Even so, lovesick fool that he’d been, Graham had clung to the dream of them. From every field he’d marched through to his near-death atop a mountain in Portugal, spared by the grace of a merciless God and Lieutenant Hickenbottom, she’d sustained him. Those aching wounds had seen him returned to England on a litter, where he’d existed in a murky state. In those days, he’d alternated between begging for death and aching to see her once more.
Only to, at last, go in search of her and find her parents unable to meet his eyes, apologetic. She’d married another. He’d stood, staring at the door they’d all but closed in his face, numb and broken from a pain that no bullet or bayonet had managed to inflict.
And yet...
For her treachery, even with all the lies and heartbreak, that she’d thought of him turned him, once more, into that silly young man picking bluebells in a meadow with her at his side.
Why had she followed any of his pursuits if she’d not, in some way, cared for him? Had it been regret that she’d not waited for that coveted role of duchess? “Did you follow my pursuits in those scandal sheets, Rowena?” he murmured when still she said nothing.
Her mouth tightened. “I found more important uses for my time than reading anything about you.” Found more important uses. A slight distinction, but a telling one. The lady hadn’t denied his charges.
“If it is any consolation, I never had a woman after you that could comp—”
Rowena shot a hand out, catching him hard on the cheek. The peal of her slap rang loud in the carriage, punctuated by the steady roll of the wheels. All the color leeched from her face and she yanked her palm back. “I...”
A wry grin formed on his lips as he rubbed the wounded flesh. God, the lady could pack a blow. Prior to his leaving, he’d given her skills with which to use to protect herself in his absence.
Then, with the smooth, precise movements that had surely earned her the reputation as Mrs. Belden’s leading instructor, the lady squared her shoulders and smoothed her hands over her skirts. “Your father was a monster.” He stiffened. The late duke had been hard and condescending in every way. “He disdained all but those of your exalted stations. And you, Your Grace, prove the demonstrator that an apple does not fall far from the proverbial tree.”
He flared his nostrils. That likening to his bastard of a sire stung worse than her earlier, impressive blow.
Rowena continued, her cheeks flushed. “You command my fate, but I’ll not be baited and jeered at every turn simply because I’m in your employ.” She twisted the blade of guilt all the more.
Where his father had been a cruel employer, treating those in his employ as objects more than people, Graham had vowed never to be that man. “Forgive me,” he said quietly. “You are, indeed, correct.” He’d invited her back into his life look after the young lady in his care. Not to needle and hurt, as she’d done.
Rowena eyed him suspiciously. What had placed that world-wariness in her eyes? Then, she nodded slowly. “We were discussing your ward.”
His mind raced. Had they been? Once again, her unyielding grip remained over his logic. “Ainsley’s father and I fought together. She is illegitimate.” He stared at her for a long while.
Rowena angled herself so they faced each other directly. An understanding dawned in her eyes.
“The young lady has informed me she is proficient on the pianoforte,” he went on. “I’ll have a recital arranged with the leading members of the peerage. Society will be unkind. Her father, in his living, was a dissolute rake who buried himself in a bottle after returning from war. He left quite a scandal with his passing—”
Rowena held up a staying hand. “It is not my place to hear the girl’s family history from you, or for you to tell it. Her past will not affect my judgment or treatment of her. She is simply a young lady, and that is how I will see her. If she chooses to confide her familial circumstances, then that is for her to determine.”
It was why, despite the volatile history between them, he’d employed her. Appreciation stirred. An unwanted, dangerous softening at that character.
“Has the lady had any governesses?”
He shook his head. “Never.” None? “According to the girl, her days were rather solitary.”
Emotion suffused her saucer-round eyes. “What a very sad existence.”
Then, wasn’t all of life truly miserable for everyone?
“And what of my responsibilities, Your Grace?”
God, she was magnificent. Any other companion, would have kept their deferential gazes permanently at the floor. Rowena seized hold of the discussion of her charge, regard for his title of duke be damned. When that is all ladies of the ton had seen, her honest responses to him made him feel more like the man he’d been before he’d gone to war and had his life ripped asunder.
“Graham,” he said quietly.
Four lines creased her adorable brow.
“There is no reason for us to stand on formalities. Graham will suffice.”
She frowned. In the hour since they’d been together, her lips had turned downward more than they had in the three years they’d known one another. “That would hardly be appropriate, Your Grace. I am a mere servant...” She’d never been a mere anything. She’d once been his everything. “...and my actions will be subject to scrutiny.”
It was the right answer. The correct one. And wanting both his life orderly and his charge transformed into everything decorous and polite, he should applaud her reply. He should. Instead, this deference to societal opinions set his teeth on edge. “Damn Society’s opinions.”
Rowena held up a gloved finger. “Ah, but complete freedom of your actions and decisions are liberties only afforded dukes and royalty. Lesser people”—she flattened her lips—“must follow the dictates laid out, or we are destroyed.”
Her somber words ended in hushed tones that barely reached him, leaving a chill in their wake. Those words suggested she knew very well about the personal destruction she warned of. He’d not allowed himself to think of her outside her perfidiousness. Now... for the first time, he wondered what her life had been like these past years. Who had been the bounder who’d betrayed her and seen her working in a miserable finishing school with an equally miserable headmistress?
“We were once friends,” he said softly. “As such, certain liberties are permitted.” Once friends. Friends turned lovers. And lovers turned enemies. He braced for her tart denial. Instead, an aching smile hovered on her too-full lips.
“Friends.” She spoke that word as if testing its veracity and meaning. “That was a lifetime ago. And you were not a duke.” No, he’d not found himself destined for that miserable rank until Monty had perished of a wasting illness while Graham was off fighting.
I am heartily glad you aren’t a duke, else you would be one of those stuffy, monocle-wearing boys who’d never be friends with a vicar’s daughter.
The memory of her bell-like laughter rang around the chambers of his memory as real now as it had been all those years ago. “No,” he agreed. “We were children.” It had been the last of his innocence. “Now we are a man and woman capable of our own decisions, and I’d have you call me Graham.” He didn’t know why it should matter if she called him Your Grace, You Bastard, or Graham Linford... it just... mattered.
The lady warred with herself. She wore that fight in her expressive eyes.
Sensing her weakening, he pressed. “Unless you are otherwise too fearful of the connection it reminds you of?”
Rowena knitted her chocolate-brown eyebrows into a single line. “It reminds me of nothing, Graham.”
With her slightly crooked front teeth, she worried the flesh of her lower lip, bringing his gaze downward to her mouth... and God help him, a potent surge of lust went through him as that subtle, seductive gesture drew forth the taste and feel of those lips, known too long ago. “Nothing?” he whispered, rolling that word in a seductive caress. He leaned forward and Rowena’s breath caught loudly. “Not even the
feel of my hand on your skin...?” He brought his hand slowly about her nape, giving her time to pull away... and yet she did not. She remained frozen, heat pouring off her slender frame. “Not the feel of my lips as I caressed you here...” He shifted his head and hovered his mouth beside the sensitive skin where her neck met her ear.
“No.” Except her denial emerged as a raspy, hungry plea.
“Not even the taste of my lips as we made love?” And with a low groan, Graham covered her mouth with his. She stiffened in his arms, briefly battering her fists against his chest. He gentled his kiss, and Rowena curled her fingers against the fabric of his jacket. With every touch of his mouth on hers, fire built between them until they met in a primitive mating of two people who’d spent more years hating one another than loving. Dragging her across the carriage onto his lap, he never broke contact. He slanted his mouth over hers again and again, and as she twined her fingers in his hair, he thrust his tongue between her full lips. She met his kiss with abandon. Their tongues danced in a bold thrust and parry. Heat spiraled inside him. Roused all the oldest hungers he’d ever known for this woman. “Rowena,” he moaned into her mouth.
She wrenched away from him. Her cheeks flushed and horror slowly filled her eyes, replacing the thick haze of desire in their depths. In her haste to escape from him, she stumbled off his lap and crashed to the floor of the carriage. He reached out to help her up, but she slapped at his hands.
“No,” she said sharply, scrambling awkwardly to her feet. She rushed into her seat and huddled in the corner. She eyed him like he was more monster than man. “That is not to happen again. I am not that woman anymore.” She’d never been that woman. She’d been only his. She’d come to him, a virgin, and together they’d learned the wonders of one another’s bodies. “And I am in your employ.”
Had she removed the gun from inside his boot and shot him through the chest, she could not have landed a more vicious blow. It had been no secret to the villagers, servants, or lords and ladies of Society the late Duke of Hampstead had a wicked proclivity for bedding the women on his staff. Graham had vowed never to be that man... and, once again, Rowena proved how weak he truly was.
“Forgive me,” he said hoarsely. “When I sought your services, it was never my intention to...” He grimaced. His neck heated, and the flush traveled up his cheeks. “You may rest assured I will not put my hands upon you again, Mrs. Bryant.”
And mayhap he was more the bastard his father had been. For giving her that pledge, he’d never regretted uttering any words in his life more.
Chapter 5
With a lover, a woman knew every intimate detail about a man. Long ago, after Rowena gave herself to Graham, she discovered the light mat of curls upon his chest. Those soft tufts, that, as she’d listened to the beat of his heart, had tickled her cheek. She’d known the taste of mint and ginger on his breath. Each discovery of those small but intricate details had made up a tender composite of a person that not even time’s passage could erase.
He still snored.
She’d not remembered that about him—until now. Such a detail about Graham Linford, the Duke of Hampstead she’d gathered long ago, curled against his side, with the stars twinkling overhead, and the world unknowing of where they were or what they did.
Rowena dropped her chin into her hand and, with the benefit of his slumber, studied him in his repose. How very odd to know those intimate details: the birthmark just below his navel, or that cinnamon made him sneeze, and to not truly know a man in any way that truly mattered. His closed eyes twitched and she stiffened. But then another bleating snore escaped him, filling the carriage, and proving he slept still. This time, she abandoned her study of him and stared outside at the countryside. Thick, gray clouds rolled overhead, blotting out the earlier spring sun.
He’d kissed her.
Following Jack’s attack in her parents’ cottage, the memory of his punishing mouth as he’d groped and grabbed at her, haunted her still long after that dark day. That violent assault, on a day when her life had been forever changed, had overshadowed the beautiful embraces she’d shared with Graham. So much that Rowena had ceased to believe she could ever know a man’s kiss without feeling that suffocating panic. She’d been wrong—yet again. For Graham had gentled their embrace, rekindling all the oldest yearnings and desires she’d carried for him and his touch. His kiss, however, had not been the tryst of young lovers they’d shared countless times years and years before, but rather the soul-searing, toe-curling kiss of a man who hungered for her. It had roused that same forbidden desire inside her.
In the lead windowpane, her gaze snagged on her visage and the wanton creature with too many strands of hair hanging about her shoulders stared back in damning testament to her weakness for him. She slid her eyes closed. Mayhap she was the whore his father had accused her of being. After all, a reformed courtesan’s blood ran through her veins. Surely that is why it had been so easy for her mother to send her away because ultimately she’d seen her daughter had fallen and followed the same wicked path. Rowena had not allowed herself to think of the parent who’d foolishly thought she could carve out a life of obscurity for all her family in the countryside, just as she had deluded herself into believing that love was real. And that dukes’ second sons could love and marry those scandalous descendants.
Her heart buckled as the clutch of pain she’d believed herself immune to reared once more. Could a woman ever truly move on after one’s lover had set her aside, and one’s mother turned her out? She bit her lower lip. Damn you, Graham Linford. Damn you for making me believe... and worse for making me remember how desperately I wanted that dream of us.
Swallowing back a ball of regret, she grabbed the small, industrial bag at her side. Made of a thick cotton, it was not the satins or silks of a lady’s reticule but rather a stark, purposeful bag. Fishing around the drawstring sack, she pulled out a book.
Proper Rules of Proper Behavior and Proper Decorum. She gave her head a disgusted shake. All valuable lessons, but by the saints preserved, what person could ever take a book with such a bloody foolish title seriously? Rowena opened the well-read, aged book that often brought her a much-needed distraction. Her gaze lingered on the now-yellowed, folded scrap. That hated note. Purposefully stuffed within these very pages as a marked reminder of her station and her suffering.
Biting the inside of her lower lip, she yanked out the missive and buried it in the back of her book. Out of sight... but forever in her mind. And she began to read.
All ladies must adhere to essential rules of behavior. It is the only...
She swallowed a sound of frustration. How could she think of anything or anyone except the towering bear snoring away on the opposite bench? The man she’d given her virginity to in the fields of bluebells with the stars twinkling on as their witnesses. “Focus,” Rowena muttered under her breath. She returned her gaze to the inked words and began again.
All ladies must adhere to essential rules of behavior. It is the only... It is the only...
It is futile...
With a sigh, she set her book aside. Not taking her gaze from him, Rowena reached carefully inside her bag. Her fingers collided with metal, warm for its placement inside, and then she folded her palm reflexively about it. She slowly withdrew the heart-shaped locket attached to a small chain. She let it dangle from her fingers, and it spun in a slow, sad half-circle back and forth. It was no grand bauble a noblewoman would don, but to her, it had once been more cherished than the Queen’s crown.
Now, it bore the marks of time. The clasp long since broken. The heart pendant as tarnished as the organ that beat in her breast. She popped open the clever latch and stared at the small tendrils of hair trapped under each side, protected by glass. His midnight lock alongside her own drab brown strand.
For years, she’d succeeded in burying the memory of Graham. Whenever the pain of losing him had left her incapacitated with the force of her tears, drawn close in a miserable heap,
she’d pulled out this very piece. A gift given in love. A gift her mother had scolded her for taking with a warning that ladies did not receive gifts, and only wickedness was attached to them.
In the end, her mother, who’d spoken from life’s experience, had proven right. Graham’s gift had become a talisman of his deceit and deviltry. Handed to her on the front steps of his country estate with a note, and the end of her grand illusions on love.
Rowena closed the locket, the faint click muffled by the rumbling carriage wheels and Graham’s occasional snore. In those times when he’d trickled into her thoughts, and she’d suffered the agony of his betrayal all over again, it had been easy to kick ash upon the memory of him—nay, of them—by taking out this very piece. He emitted a bleating-broken snore, and heart jumping, Rowena quickly shoved the pendant back inside the bag.
But this, this was an altogether new impossibility. Now, forced into his company, into his carriage, and then his household, there would be no hiding. She briefly pressed her eyes closed, and allowed memory after memory to parade through her mind. This time, she did not bury them but punished herself by reliving those darkest days. Learning he’d returned home from fighting Boney’s forces soon after his brother’s death. The seemingly endless carriage ride from Mrs. Belden’s, and the terror that had filled her breast at risking her security at Mrs. Belden’s, all to see him. And then, in the end, he’d not even deigned to let her into his foyer. He’d given her one final note, care of his father. A note so unlike all those beautiful lines and verses he’d written her through the years but succinctly marked in his elegant, bold strokes.
I would have married you... on nothing more than a lie. In dallying with a vicar’s daughter, I lowered myself beneath my station. However, you are no vicar’s daughter, Miss Endicott. You are a whore’s daughter, and as such, there can be nothing respectable in marrying you. If you desire a place in my bed, however, it is yours...
Schooling the Duke (The Heart of a Scandal, #1) Page 7
