still remember her intimate taste from last night—her mouth warmed by brandy tempered with a floral note, her body canted over his, pressing into him. But in the here and now, her hand touched his, and he reluctantly looked at her.

  Even though he’d prepared himself, the sight of her still sent a little shock down his spine. Her lips were rose-pink, and oh-so-kissably full. A handful of kisses hadn’t been enough. The faint color of her cheeks was broken up here and there by a hint of freckle. Her hair was braided and bound up, tight and proper, but her mouth
pursed, and that hint of impropriety made him think of unlacing her from the confines of her gown, unpinning her curling hair…

  Damn. He was distracted already.

  “This,” she said, tapping the pages in his hand, “is your brother’s book. He mentioned to me earlier today you’d received the copy. He seemed nervous.”

  Ash spread the loose pages in his hands. “As you see,” he murmured, “I’ve managed to take in so much of it already.”

  She bit her lip. “I thought I might read it to you.”

  The blood simply stopped in Ash’s veins. His whirling thoughts came to a crashing standstill. His throat dried out, and he coughed. She looked down.

  When he didn’t respond, she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “I can see I’ve offended you. I didn’t intend to imply— I apologize—”

  “No.” He choked the word out, and she drew back further. “I mean, no, don’t apologize.” He was stunned, too stunned to form a response. But he caught her hand in his. Their fingers intertwined, his grip saying what his mouth could not manage. He squeezed all his pent-up helplessness, his secret shame into her fingers.

  “I promised Mark,” he explained awkwardly. His inability to read was a guilty, secret part of him, something to be hidden away from the light of day under a mass of lies and misdirection. He’d invented excuse after excuse, pleaded his schedule a thousand times, ordered employees to summarize numerous documents.

  But this…this, he couldn’t hide.

  She’d looked into his darkest degradation and whispered that he was not alone. Maybe this was what he’d felt, that fine morning when he’d first seen her out on the steps. He’d felt an echo of this moment—as if he were somehow, finally, coming home.

  He nodded at Margaret. “Very well,” he said. He knew his voice sounded harsh, almost devoid of emotion. It was merely because she had no idea how long he’d carried that burden in solitude. To think he might trust someone with his secret—and that she might offer to help, that she might bridge the gap between Ash and his brothers… He couldn’t even contemplate it. If he hid behind gruffness, it was because his throat felt scratchy, as if he were on the verge of weeping.