Least Likely to Marry a Duke

by Louise Allen

  ‘They were not threats, Verity. I was making promises.’ He took the seat opposite her, crossed his legs and smiled.

  ‘I see. In that case there is only one thing I can do.’

  ‘Go home to your papa and wave goodbye to your Duke and to respectable society.’

  ‘Give up and let you win? Good gracious, whatever made you think that I was such a feeble creature, Thomas? I shall go and see the Archbishop of Canterbury and tell him the entire story.’

  ‘It would ruin you.’

  ‘But I will be ruined anyway if you carry out our threats. This way I will have the great satisfaction of knowing that I have brought you down into the bargain. You must see the attraction of that.’

  He stood up. ‘Who knows you are here?’

  Verity slid the pistol out into plain view and lifted it. ‘I am able to use this. I taught myself to shoot in the country. Target practice, you know—I am accounted quite a good shot with a pistol and bow and arrow, although a bow might have caused raised eyebrows on the streets of Chelsea.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  The hair on the nape of her neck stirred as though in a cool breeze, but she told herself to keep calm, that his expression was frustrated fury, not killing rage. Thomas’s gaze was darting from her face to the door and then to the far corners of the room and his mouth was half-open, as though he was about to rage at her.

  ‘This is one of my uncle’s Mantons. Hair trigger, of course. And, yes, I would dare. Dare to shoot you if you threaten me, dare to confess all to the Archbishop. You see, I love William Calthorpe, my Duke, and I will not have him punished for my follies. He does not love me, but then I would not expect him to. I have been nothing but a trouble to him from the moment we met and I am the most unsuitable woman for him to marry. But there it is and there is nothing to be done about it.’

  ‘I would not say that,’ Will remarked from behind her, his voice husky.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Verity jerked round, her finger tightened on the trigger and the gun fired. There was a splintering crash, Thomas screamed and Will took the pistol out of her hand.

  ‘A pleasant enough Chinese bowl, but not of the best period,’ he remarked, gesturing towards the shattered remains in the hearth.

  ‘You could have killed me! I’ll have the law on you—’

  ‘And I shall tell the constable that I entered the room just as Miss Wingate was defending her virtue from your cowardly attack. Most fortunately I had this weapon on me, fired a warning shot—and so on and so forth. Mr Fitcham here was witness to the entire incident, weren’t you, Fitcham?’

  ‘Indeed, Your Grace. A most disgraceful affair.’ The secretary turned and faced the footman who was trying to push his way into the room. ‘Nothing to worry about, my man. All under control and nobody hurt. Is that not so, Vicar?’

  ‘Er... Yes. Yes, just an accident, Simon. You may go.’

  Fitcham came into the room, closed the door behind him and sat at the table in the corner. Verity glanced at him, but he was calmly removing papers and a portable ink well from a small case.

  ‘My dear.’ Will took her hand, still trembling from recoil and shock, and kissed it. ‘My very dear Verity.’

  ‘When—when did you come in?’ He had heard her, of course. The door opening silently behind her was what had caused that draught. She pulled her hand away.

  He looked very serious. ‘You were telling the Vicar all about hair triggers.’

  Will had heard her confess that she loved him. So had Fitcham. There was nowhere to hide, the floor was not going to open up. She could feel the blood heating her cheeks, knew she could not meet his gaze.

  At least he heard me acknowledge how unsuitable I am. At least they know I have no hopes, no expectations.

  That was not particularly consoling.

  ‘Why not sit down over here?’ Will took her elbow and she went, unresisting, to the armchair at the side of the room. When he turned back she saw he was smiling, that false, dangerous social smile. ‘Now, Mr Harrington. There is absolutely no need for Miss Wingate to visit the Archbishop or to write to him.’ He must have heard her gasp of protest, because he glanced towards her, shook his head. ‘I have already been to Lambeth Palace and called on His Grace, my godfather, and secured an appointment for you, one he feels is most appropriate to your character and talents.’

  ‘Thank God someone has some sense.’ Thomas shot her a look of hatred mingled with triumph.

  ‘Indeed. You will be setting sail within the week to take up the post of Assistant Chaplain to the head of the Anglican Mission to Seamen based in English Harbour on the island of Antigua. Regrettably the previous incumbent died of yellow fever, but that does open up this fascinating opportunity for service to you. It is the main anchorage for His Majesty’s Navy in the Caribbean, as you doubtless know. The scope for doing good and bringing lost souls to redemption is enormous, so the Archbishop says, and the head of the Mission is a most rigorously devout man.’

  ‘It is a fever pit, a notorious fever pit!’ Thomas gabbled. ‘You promised me preferment. You promised me—’

  ‘I promised I would speak to my godfather and secure you a position. I did not promise not to tell him that you were blackmailing me and a young lady whose only fault was to fall victim to a plausible seducer, a wolf in clerical robes. The Archbishop has placed you where he feels you would benefit most.’

  ‘It will kill me. I won’t go.’

  ‘Now that is a pity, because your berth is all arranged.’ Will studied the weapon in his hand for a moment, then looked back at the white-faced Vicar, who was clutching at the mantelpiece. ‘My cousin, Vice-Commodore Lord Anstruther, is sailing tomorrow and he has sent two of his larger seamen along to help you pack and find your way to the ship. He will also ensure that, should you start slandering Miss Wingate, or anyone else for that matter, you will find an ocean voyage even less healthy than English Harbour. Unhealthy, short and very wet.’

  Through the fog of her own embarrassment and relief Verity saw the realisation come over Thomas that he had nowhere to escape. She wondered if he had ever failed to get what he wanted before. When she had pushed him into the river, of course... Otherwise he must have thought himself invincible, his rise unstoppable. ‘But—my parish, my possessions...’

  ‘A most excellent young clergyman has kindly agreed to step in at short notice,’ Fitcham said, looking up from his notes. ‘If you will give me written authorisation to your solicitor and banker, I will see your possessions safely stored and your affairs taken care of. Your will is up to date, I trust? Always wise before a sea voyage, I feel.’

  Thomas subsided into a chair, his hands to his face. Verity felt a twinge of pity, then recalled the young lady he had been courting, Lady Florence Wakefield. Plain, not at all intelligent, doubtless being pressed by her relatives to marry this rising young cleric. She must think he loved her. Perhaps, after all, he did.

  ‘Do you want to write to Lady Florence?’ she asked.

  Thomas lifted his head from his hands and stared at her. ‘What for? The silly chit can’t help me now.’

  I must seek her out and tell her that she has had a narrow escape.

  It was bad enough breaking your heart over a man who merited it. To be cast into despair by the loss of an unscrupulous climber was a waste of tears, Verity thought bleakly. She removed her handkerchief from her reticule, discovered that she had no tears to shed into it and sat twisting it into a knot.

  She had been brooding, she realised when she came back to herself and found Thomas gone, the sound of deep voices in the hallway, the footman protesting that he had received no notice and Mr Fitcham assuring him that he, and the other staff, would be no worse off.

  The room was empty. She could slip out through the kitchen area if necessary, hail a hackney. Escape. She stuffed her handkerchief away, sto
od up.

  ‘Are you ready to go back to your aunt?’ Will rose from the deep wing chair beside the fireplace.

  ‘Will. You made me jump, I thought you had gone. I will just go and find a cab. I am so glad you have dealt with Thomas... Goodbye.’

  He caught her to him as she tried to reach the door, held her away from his chest at arm’s length. ‘Verity, you are positively gibbering. What is the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. I really must go. Oh, and I must take the pistol with me. I borrowed it without asking.’

  ‘I doubt your uncle is going to fight any duels today. It can wait. Verity, I heard you, very clearly, say you loved me. Why are you running away?’

  ‘Because that is neither here nor there,’ she told his neckcloth firmly. ‘I mean, I like you very well and I am quite used to your being perfect in every way and I can even forgive you being a duke, but you have kindly said you will deal with any gossip in the clubs and all the influential matrons accept me and Thomas cannot spread his poison about either of us now. So I can go home and next time I come to London it will all be forgotten.’

  ‘Do you not want to marry me, Verity?’ Will asked.

  ‘You don’t love me and I would be a most unsuitable duchess, so I would be unhappy and you would be, too.’

  ‘Do you think you could bear to stop talking to my top waistcoat button and look at me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because if I look at you I want to kiss you and that would not help in the slightest.’ If he did not let her go, she was going to weep and that would be even less helpful, she thought shakily.

  ‘But it would cheer me up considerably,’ Will said. He switched his hold from her arms to her waist, picked her up, deposited her on the edge of the table in a swirl of Mr Fitcham’s papers and bent to kiss her.

  Verity kissed him back, curled her arms around him and held him to her as, with lips and tongue, he proceeded to reduce her to helpless longing. Something crackled beneath her, a long-fingered hand came to cradle the back of her head and Verity blinked her eyes open to find herself staring up at the ceiling and Will lying beside her on the table.

  ‘Will, we can’t!’

  ‘I can make love to my wife-to-be anywhere,’ he said. ‘Now, how does this charming garment unfasten?’

  She was beyond coherent reply—even if she had been able to remember how the gown did up. Will had worked it out, she realised, as his hand slid, warm and gentle, over her breast. She arched into his palm as he caressed the swell of flesh above the edge of her corset with one hand and the other slid up under her skirts, over the edge of her garter, on to the bare skin.

  This was Will and she loved him and she wanted him and her whole body was screaming for him as his thumb found her nipple and his fingers caressed over intimate folds that she could feel were already wet for him.

  He desired her, she had known that from their first kiss, could tell it now from the rasp of his breathing and the hard thrust of his body against her thigh. ‘Verity. You will be mine. Not here, not now, but soon.’ One finger found a point of aching sensitivity, moved and she cried out at the exquisite pleasure of it.

  So good. Seducing me as though he knows my body inside and out... Seducing...

  Verity twisted away, found the edge of the table and staggered to her feet. ‘No. Will, you are trying to seduce me into doing what you think is right and I will not, because I know it would be wrong.’ She was weeping now, at last, feeling the moisture slipping down her face. She pulled up the neckline of her walking dress—goodness knew where her pelisse had gone—shook out her skirts, saw her reticule and grabbed for it.

  ‘You might want me, but you do not need me and you have said yourself, over and over, that I would be a disaster of a duchess. Do you think I want to be tied to a man who does not love me? Who married me because he felt he had to and because he would quite like to get me into bed? If I did not love you, it would be bad enough, but now, it would break my heart.’

  He stood stock-still, his clothing disordered, his hair across his brow, as dishevelled as he had been on the island where she had come to know him, perhaps where she had learned to love him. For once he seemed to be lost for words. Verity took her chance and ran, out of the door, down the hall, dodging between two burly men with straw hats and tarred pigtails who were ordering the footman to fetch his master’s trunk, out of the front door and into the street. And there, just rounding the corner, was a hackney carriage.

  * * *

  What had just happened? Other than him losing his mind and his self-control and attempting to make love to Verity on a vicarage table and then standing like a lightning-struck tree when he should have been reassuring her. From the window Will saw Verity scramble into a hackney and drive off.

  She loved him, she had said so, not only to Harrington, but again just now. He loved her and that was what she wanted, so why... Oh, hell. He hadn’t told her, had he? He had demanded that she marry him, attempted to ravish her in conditions of extreme discomfort with strange men just the other side of an unlocked door, but he had not said those three simple words. Verity had many talents, but mind reading was not one of them, he told himself ruefully.

  ‘Your Grace?’ Fitcham stood just inside the door staring from the floor, where his paperwork was strewn, to his dishevelled employer and back again.

  ‘Carry on, Fitcham,’ Will said, with a sweep of his hand to encompass papers, errant vicars and hard-jawed sailors. He tugged his neckcloth into some semblance of order, scooped up his hat from the hall table and strode out of the house. Simply turning up on Lady Fairlie’s doorstep with declarations of undying love was not going to convince Verity, he knew her well enough for that. She would assume that he was telling her he loved her because he was determined to do the right thing and marry her.

  Will stopped dead in the middle of the pavement. A stout woman with a small dog on a leash swerved round him with a loud comment about young bucks with no manners. He lifted his hat automatically and she sniffed and walked on.

  Verity believed that the most important thing in his life was being the perfect duke but, somehow, he had to convince her that she was what mattered most to him, perfection be damned. He saw a hackney and hailed it. ‘Grosvenor Square.’ As he settled back against the worn old squabs without a care for his coat he told himself that Verity would not simply run for home. Her aunt had accepted invitations for them over the next few days, including one to a Drawing Room at St James’s Palace. Verity would not want to let Lady Fairlie down, he had to believe that.

  * * *

  ‘But what if he is there?’ Verity said, for perhaps the sixth time that day. She was sitting in extreme discomfort on the backwards-facing seat of the Fairlies’ town coach, her hooped skirt tilting up at an absurd angle and forbidden by her aunt to hold it down in case she creased the fabric. Her head was bent forward to avoid bending the three ostrich plumes in her headdress and she had to keep them to one side to avoid them tangling with those of her aunt opposite. Her uncle was barely visible to one side, his wife’s bell-shaped skirt draped across the satin breeches of his Court suit. His dress sword and chapeau bras were held by straps in the roof of the coach and his expression beneath his powdered wig was one of stoical discomfort.

  ‘If the Duke is present, which no doubt he will be, he will behave with the utmost decorum. If he bows and exchanges a few words of greeting, that will be all,’ Lord Fairlie said, with rather more patience than his wife had been showing in response to the previous five queries. ‘You should curtsy and merely respond with some platitude.’

  Will had given up on her, that was clear. It was three days since the incident in Chelsea and a short note from Mr Fitcham informing her that a gentleman of their acquaintance had taken ship for the West Indies was the closest thing to a message from the Duke that she had received.

  He must have
finally accepted that it was futile, that his sense of honour—and his physical desires—weighed nothing in the balance against her complete unsuitability to be a duchess. And her declarations of love must have helped tip the balance, too, because what man wanted a wife pathetically loving him when he felt no such emotion for her?

  The clock struck two as the crawling queue of carriages finally reached the door and there was the business of disentangling the ladies with their hoops and feathers, yards of train and fans without anyone treading on a hem, impaling themselves on the sword or knocking Lord Fairlie’s wig askew. One last chance to wish silently that one had paid a visit to the privy, to discreetly blow one’s nose and clear one’s throat—it was preferable to choke silently to death than to cough or sneeze, apparently—then the slow progress along the corridors, nodding carefully to acquaintances, everyone keeping their voices low, their expressions dignified.

  At least there were no disapproving glances from the matrons and, if there were some sideways looks from the younger men, that was no more than they were giving any of the other young ladies. Will must have trodden very firmly on the salacious club gossip. Perhaps, next year, she would feel comfortable coming back to London. Next year seemed a very long way away.

  Then they were through the double doors, their names announced. To the left were rows of tall windows, to the right, unlit fireplaces and paintings in heavy gilded frames and ahead the Cloth and Canopy of State rising to the high ceiling, marking the position of the empty throne. The Queen, invisible behind a wall of hoops, plumes and wigs, would be seated on a slightly less impressive chair a step below.

  As they edged forward, marshalled into a receiving line by men in Court uniforms encrusted with silver lace, Verity did her best not to stare around her too obviously. There were a number of young ladies being presented, all looking as terrified as she had once felt in their place, a cluster of naval and army officers, be-medalled and in their dress uniforms, all waiting to be congratulated on some engagement or another, diplomats, laden with foreign honours and colourful sashes but no familiar tall figure looking down his perfect ducal nose at the common herd.