He stepped back. “Come along. We’ve watched it rain, and I’ve neglected my correspondence while I played land steward these past few days.” He led Thea under balconies and eaves to the kitchen door, and when they were in the back hallway, he drew off her gloves.
She had pretty hands, a lady’s hands, and she’d used those hands just hours ago to—
“I haven’t given you the official tour of the staterooms,” Noah said.
“That can wait, Your Grace, if you’ve correspondence to catch up on.”
He leaned in close, his words only for Thea, because they were not far from all the bustle in the kitchen.
“You and your proper address. We are married, Your Grace. You didn’t call me Your Grace this morning.”
She’d called him Noah, which was apparently justification for a blush.
“You take my point.” He straightened. “My day is well begun, then. Should you need me, I’ll be in the library for the morning. After luncheon, if you would afford me some time, I will acquaint you with more of the house.”
“Until luncheon.”
Thea turned to go, but Noah’s pride—or something—rebelled at how easily she parted from him. He tugged her gently back to him, kissed her on the mouth—lollygagged over kissing her on the mouth, the cheek, the chin, the forehead—and when Thea began to give as good as she got, he let her go, patted her backside, and took himself off.
If he weren’t mistaken, Thea remained in the hallway, fingers on her cheek, trying not to watch a certain part of his anatomy as he retreated.
* * *
“Are you our new cousin?”
Thea halted abruptly, her hand on the door of Mr. Erikson’s conservatory. A little girl and a littler girl, both dark-haired and blue-eyed, stood across the corridor. They were holding hands and regarding her with the solemn intensity unique to uncertain children.
“I am Lady Thea,” she said, hunkering down. In fact, she was no longer Lady Thea, but rather, the Duchess of Anselm. “Who might you be?”
“That’s the name of Cousin Noah’s new duchess,” the younger child stage-whispered to her companion. “Lady Thee.”
“Thee-a,” the older child replied, keeping her gaze on Thea. “Cousin Noah said we might be crowded, with you moving in here at our house.”
“It’s a very large house,” Thea observed. Large enough to hide two children who resembled Noah in many particulars. “So large I sometimes get lost here.”
Was usually lost in some fashion or another.
“Will you play hide-and-seek with us? We know all the best places to get lost.” That from the younger one, while the older looked vaguely worried.
“Before you show me how to get lost, why don’t you tell me your names?” For Cousin Noah had already told them Thea’s name.
“I’m Evelyn,” said the older, “and this is Janine, but we call her Nini. We live here.” This last was offered with a pugnacious emphasis.
Thea straightened and held out one hand to each child. “Can you show me where, exactly, your rooms are? I’m sure I couldn’t find them without knowledgeable escort.”
“She means us,” Evelyn concluded, but it was Janine who took Thea’s hand first.
“Come along.” Evelyn took the other hand. “Maryanne and Davies are having their tea, and they never notice when we get to rambling when they’re having a cup. Cousin Noah says it’s our besetting sin, but we asked him to find where in the Bible it says rambling at tea is a sin, and he hasn’t yet. Cousin Harlan said Cousin Noah was hoist on his own petals, which makes no sense at all, for Cousin Noah isn’t a flower.”
“Petard,” Thea said as the girls towed her along. “Like being speared with your own pikestaff, by accident.” Or by bad luck, or poor timing.
“Cousin Noah would never have an accident like that,” Janine pronounced, clearly dismayed at the very notion. “Not Cousin Harlan either.”
“Maybe when he was little, like us,” Evelyn temporized. “Harlan that is, not Noah.”
The girls debated the possibilities until they’d led Thea to the opposite end of the corridor, down a short cross hallway, and halfway up another corridor.
“They’ve done took off again,” said an exasperated female voice. “The dook will turn us off for this, Davies, see if he don’t.”
“We’ll just have to find them and hope…” The second voice fell away when the girls drew Thea into a cheerful, cozy nursery suite.
“Good morning, Your Grace.” The two nursery maids bobbed nervous curtsies in unison.
“This is Lady Thea,” Evelyn said, swinging Thea’s hand. “We went to visit Mr. Erikson, and we found her.”
“You were naughty.” Maryanne closed her eyes. “You were both very, very naughty, begging Your Grace’s pardon. You’ve been told and told not to wander, and I can only imagine what your—what His Grace will have to say about this.”
Your father?
Thea shook her hands free and sauntered over to the windows. “His Grace has best not take very great exception. Today is a boring old rainy day, and if nursery maids can take a short break over their tea, perhaps children can be forgiven for visiting Mr. Erikson in his lonely conservatory on the same floor of the house.”
The same floor from which Noah had personally escorted Thea the last time she’d ventured up here.
“I like her,” Janine said, grinning hugely and looking every inch a Winters. “She’s nice.”
“Lady Thea gets lost, and we know where everything is,” Evelyn reasoned. “She’s been here for days and days, and even if Cousin said we must give her time to settle in, days and days is long enough.”
“What are you young ladies working on, when you’re not paying a call on Mr. Erikson’s beauties?” Thea asked as she sat on a small chair and opened a book on the proportionately small table before her.
“We’re Mr. Erikson’s best beauties.” Janine’s tone was preening as she clambered onto Thea’s lap. “He says so all the time.”
“That’s my old storybook.” Evelyn took the opposite seat. “I can read it better than anybody. Cousin Noah said so.”
“Rainy days are the best for telling stories,” Thea said, opening the book to a drawing of a fire-breathing dragon attempting to toast an armored knight. “You must each tell me your favorites.”
“My favorites,” said a stern voice from the doorway, “are little girls who obey the very few orders they are given.”
“Hullo, Cousin.” Evelyn and Janine popped to their feet and dipped little curtsies at the unsmiling duke. Thea didn’t so much as glance up from the storybook.
“I met my new friends as we converged on Mr. Erikson’s conservatory,” she said, flipping a page when she wanted to fling the book at His Perishing Grace. “The girls and I were of like mind, thinking perhaps the dreary day had made him or his beauties lonely for callers.”
Noah shot a glower at the maids. “Then by all means take the girls to visit Erikson for a nice long cup of tea, why don’t you?”
“Aye, Your Grace.” In unison. Each maid took a child by the hand, leaving Noah and Thea surrounded by pint-sized furniture, dolls, and toys.
And a huge silence.
Thea stayed where she was, perched on the sturdy little chair, looking at a book of fairy tales but not seeing the knights, dragons, or witches. She saw only a husband, one trying very hard to find a place in the room that would give him strategic advantage in the battle to come.
“They’re good girls,” he said, back to Thea as he stared out a rain-streaked window. “This is the only home they’ve known.”
Thea had spent her entire childhood in pursuit of good-girlhood—fat lot of good that had done her—while Noah had been exercising the privileges of a young, wealthy, lusty duke.
She snapped the book closed. “His Grace deigns to pass along a tid-bit.” She enunciated each syllable with biting precision. “Or perhaps, in the spirit of good sportsmanship, we can consider that two tidbits.”
He fell silent as Thea advanced on him, skirts swishing in her fury.
“You lied to me, Noah Winters,” she accused in low, miserable tones. “You lied to me about your own children, and you have been living a lie with me this past week and more. You judged me for my past, but at least I didn’t involve a pair of innocent children in my short-lived attempt at discretion.”
He shoved the dragon book between other tomes on a shelf. “So you’re discreet when you come to the marriage bed unchaste, but I’m a liar?”
“They are children,” Thea spat. “Innocent, helpless children who depend on you for the stability of a roof over their heads, and you involved them in your subterfuge.”
Noah had the grace to look chagrined, running a hand through his hair and again turning his back.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, I. Am. Sorry. Your Grace.”
All the hope, all the possibility Thea had been harboring for their marriage evaporated in the chill spaces between his words.
“It was not well done of me,” he went on, “to think the children wouldn’t be curious about you, and look for every opportunity to inspect you at close range.”
“You are sorry.” Thea came to stand beside him, determined he would not avoid her gaze, even if his expression could freeze boiling water in an instant.
“Yes, Araminthea, I am sorry. Shall I put it in writing for you?”
No angel of common sense appeared to slap a celestial hand over Thea’s mouth, not that such a trifling impediment would have kept her silent.
“Maybe that was my mistake,” she said. “I did not apologize to you in writing for my lack of chastity, and for my failure to find a way to disclose it to you any sooner than I willingly did.”
Noah traced a finger down the glass, keeping pace with a single raindrop as it started its journey to the sea.
“You disclosed your lies when it suited you to do so, and mine have been revealed by the children,” Noah mused. “The glare from your halo must be blinding me to the distinction between the two.”
“And no doubt”—Thea matched him for coolness—“some night over cherry cordials, you planned to tell me about your little indiscretions, tucked away up here in the attics. You’d relegate them to the status of details, and dare me to fuss at you for your dissembling.”
“Please do not refer to the children as indiscretions,” Noah bit out. “They have names, and they are dear to me, and whatever your quarrels with me, you may be assured of two things.”
Thea waited, for His Grace was very fond of ducal pronouncements—when they suited his purposes. His expression would wilt all of Erickson’s beauties, and likely Maryanne and Davies too.
At some point in this skirmish, he’d become the man who, without benefit of his own majority, had kept his family and estates together. The same man who coolly chose the companion when the debutante had given her hand elsewhere.
No, Thea corrected herself, not coolly. Coldly.
“First,” Noah said, “you may be assured I will do what is right for those girls in all the ways that count. They aren’t leaving, Thea, not to protect your sensibilities, not to spare you, of all people, embarrassment.”
“You idiot man, I would not ask them to leave.”
“You would ask me to leave?” He put universes of condescension in his question.
“Your blasted pride won’t let you set me aside, Noah,” she said. “I am resigned to being periodically tormented in this marriage for my mistake, or regularly tormented with your scorn and victimhood, but even you have to grow bored with bemoaning what you have unilaterally decided cannot be changed.”
His drew in a breath, and Thea would not have been surprised to see him sprout scales and wings and start breathing fire.
“You are already clear on my second point, Duchess: no matter your disagreement with me for how I’ve handled the introductions between you and the children, no matter you feel justified in judging me for it, this changes nothing. When I am assured you aren’t carrying another man’s child, I will make every effort to see to it you are soon carrying mine.”
He leaned in, kissed her cheek, and whirled away. His boots thumped down the corridor in an angry tattoo as the first, futile tears slid down Thea’s cheeks.
Nine
“It wasn’t raining when we left Town.” James Heckendorn accepted a medicinal tot from Noah as the storm raged outside the Wellspring library. “Patience insisted Lady Nonie had to see her sister. If I’d known dropping in would put you in such a foul humor, I would have come earlier.”
Noah saluted with his drink. “Bugger you, James.”
“The same to you,” James completed the toast as he ambled around a library where he’d run tame since boyhood. Noah should ask James to give Thea the tour of the house, lest Thea become lost on purpose for the remainder of the year.
“You’ll have to put off that thunderous expression,” James said, giving the globe a spin. “Otherwise, Patience will insist we join you here for a protracted stay.”
Noah took a hefty swallow of his brandy. “You intimate to her you’d abet such a plan, and it will be pistols at dawn, James. Rain, shine, or impenetrable fog.”
Such was the hospitality of a man who’d bungled with his duchess and knew not exactly why, much less how to fix it.
Though fix it, he would.
“You weren’t in this bad a mood when last we met,” James observed, giving the globe another push. “I thought maybe you’d stop by Henny’s and get your newlywed spirits, shall we say, lifted.”
The rest of Noah’s drink burned its way to his middle. “I am newly wed, and I did ride past Henny’s, though I haven’t yet officially informed her of my nuptials.”
“Oh, right.” James peered at his brandy, as if perhaps tea leaves might be read therein. “You’re the town crier now, making sure your mistress is kept apprised of your social schedule. I gather holy matrimony is now approximating holy hell?”
Noah gently set his empty glass down on the sideboard.
“For your benighted information, I cut Henny loose at the beginning of the Season, and generously so, if I do say so myself. I did not call on her last week because Meech’s phaeton was in her mews, and while I do not begrudge my uncle his pleasures, neither do I want to catch him on the stroll, so to speak.”
Which was nearly impossible, because Meech and Pemmie were usually trolling for custom of one sort or another. No wonder Harlan fretted over his legacy.
“One doesn’t know whether to admire Meech’s stamina, or shudder for his lack of adult restraint,” James said. “But if you’ve gone for, what—three months?—without exercising your manly humors, then no wonder you’re like the Regent with a bad head.”
“Oh, it’s worse than that.” Noah poured himself a touch more libation—a generous touch. “I was trying to give Thea time to settle in before I told her about Evvie and Nini, but the girls slipped the leash and found her on their own. Thea drew the worst conclusions, and we’re at daggers drawn all over again.”
For Noah’s duchess had gone toe to toe with him, as a duchess should when her idiot duke had bungled badly and been too proud to admit his error.
James saluted with his glass. “When you set out to muck something up, you muck it up as efficiently as you manage everything else.”
“I was trying to be considerate,” Noah shot back. “I was trying not to overwhelm the lady with all the changes in her life at once, to give her a chance to be my wife before she had to be anybody’s mother.”
With the luxury of hindsight, those rationalizations now seemed implausible to Noah—cowardly, even.
“That’s the preferred sequence: wife then mother,” James said. “But when you’re nobody’s
father, why would she think she’s their new mama?”
Yes, why indeed? Thea had been magnificent in her temper, and not entirely wrong. Noah had kept the girls from the notice of his duchess, which was badly done on his part. Beyond that, the disagreement had escalated on both sides before common sense could wrestle pride, hurt feelings, and mistrust into submission.
Escalated again.
James touched his glass to Noah’s. “Anselm, you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?” Noah took off across the carpet, for the drapes wanted closing lest the drafts gutter the sconces. “Thea drew erroneous conclusions, and I did not correct her. The girls call me Cousin, and Thea chose not to believe them either.”
“Was she at least civil to them?”
Noah pulled two sets of curtains closed, plunging the library into funereal gloom.
“She was…” Noah flopped into a wing chair and ran a hand through hair already disheveled. “Thea was ferocious, James. She as good as told me I was free to decamp to some other residence, and she and the girls would be just fine without me, thank you very much. She berated me for involving the children in my schemes, and was generally quite impressive.”
Very impressive. Had called Noah an idiot to his face.
James put a hand over his heart. “Never say you found something to respect in the hopeless jade you married? Your Grace, I am ashamed of you.”
Noah threw a pillow at him, but James dodged it easily and took the other wing chair.
“What will you do, Noah?”
“One considers soaking one’s head in a rain barrel and beating one’s chest at such times,” Noah said, staring at the fire. “Or giving the lady what she wants.”
“Which would be?”
“The absence of her spouse,” Noah said. “Maybe some time to settle her feathers is a good idea.”
“While you leave Thea to contemplate having the marriage annulled?”
Noah got out of the chair and handed the pillow to James, who wedged it behind his back.
“No annulment,” Noah said. “I’ve spent years living down the reputation of my elders, and the day Thea goes to the bishop, I will be a laughingstock, just as they were.”
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