by Vanessa Kelly, Christi Caldwell, Theresa Romain, Shana Galen
“I’ve wanted to do that for years,” he murmured against the damp hollow of her collarbone. “Years, Poppy. We’re flint and tinder.”
“I always felt the sparks.” She drew in a deep breath, liking the blended scents of the lamps, the stone, their bodies. “But I wasn’t certain you did too. Especially when you left.”
“I hid many things that I thought I ought not to reveal.” With one more kiss, he eased from her.
Her feet touched the ground, but she hardly noticed. “I do not blame you for it,” she said softly. She too had kept her desires to herself.
Until tonight. Tonight, she hadn’t feared loss; she had taken what she wanted. Despite the changes inevitably ahead, she wasn’t alone in this moment of love. Not for now—and if she carried the spark of memory within, not ever.
No matter how my life changes, I will never lose this night.
The thought felt not like a burden, but like a gift.
Squinting through the near darkness, Poppy and Leo set themselves to rights. She whispered some sort of gleeful nonsense to him; he answered in kind. The words were irrelevant. The feeling was what mattered.
By the time they slipped from beneath the orchestra, a comic song had begun, all broad gestures and bawdy lyrics. And now there was dancing to do, a night to imbibe, champagne to bubble within one like stars. A single sip was enough for Poppy; she was already tipsy with the freedom of being with the one person, of all those on earth, she would have chosen to have at her side. Nothing could spoil this night, she was sure of it.
Until she saw the men.
Four men, obviously drunk, playing at sword fighting in front of the supper boxes at the edge of the Grove. Their swords were awkwardly long bars of wood painted in white and gold. Of a familiar pattern…
“No!” She gasped, tugging free from Leo and shoving through the crowd.
“Poppy, wait!” Leo caught her arm. “Wait! What happened? What do you see?”
“Those men! They have my balance pole, and they’ve snapped it into pieces.” Conscientious Lord Bexley had promised to store it after every performance, and he had never failed to do so. What the devil had happened?
Furiously, she yanked at her arm, but Leo wouldn’t let it go. “Leo, it’s mine. I need it.”
“Not on your own, Poppy. There are four of those men, and from the look of them, they’re brimful of rack punch. Let me find a constable.”
“No, now. I need it back now.” Her throat was closed, choking. She kept struggling through the crowd.
Didn’t he understand? It was her balance pole, the only thing that allowed her to walk sixty feet in the air without a care. To go up high, where nothing bad had ever happened to her. “I can’t perform without it,” she flung at Leo.
When she finally shoved free from the dancers, she was able to shake off Leo’s hand. Yet she felt rooted to the spot, numbly watching the quartet of fools. As they staggered, laughed, banged the poles together, bits of wood splintered off. The crisp white and gold paint was marred. A few other pieces of the pole lay on the trodden ground, snapped again and again so the men could have just the sort of fake swords they wanted.
The orchestra music had gone silent in her ears. “I…can’t perform without it.”
She had forgotten Leo was still beside her until he caught her under the chin with a gentle fingertip. “Poppy, it’s all right. I promised you a thousand pounds. You don’t have to perform anymore if you don’t want to.”
His eyes caught hers. Held. I’ll buy you.
He didn’t mean it like that, she knew. Not in the way Lord Nithsdale had, taking what he wanted and leaving her in pieces. Leo wanted to help her, to show her she wasn’t alone.
But she was still in pieces. There were four, snapped apart, in the hands of drunken men, and more cast aside on the ground. There was a piece of a man who had forced himself on her, growing larger within her body by the day. And what was there of Poppy, friend and lover and ropedancer? She felt she had found herself tonight, but so quickly, she could be lost again.
She wasn’t ashamed to ask for help, but she couldn’t surrender to helplessness. She had a contract, all her own.
There was to be no touching.
She drew herself up straight, lifting her chin away from his fingertip. “Yes. Leo, I should like you to get a constable and retrieve the pieces of my balance pole.”
“It can be repaired, then?”
“No. It cannot.” It would never be strong and springy again. “But those men should not have it.”
“If you’re not going to perform again—”
“Of course I’m going to perform again. I have agreed.” And she wanted to. How could she explain? Nothing bad had ever happened to her as she walked a fence or a tightrope; she could not say the same for the earth.
“Contracts can be broken.” His green eyes looked dark, framed by the half mask.
“Yet we clasped hands on one,” she said. “Would you treat it so lightly?”
“Anything involving you? Never.”
“Nor would I you.”
“We can get you another, then,” Leo said. “Another pole, just like this one.”
She folded her arms tightly, catching the cloak about her like a cocoon. “There is no other. I had that made just for me. I begged a man at a lumberyard to let me choose just the wood I wanted, and I had it cut to size. I smoothed it myself, with sandpaper and my hands.”
This was the only thing she had, just for her, just the way she liked it, and drunken sots had destroyed it during the single moment of pleasure she’d dared take for herself.
“And someone broke it, just like that. Poppy. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.” His jaw was hard. He wasn’t talking about the pole alone, she thought.
She wasn’t either. “It’s done. I’ll sort matters out.” The crowd around her felt crushing, the music vulgar, the laughter too raucous. “I forgot myself. I shouldn’t have…”
“Shouldn’t have what, Poppy?” His tone was brittle.
Let it shatter, then. “I shouldn’t have gone off with you as I did. I’m sorry, Leo. I have…I cannot be thinking only of myself.”
He threw out an elbow, keeping a weaving masquerader away. “Were you not thinking of me?”
“Of course I was. Always. And I am thinking of you now.” Who he’d once been, and who he had become. If he hadn’t returned as the Duke of Westfair, then maybe…
But Leo Billingsley was now His Grace, and all the what-ifs fulfilled were rubbed away like chalk underfoot. She had thought she would be satisfied with their engagement as a brief farce. She had thought she could surrender her body without giving him her heart again.
She had been wrong. He had always had her heart, after all. But her body wasn’t her own anymore, and her life wasn’t either. And neither was his, was it? The Duke of Westfair was the king’s peer, wrapped in golden threads of tradition and expectation.
“I can’t—do this anymore,” she managed to say. “I have to take care of the baby. I…”
Through his mask, his green eyes were pleading. “Poppy, let me help you.”
What if I did…?
No, the time for what-ifs was past. “I wish you could.” She smiled, but her heart was so heavy, the expression fell away at once. “But some things can’t be helped.”
From the look on his face, he knew as well as she did that this was just another way of saying good-bye.
Chapter Four
* * *
When the study door swung open without so much as a knock, Leo knew the intrusion could be from only one person. “Not now, Uncle,” he barked even before Bernard stepped into the room. “I’m occupied at the moment.”
Of course it was Bernard. And of course he looked irritable.
Usually Leo was willing to allow his uncle full rights of irritability in their conversations, but he wasn’t up to it today. He’d been feeling prickly himself all day—all week, really—and fighting about the same old nothings w
ith Bernard was the last thing he wanted right now.
Not that his uncle listened to Leo’s dismissal. “You look terrible.” The old man creaked across the study and settled into the chair on the opposite side of the desk. “Were you out carousing? And you an engaged man?”
Setting down his quill, Leo pressed at his temples. After all the years Richard had smoked in this room, its furniture still held the smell of his pipe tobacco. “I have not been out in Society for a week. Not since I accompanied Poppy Hayworth to the masquerade at Vauxhall. Thank you for your concern, though. It has been noted.”
She would be performing tonight, at a concert and fireworks show. Another in the string of celebrations of the Prince Regent’s birthday.
Leo had thought about visiting Vauxhall tonight, but he’d decided not to. Poppy would be safe on her high wire; he was the one who had fallen.
“Poppy is a good girl,” grunted Bernard. “You should make her your duchess at once, so she can help you administer the dukedom. That should be your first duty. Always.”
Leo let his fists thump to the desk’s cluttered surface. “I am aware of my responsibilities. Why do you think I look terrible, as you kindly put the matter? It’s not because I’ve been carousing. I’ve been trying to make sense of the dukedom’s accounts. Have the tenants in Sussex really been paying only half-rent for two years?” When Bernard opened his mouth, Leo held up a silencing hand. “I’m already looking into it.”
The fortune he’d made in shipping was being steadily parceled out. Here a fence, there a cow, everywhere a thatched roof. And a drainage system for the land on which crops were grown. And the cows…was no one making cheese with their milk?
He dipped the quill and scribbled another note for the steward in Sussex. Likely it was time for a new steward.
When he set aside the quill again, he considered the line of small objects across the front of the desk. A puzzle of interlocking wooden links. An ebony carving of an elephant whose ivory tusks Leo had accidentally pulled out, so that now they could be removed and replaced at will. A china dish of marbles and dice carved from vivid semiprecious stones. All for taking up and fiddling with when Leo’s attention wanted to flit, taking his body along with it.
He took three marbles, big jade ones, from the dish and began tossing them in the air and catching them. Half the reason was because it settled his mind; the other half was because he knew it would annoy Bernard.
“You can’t be looking into financial matters well if you keep playing with children’s toys,” complained the old man. “And you’re not having second thoughts about Poppy, are you? Her occupation is eccentric, but her birth was good.”
Leo had found his rhythm, a high toss of one marble and a quick pass of the other two. He ought to practice juggling with a fourth sometime. “I never doubted her birth or her worth. Honestly, Uncle, I knew her long before you came to live with us at the Sussex estate.”
He could hardly remember a time before he knew her. He could hardly imagine how he’d got through the past years so far away from her.
It had been one week since he’d ducked from under the orchestra at Vauxhall, hand in hand with Poppy. Finally, they had claimed each other, and it had been a pleasure of a sort that brought a man to his knees.
And it had been utterly fleeting.
He was Westfair, and she was with child. He’d never cared about the dukedom before, but that was before it belonged to him. The land, the money—what little there was of it—the tenants, the servants.
The line of succession. The future heir.
Besides this, Poppy remained in England only until she earned enough to leave it forever. She could not really be his, and he couldn’t be hers. Not beyond a single moment. Not even for a thousand pounds.
Some things, as she said, couldn’t be helped. It had been a week since that wonderful, terrible night, and he still hadn’t come up with a way through their situation. A week that had begun with Poppy slipping away from him into a crowd of costumed strangers. With him unable to find her in the crush of people dressed exactly like her.
She was always right. Damnation.
He supposed he had to prepare his uncle for the inevitable end. “I’m not sure I’m the sort of man she wants.” Toss, toss. “I believe she is having doubts about me.”
Probably he should have blamed himself for their parting. But Leo couldn’t make himself say that he didn’t want Poppy.
To the contrary: He wanted her enough for two. He was the one who had said too much; he alone had confessed he had wanted to marry her. He had suggested the fake engagement; he had offered the bribe. He had invited her to the masque, and he had admitted how he longed for her.
And Poppy? Poppy had left, and when Leo tracked down her lodging and asked to speak with her, a hatchet-faced widow said she wasn’t at home to gentlemen callers.
Leo was persistent, but he was no fool. Though wordless, this was Poppy’s answer to his presence in her life.
Uncle Bernard, of course, knew none of this. “Then you have to settle Poppy’s doubts in you, Leo. You need a duchess.”
“Right, right.” It was easier to agree. Maybe his uncle would leave the study more quickly that way.
“This is not a matter about which to be flippant. Think of what you owe the Billingsley name. The succession, and the Westfair title.”
Another man’s child in place of the future duke ? Bernard could have no idea. The more he tried to persuade Leo that Poppy was right for him, the more he confirmed that Poppy had been right instead.
Leo opened his mouth—but before he could reply, the clock chimed the quarter hour. He startled, missing all three marbles, which clunked to the floor and rolled somewhere inaccessible.
Time to check in with himself: Had he been doing what he ought?
Sort of. Mostly. It was too easy to drift from the work before him, to think of Poppy. Of soft skin and seductive moans, of laughter and bare toes and walnuts and furniture dragged all out of place. He hadn’t been thinking of the dukedom at all—and damn the world, damn his bad luck, but the two were mutually exclusive.
Leo bent over, searching the floor for his jade marbles. He found one…two…no, he couldn’t see where the other had gone. When he sat up again, he cracked his head on the underside of the desk.
He cursed, rubbing at the sore spot on his crown, only to meet piercing green eyes with low brows like storm clouds. “Leo,” said Bernard. “You’re not taking this conversation seriously.”
“To the contrary. You have no idea how serious I am at this very moment.” With a clatter of stone on porcelain, he dropped the two marbles back into their dish. “If you want to criticize anything else, I will see you for that at seven o’clock tonight. We can give each other indigestion following dinner. Right now, unless you want to sign some papers and leave London, I must ask you at least to leave this study.”
Bernard folded his arms. He looked like a scarecrow perched on the old leather-seated chair, all elbows and grimaces. “I won’t sign it. Not anything you want me to sign. I won’t have you hurt the dukedom.”
“I don’t really need to have you sign anything, you know. I could pack you off to Sussex and make you live in the dower house there. Surely the Duke of Westfair could summon servants enough to drag one single person from this town house.”
His uncle made a noise of disgust.
Leo felt much the same. He sighed. He drew the little ebony elephant toward him and pulled out its tusks. “These papers are to settle an income on you, Uncle, regardless of the dukedom’s state of affairs. Is it so difficult to believe I do not wish you ill?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s…Westfair.”
Leo bobbled the tiny ivory tusks, dropping them on the desk. “What of it?” His curiosity was piqued by Bernard’s tentative tone. He hadn’t known the old man’s throat could issue such a sound. “I’m doing my best by Westfair. Or I will be, once I’ve had time to straighten out its financ
es.”
Bernard was silent. His gaze was averted, faraway. Finally he whispered, “It’s all I’ve had for years. It’s all I have left.”
Leo stared at his uncle. Bernard looked frail and old, his vitality leached away with the words, gone from the air.
He had not thought about the matter like that before, that after losing wife, daughter, brother-in-law, sister, nephew, the only thing to which Bernard remained attached was the dukedom that had brought him into Leo’s life all those years ago.
Cautiously, quietly, Leo said, “You will always have a place at Westfair. After my father died, when Richard was but a child, you were the one who helped us to—”
“Don’t condescend to me.” Bernard snapped upright, glaring at Leo with his familiar resentment. “I know you haven’t any use for me. You never have.”
“Uncle, that’s not tr—”
“I won’t be at dinner tonight. Don’t wait for me.”
Leo’s hands balled into fists. With careful calm, he said, “What you’ve said about me is not true. I will have a meal sent to your chamber, if you wish to dine there.”
Bernard’s reply, as he shuffled from the room with a fling of sharp elbows, was profane.
Leo picked up one of his marbles and flung it at the closing study door. The crack of jade against wood was most satisfying.
So. All Bernard had was Westfair, he said? Leo wished he could give his uncle the cursed dukedom. If Leo couldn’t have Poppy, and if his closest living relative wouldn’t listen to him, what was the point of having people call him Your Grace? He was as alone as he’d been when he lived abroad.
The truth was, he’d been away too long. His tenants, his seat in Parliament, might require the presence of the Duke of Westfair. But Leo Billingsley? The world could get along just fine without him. The world, and all the people in it. Especially Poppy Hayworth.
