“What if I say no?”
Graham clasped his hands at his back, bringing her gaze unwittingly to the broad expanse of his chest. “You won’t say no.”
Rowena tipped her chin up at a furious angle. Fire flashed in her brown eyes, momentarily sucking the breath from his lungs. God, she was breathtaking. “Because you believe no one would dare defy a duke?”
He looked her over, allowing him to assess her in ways he’d resisted since he’d entered the room and seen her standing before the headmistress. Willowy, narrow-hipped, and tall as she’d always been, there was more of a generousness to her breasts than there had been when she was a girl. His mouth went dry with a hungering to explore this new, mature, still-bold Rowena. “Because you were never one to refuse a challenge, Rowena,” he murmured, laying command to her name for the first time in eleven years.
“Is that what this is?” she demanded tightly.
“No,” he said taking a step toward her. In the first remarkable crack in her façade, she retreated, stumbling over herself in her haste to be free of him. Fear sparked in her eyes, but in an instant, it was gone, and had he not witnessed that same flash in too many terrified stares on the fields of battle, he’d have, mayhap, missed it. His annoyance with her spiraled now, for altogether different reasons. “This is employment, and you are capable of serving as a companion and, as such, I’d have you care for my charge.” Graham pulled out his watchfob and consulted the timepiece. “Mrs. Belden?” he called.
The patter of footsteps filled the corridor and, moments later, the headmistress ducked her head inside. “She will do.” Rowena’s teeth knocked loudly together. “Please see her belongings readied.”
Without sparing her another look, the headmistress stalked off.
Tossing her hands in the air, Rowena made a choking noise. “You ordered my belongings packed? The insolence of you, Your Grace,” she hissed.
He arched a single eyebrow. “Do you intend to refuse me?” Her silence served as her answer. The headmistress would turn her out for failing to take on the illustrious assignment. “I did not believe so.” He made to leave once more.
“Is that all?” she called out, the high-pitched tenor of her husky voice cascading over him, rousing in him an unwanted hunger. God, how he despised this need for her still. “You will not even tell me anything about your ward? Her name? Her interests?”
He’d have to be deafer than a post to fail to hear the reproach there. No doubt she took him for one of those unfeeling, diffident noblemen. In this she would be correct. “There will be time to discuss my ward in our carriage ride to London.”
She widened her eyes to the size of saucers. “Our carriage ride?” she choked.
Graham forced his lips up in a slow, emotionless half-grin. “Rest assured, Mrs. Bryant, we will have countless hours to discuss my ward... among other things.” He paused. “We leave within a quarter of an hour. We introduce the girl to Society in three weeks.”
“Society?” she echoed. Her mind raced for a horrifying moment that went on forever. What if her path again crossed with the women she’d briefly called friends? What if they discovered just how far she had fallen? Her stomach churned. Don’t be silly... It’s been more than ten years. Why, it was likely they’d not even noted she’d one day gone from Wallingford. Rowena’s own family hadn’t made a single attempt to contact her over the years.
“A formal dinner,” Graham elucidated, slashing through her maudlin musings. “A musicale. Balls and soirees.” Events meant to ease Miss Hickenbottom’s way into a cold Society.
She shook her head. “But I cannot...”
“Do you find yourself unable to serve in the role?” he dared.
Rowena pursed her mouth. “No, Your Grace,” she said curtly, demonstrating that intrepidness lived within her still.
With the faint thrill of victory, Graham turned on his heel and left.
Chapter 4
When presented with the option of dancing with the devil in the fiery flames of hell or sharing the confines of a carriage with a man who’d broken her heart years earlier, Rowena would have invariably chosen the former.
As it was, the prince of darkness handily absent, she was left with an altogether different one or, in this particular case, a duke of darkness. She huddled against the interior wall nearest her, attempting to make herself small and invisible. It was an impossible feat when this new, all-powerful Graham’s frame swallowed the much-needed space inside the elegant, black barouche.
Eleven hours in a carriage. With one stop at an inn along the way. At the inn, she’d not need to see him or speak to him. In the carriage... well, mayhap he’d tire of the closed quarters and take to his mount as any polite, respectable gentleman would. At the very least, mayhap he wouldn’t speak—
“You are a good deal more laconic than I recall,” he observed, stretching out his legs. Their knees brushed, and she damned the quickening of her heart. Foolish, foolish body’s response to him. Then again, a body cared not for long buried hurts.
“I am a good deal many more things since we last saw one another.” More Bitter. Wiser. Stronger. “Your Grace.” She placed a slight emphasis on those two words, raising an unnecessary reminder of the great gulf between them.
As a duke’s second son, the divide had been great, now it may as well have been the width of the Atlantic Sea.
“Indeed, you are.” By the dry bite to his words, she could venture precisely to what manner of things he referred. None of those things were kind or flattering.
... I could lose myself in the pools of your eyes and drown happily without ever a regret.
God, what utter rot and rubbish she’d allowed to fill her ears and rule her thoughts. In doing so, she’d become everything she’d never wished to be: her mother—a nobleman’s plaything. Only, in the greatest irony, her mama, a reformed courtesan, had found love with a vicar. Whereas Rowena had given her virtue, heart, and soul to a man merely toying with her affections. And in so doing, she’d secured a powerful enemy in his now-dead father, the late Duke of Hampstead—God rot his soul.
When her mother had warned her of the perils in loving a nobleman’s son, Rowena had scoffed with the arrogance only a naïve girl was capable of. Graham was unlike the man who’d fathered her. Or any of the others to serve as her mother’s protector, until she met the vicar. Rowena had trusted one of those powerful peers—and lost. Not only her heart, pride, and happiness, but her family who’d had no choice but to send her away. At the duke’s orders.
All the age-old hatred had burned strong in her heart.
Her bitter smile reflected back in the lead windowpane, Rowena shook her head. How naïve she’d been... believing words of love and talk of marriage could have swayed the late Duke of Hampstead in his efforts to separate her and Graham. If possible, the all-powerful duke had known even less about love than his son.
No, she’d dipped her toes into the world of nobility and been so burned, it was a place she never, ever again wished to be. Not as a servant. Wife. Widow. Or anything else.
Rowena pulled back the curtain and stared out at the passing countryside. Seeing the green meadows and rolling hills, she could almost imagine herself in Wallingford, making that long, miserable journey alone in a different carriage at a different time, a scared, lonely child.
Taptap-tap-taptap-tap...
The grating staccato of that incessant beat cut across her useless musings. He was trying to get under her skin. The same way he’d reentered her life and stolen her anonymity at Mrs. Belden’s, Graham sought to rob her this time of calm.
I am no longer an impulsive girl. I am no longer an impulsive girl.
Taptap-tap-taptap—
“Must you do that?” she snapped.
Tap. He paused. “No, ‘Your Gracing’ me now, Rowena?” Once more, he boldly commandeered her name. She curled her toes into her boots. Why did his gruff whisper set off this wild yearning inside her, still? “You are even bolder than you we
re as a girl of sixteen.” And then promptly commenced his incessant drumming.
“Cautious,” she said between tight lips. He stopped his beating. “I am even more cautious,” she clarified. Learned at the hands of his iniquity.
“Ah.” He leaned forward, his broad-muscled frame shrinking the space between them. “But wherever is the fun in caution?”
That husky whisper wrapped in seduction and sin belied the gentle, charming gentleman he’d once been. In his place was this older, cynical, wicked lord who thought the world was his due and the ladies around him were a pleasure for the taking. Her ire stirred, a frustration that this was the man he’d become... and that her belly still danced and fluttered at a mere hooding of his thick, black lashes.
“Some of us are not afforded the luxury of fun.” She peeled her lip back in an involuntary sneer. “Some of us must hold sacred and honor our reputations.” It was all a lady had between respectability and a life of sin upon one’s back.
His chiseled features, set in a mask, gave little indication as to his thought. “I daresay, I see how you’ve attained your reputation as most-revered instructor. But I do wonder...” He dangled that bait, the lure as great now as when they’d parried with word riddles and puzzles at the copse on his father’s properties. Nay, his properties. They were now Graham’s.
Those same green meadows she’d cried herself to sleep thinking of when she’d first arrived at Mrs. Belden’s. The same ones that, if she closed her eyes and dreamed just so, she could draw forth from memory.
He leaned forward once more, and the red velvet squabs of his bench creaked under his shifting weight. “At one time, you would have asked me what I wonder.”
At one time, she would have done a whole host of other things, all that would have ultimately found her in his arms with his lips on hers. On the heel of that, cool logic was restored and the memories of old were extinguished like the flicker of a once-bright flame. Schooling her features into the dragon mask she’d donned and perfected in her time at Mrs. Belden’s, Rowena faced him squarely. “Perhaps this is the ideal time, Your Grace, to tell me of your ward and discuss your expectations of me as her companion as well as my expectations of you, as my employer.” That last part was added as a pointed reminder to the both of them that, ultimately, that was all she was. Which was a good deal more than what she’d once been to him.
He narrowed his eyes, and she braced for his jeering contradiction of her orders, but he slowly leaned back. “Very well,” he said, stretching out those two syllables with a frostiness that could only come from a duke. He may have been the spare to his brother, Monty, but Graham spoke and moved with the ease of a man born to that position. Her heart tugged with regret for the young man he’d been and whom he might have grown into. “Her name is Ainsley. She is spirited. Wild. Romantic.”
Just as she had been. “Very dangerous combinations,” Rowena said evenly.
“Then, it is a combination you would know very well.” Her stomach muscles clenched reflexively, but she’d be damned if she gave him any indication as to how that barb struck.
“And a gentleman thought the illustrious Duke of Hampstead to be the ideal guardian for such a girl?” It had taken but a handful of readings of those gossip columns long ago to glean that Graham had returned a conquering war hero and shaped himself into a rogue, whom widows and ladies vied for with equal fervor. Until, by the words reported in those gossip pages, he’d become the proud, austere duke who’d sown his last oat, and become a model of the late Duke of Hampstead. Then... he was always that man. I was just too blind to see it.
“Hardly,” he snorted, tugging off his gloves. He stuffed them inside his jacket, revealing long, tanned fingers. “I was the second. The first chap had the bad form to up and die on the girl.”
Who was this aloof, unfeeling man? Did his ascension to the title of duke alone account for the change that had overtaken him? “How rude of him,” she drawled.
“Regardless, I find myself guardian and eager to turn her over to someone else’s care.” He paused. “Yours.”
How ruthless he was. How coolly methodical he was about a young lady’s future. What a master he’d always been at prevarication. He’d presented himself as teasing, gentle, kind, and loving. In the end, he was always this privileged lord before her. “And is there no Duchess of Hampstead to oversee the girl’s education?” She held her breath.
“There is no duchess.”
Why did the tension in her chest ease at that four-word revelation? He was one and thirty years, and yet, he remained unmarried. Bah, foolish twit. She forced her lip back in a sneer. “Ah, of course, you are too busy carousing and womanizing to be bothered with a wife or charge underfoot.” That stinging rebuke came before she could call it back.
He smiled a slow, seductive, and tempting grin that Satan himself could not so perfectly emulate. “Miss Bryant, I am far too old for carousing.” Graham winked.
She opened her mouth and closed it, and then heat slapped her cheeks. Of course, he’d not refute the womanizing portion of her charge. The bounder. “Mrs.”
He cocked his head.
“If I am to remain in your employ, I am to be referred to as Mrs. Bryant. Otherwise, my reputation will be in question.” And all an unwed lady had was her reputation.
“Ahh,” he whispered and damn her for the butterflies that were set to dancing, yet again, inside. “And your position as instructor is so very important to you?”
It was the best she could hope for. Unless, she wished for a life of sin like her mother. “It is all I have,” she said quietly. “Young women without the benefit of a husband...” I will return to you. Make you my wife... That long-ago pledge whispered around her memory. Fool that she’d been, she’d failed to see that had he truly wished her to be his forever, he would have given her the benefit of his name long before he’d left.
“Rowena?”
She snapped to. “Young women without the benefit of a husband or employment find themselves with no security and even more uncertain futures.” Or whores like her mother had been.
Graham studied her for a long moment, and she remained motionless under that frank perusal. Then, he layered his arm over the back of his seat. His biceps strained the fabric of the garment. “What of Mr. Bryant?”
It was a statement, devoid of any inflection, perfect for a military man who’d ordered men about the battlefield. Long ago, with his falsity and defection, she’d given up on the dream she’d carried for a loving husband and chubby-cheeked babes with his jade green eyes. He wouldn’t know that. He saw, just as the world saw, what they were content to believe her to be: a proper widow.
“Tell me of your devoted husband,” he drawled.
“If your questioning pertains to my employment status, then it should have been asked prior to our leaving Mrs. Belden’s. If it does not, then you should refrain from asking it,” she rebuked, cursing the widening grin on his face. Damn him for finding amusement in this.
“Tsk. Tsk. I expect you wish we’d married before I went off to fight. Who would have thought my brother would up and die while I was away, no less? Imagine, you could have found yourself a duchess.”
He may as well have slapped her across the face. Say nothing. Say nothing. He merely sought to bait her. Odd, she’d failed to see the deliberately cruel streak he carried. His father’s blood ran strongly through his veins. Rowena focused her attention on the passing countryside and damned her gaze as it found his in the windowpane. His mocking smile reached his eyes. She curled her toes into the soles of her serviceable boots so hard her arches ached. His father’s loathsome face flashed to her mind. “And I expect you find yourself fortunate not to have been saddled with a lowly vicar’s”—and reformed courtesan’s—“daughter so you might nobly carry on your roguish ways.”
“Been following my pursuits?” At the triumphant thread to that question, she gritted her teeth.
It did not escape her notice he didn’t counter her
charges. Of course, her status as lowly vicar’s daughter had always mattered to him. He’d simply done a masterful job of concealing it until he’d no longer had a need. Rowena angled her shoulder away from him. She’d already said too much.
Any other moment, the confines of a carriage would have commanded all Graham’s focus. The closed-in walls brought him back to another place, another time, when he’d been injured on the Peninsular and the carriage carrying him had been attacked. The sharp report of pistol balls striking the conveyance and finding mark in two of the men riding with him. The stench of gunpowder permeated his senses and forced him to relive the moment of helplessness where he’d been too weak to steadily wield a weapon. While his brothers-in-arms battled the enemy. It was a never-forgotten horror that revisited him in too many carriage rides.
That staccato tap that so grated on Rowena’s nerves, however, also had become a calming mechanism he’d developed over the years. A distractionary measure that moved his mind from the fields of Bussaco and into that steady beating he could control. It was just another demon he had slayed, and for it, he prided himself on his calm and composure. His entire life, however, was an artful façade he’d taken on to conceal his madness and demonstrate restraint.
Yet, here he sat, a man who avoided all hint of strife, deliberately baiting her. Then, her hold had always been great over him. It was not her fault. It was his folly.
His weakness for her had once been so great, he’d have turned over the English flag to Boney’s forces if she’d but asked. It was a frailty he’d spent years despising himself for.
Never had he hated himself more than he did in this moment. God curse him, he cared that she’d thought of him. For with her barely restrained fury and telling words, she’d revealed herself as clearly as the sun rising on a clear summer’s day.
He hated his own inherent weakness that he should care or that truth should matter in any way. The memory of Rowena Endicott had sustained him through countless battles when he’d fought death and dying on the fields of Italy and Belgium. He’d written her more goddamn letters than all the words his miserable tutors had demanded of him for the course of his life. And not once had he received a return word from her.
Schooling the Duke (The Heart of a Scandal, #1) Page 6
