Too Wilde to Wed

by Eloisa James

  “I don’t have a willy,” he said, a wry twist to his lips.

  “No,” she breathed.

  “I’m sorry that you no longer have shoes,” he said, dropping her hand. He bent over, and before she could stop him, her stockings flew over the bank, floated on the surface for a few moments, and sank.

  Of course they sank. They were heavy and hot. They made her legs itch and her calves sweat.

  “North,” she said, marshaling arguments that would address his arrogance and thoughtlessness, not that sweet expression in his eyes and the way he looked at her as if she were a queen, ugly shoes or not.

  “Now I owe you a pair of shoes and a pair of stockings,” he said, as if that excused him. As he pulled on his silk stockings, having retrieved them from the grass, she remembered how smooth the silk stockings she used to wear had felt on her legs. Her favorites were embroidered with pansies, and tied over her knees with ribbons embroidered with the same design.

  They had been a pleasure to wear.

  North was stamping into boots that had voyaged to the New World and back, and yet, because they were so well made, looked hardly the worse for wear.

  “I am a governess,” she said, resolving to make herself understood to him. No matter how much she missed wearing silk stockings, they were part of her past and not her present.

  He pulled her arm through his as if they were strolling through Hyde Park, whereas in fact they were heading up a small hill and would be making their way through an apple orchard. They were quite improperly alone, in other words.

  “I don’t have very many belongings and you cannot take them.”

  His brow furrowed. “Don’t we pay you a decent wage?”

  “It is absurdly generous, considering my poor credentials. But everything costs money.” Godfrey’s clothing, for one. Any treats she bought him—or Artie, for that matter. Prism had told her to inform him about what she spent on the children, but how could she do that? Godfrey was in the castle under false pretenses.

  “My aunt was furious about the clothing that Boodle took,” North said.

  She stole a sideways glance. He was rubbing his chin. How had she thought his face unreadable? That quirk on one side of his mouth was rueful. “She has a good point, but . . .”

  The slumberous expression in his eyes made her stomach twist. “Boodle made it possible for me to catch your attention,” he said. “He took a man who didn’t know a French wig from a pile of straw and taught me everything.”

  “I paid no attention to your wigs.”

  He shrugged. “I thought you were fashionable. It wasn’t really you, I know now.”

  Diana looked at her freckled feet, strolling through the thick grass of the west lawn. Two gardeners spent days every month rolling it flat and thick. But somehow that fact slipped away.

  Her mother had forced her into a duchess mold, set her out to trap a duke, and succeeded. She hadn’t realized that North had done something like it—but for her, not for an abstract title.

  “That wasn’t me,” she agreed.

  “I didn’t know about the freckles on your nose, for instance.”

  She glanced up at him. “Would that have changed everything?”

  “Absolutely.” His mouth quivered but he didn’t smile.

  “Imagine if you had known that I have them on my feet.”

  He pulled her arm tighter, against his body. “I would have had to throw you in a carriage and set out for Gretna Green.” Looking at her with lustful eyes. “In order to save any other men who would be fooled into thinking there weren’t freckles under all that face paint. A sacrifice for the greater good of mankind.”

  They rounded the corner of the castle and Diana pulled away. Hopefully no one had seen them strolling across the lawn. She certainly wasn’t going in the courtyard arm in arm with the heir to the dukedom. She headed toward the side entrance that led to the kitchens.

  “Who would have thought you were so saintly?” she asked. “So willing to use the small tools you have to help your fellow man!”

  He burst into laughter. “My cock, such as it is, is always at your service, Diana.”

  She gasped. “I didn’t mean that!”

  “I did.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Frederick, the footman who had earlier been carrying Godfrey on his shoulders, was manning the front door. “Is my family still in the drawing room?” North asked him.

  Now he could tolerate a room full of Wildes. An hour or two drifting in a punt had settled his spirits.

  That, and kissing a beautiful, befreckled woman.

  “I believe the ladies accompanied Her Grace upstairs,” Frederick said.

  North took the stairs two at a time. Shoes. His girl needed shoes.

  He found the female members of his family—his aunt, stepmother, and all four sisters—in the duchess’s bedchamber.

  North happened to know that his stepmother slept with his father, though no one would mention such a disreputable fact.

  Her chamber had been designed to be a reception chamber, back in the sixteenth century. An enormous bed jutted from one corner of the room, surrounded by a low railing that served as a barrier in times past. Ladies’ maids and ladies-in-waiting would have been allowed inside the railing, whereas guests could only hover outside.

  Naturally, his sisters were all over the room like chickens in the hen yard.

  Artie was balancing on the railing, her mother waiting to catch her. Viola, Betsy, and Joan were clustered on the bed, the first two watching Joan cut something up. The bed was scarcely large enough to hold the three of them and their skirts. Aunt Knowe was seated on a settee to the side, poking at a bedraggled piece of knitting.

  They all looked up as he entered. Ophelia smiled and caught Artie when her welcoming wave toppled her from the rail. Viola hopped off the bed, came over to him, and put an arm around his waist.

  As she was Ophelia’s daughter from her first marriage, Viola wasn’t really his sister. But from the moment he’d met her fourteen years before, a painfully shy child, she’d been his special girl. She had walked into the nursery holding her mother’s hand, her mouth somewhere between vulnerable and just plain terrified.

  “Viola,” he said, giving her a squeeze and a kiss. “You’re what . . . sixteen now? Is that possible?”

  Betsy, the oldest of his sisters, pranced over. She had turned into one of those women so beautiful they blind a man—and she knew it. Every swish of her hips said, Watch me.

  North bent down and gave her a kiss as well. “I understand that you have mowed down every man in London, forced them onto their knees, and tossed them out the door.”

  “That’s right,” Joan shouted from the bed. “She chews them up and spits them out.”

  “You are disgusting!” Betsy told her little sister, tossing her curls again.

  “No lady should marry in her first Season, and possibly not in her second either,” their aunt observed.

  “I can’t get up to greet the conquering hero,” Joan said, blowing him a kiss. “I’m busy making you a present.”

  “Good afternoon, shortcake,” he said, going over to the bed and dropping a kiss on her cheek. Then he saw what she was doing and an involuntary groan came to his lips.

  “Miss Gray—Willa’s friend Lavinia—did it with Alaric’s prints,” Joan told him. She was busily cutting around the outline of an aristocrat with a snarling expression of disdain and a wig so high it grazed the ceiling. “I bought five in a stationer’s shop last week, and we already had some.”

  “I donated mine,” Betsy said, adding impishly, “I’m the only one who owned the naughty one.”

  He didn’t curse, but it was a near thing.

  “Just as well it’s being cut to pieces,” Aunt Knowe said, sounding unusually severe. “That print is almost as bad as my knitting. Does anyone know how I could have ended up with a hole in the middle?” She held up a ragged scrap.

  Viola sat down beside her. “I’ll f
ix it, Aunt Knowe,” she said in her sweet way.

  The duchess’s bed was covered with snippets of paper. One discarded fragment showed Diana kneeling, presumably at North’s feet. He picked it up. A memory of her kneeling before him on the boat seat flashed into his head, sending a streak of pure heat down his body.

  “What do you plan to do with those versions of me?” he asked, poking around in the mess and rescuing three more images of Diana.

  “I oughtn’t to ruin the surprise, but I’m making you a memory box,” Joan said. She spread six or seven versions of him like a fan. “I’m going to glue them onto the lid of a box so you don’t forget the year when all of England thought you were the devil’s brother.”

  “Just like that pantomime we saw at Haymarket last year,” Betsy cried. Then she sang, “I can bark like a dog, I can grunt like a hog!”

  “No one would want to hear you singing onstage,” Joan said with dampening emphasis.

  Ophelia came over and kissed North’s cheek. “Good afternoon, dear.” Artie was on her hip, blissfully sucking her thumb.

  “Good afternoon, Duchess,” he said, and tapped Artie’s nose. “Where’s your accomplice, Godfrey?”

  “Leo,” Artie said, the word muffled by her thumb.

  “After the stables, Godfrey wanted to stay with Leo,” his stepmother explained, “so they went to his bedchamber. Leo said he’s going to teach Godfrey to tie a neckcloth, but I think he was joking.”

  “I need shoes,” North said, abruptly remembering why he had come into this bower of femininity.

  “None of our shoes will fit you,” Betsy said with a giggle. She was practicing the steps of a country dance, sashaying forward and backward to music only she heard.

  “I threw Diana’s shoes into the water,” North said, keeping it simple.

  But nothing was simple with six women in the room. “That was very naughty of you!” Joan exclaimed, and even quiet Viola said, “You oughtn’t to have done it, North, because she doesn’t have any others.”

  When the recriminations had died down, his stepmother said, “Who has shoes that might fit Diana?”

  “Not I,” said Joan. “There’s a reason you all call me ‘shortcake,’ and Diana is delightfully tall.”

  “Not as tall as I am,” Lady Knowe said. “My shoes will never fit Diana, though I will echo the rest and say that you shouldn’t have done it, North.” His aunt’s feet were as ungainly as her hands, another unenviable inheritance that came with being the duke’s twin. Not that the size of her feet ever seemed to bother her.

  “Diana isn’t as tall as she used to be when she wore high wigs,” Betsy said. “Oh, I envied her so much. Parisian wigs! And now look, she lets Artie suck her hair, which is disgusting.”

  “Shoes,” North ordered. “I left the poor woman barefoot.”

  After that, everyone but Joan ran off. Ophelia put Artie down and began rummaging through a trunk that appeared to hold nothing but shoes.

  North was conscious of a desire to buy a trunk full of shoes for Diana, but he was used to waiting. That day would come.

  “Rats!” Joan cried. “I accidentally cut off Diana’s hand. Not that it matters.” She threw the scrap to the side.

  He rescued the mangled Diana, adding it to the others he held. He must be losing his mind.

  Perhaps he could make a memory box for Diana, whatever that was. He pictured his bold, self-reliant former fiancée’s reaction to a box covered with kneeling images of herself and snorted.

  Betsy stuck her head back in the room. “Come on, then!”

  Ophelia handed North a basket with two pairs of shoes and put Artie back on her hip. Joan grabbed the remaining prints and her scissors, and Lady Knowe put aside her mangled piece of knitting.

  “Artie, may I have the inestimable pleasure of carrying you to the nursery?” North asked.

  “No!” Artie said, snuggling against her mother’s shoulder and sucking her thumb.

  Ophelia smiled at him. “I’m perfectly able to climb the stairs with her, North, but thank you.”

  They trailed up a flight and down a corridor and arrived at the steep flight leading to the nursery.

  By the time the three of them reached the nursery corridor, a burst of high-pitched voices could be heard coming from the schoolroom. Ophelia stopped, and North halted as well, even though Diana’s laughter drew him like a kite string.

  “I am very fond of Diana,” his stepmother said. “As is Artie.”

  Artie’s head rested on her mother’s shoulder but she roused enough to nod. “DeeDee.” That nod seemed to take all her strength. Her eyelids closed.

  Was he meant to chime in? “Fond” wasn’t the word for what he felt for Diana.

  “Diana is a wonderful woman, but she would not be a happy duchess,” his stepmother said firmly.

  Another burst of laughter from the schoolroom underlined North’s stab of pure impatience with Ophelia’s interference. “I thank you for sharing your opinion.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t become stiff with me, North. I love both of you, and I am a duchess. I know what the position entails.”

  “I have not asked her again to be my duchess,” he stated.

  Ophelia’s eyes softened. “Not yet.”

  “Are you warning me not to propose marriage?”

  “I am telling you that Diana Belgrave would not be happy as a duchess. I leave Artie behind when I accompany your father to London; babies cannot thrive in London because of the smoke from coal fires. As Duke of Lindow, he attends endless dinners and hosts them as well, and he needs me beside him. That is part and parcel of being a member of the House of Lords.”

  North had already decided to stay away from Parliament, though it had little to do with Diana, and everything to do with an aversion to hours spent in an airless chamber listening to tedious speeches.

  “Yes, you will,” his stepmother said, reading his face. What happened to the days when no one could read his expression?

  “There are more than enough asses in the Parliament chambers already.”

  She shook her head. “You Wildes are stubborn enough to choke, but you never shirk your responsibilities. Your father would vastly prefer to be here. It breaks both of our hearts to leave Artie. But he has been fighting to get an anti-slavery bill through the House.” She readjusted her sleeping daughter.

  North frowned.

  “Exactly. How could you not take up your seat? Or refuse to attend the dinners necessary to persuade selfish men to think of someone other than themselves?”

  “I take your point.”

  “I presume that throwing Diana’s shoes in the lake was a courtship ritual of some sort.” Ophelia’s eyes crinkled at the corners, and he had the random thought that his father was a damned lucky man.

  “You could call it that.”

  “I will be very displeased if my home was no longer a refuge for Godfrey and Diana.”

  “She cannot remain your governess. If I do listen to you, I still have to marry someone, and what woman would marry me under those circumstances? Most of England thinks I took advantage of her!”

  “I understand.” Ophelia nuzzled her daughter’s cheek. “I will find another governess.”

  “You should bring Artie to London, governess or no.”

  “I can’t.” His stepmother’s hand curled around Artie’s head. “The smoke.”

  “London is full of babies, and our townhouse borders on Hyde Park. The smoke must be better there. Or buy a house just outside London, if you want. Send Father in daily to the Parliament. You could join him when you absolutely had to.”

  Ophelia’s breath hitched. “What if she grew ill?”

  “Then you would return to the country. Look at Joan. There’s nothing wrong with her lungs now, is there? Artie needs you, and Diana cannot remain here to be her second mother.”

  Pain flashed through Ophelia’s eyes.

  “Exactly. If there’s one thing that I learned in battle, it’
s that time is precious. Anti-slavery laws are a noble pursuit, but I’m certain there is a way to keep your family together.”

  Instead of going on to tell her that he meant to find a way to have Diana, he strolled into the schoolroom and watched as Diana rejected offers of shoes for long minutes until she gave in and accepted a pair of cream slippers cross-hatched with black thread.

  “You should have these as well,” Viola said, waving a heeled shoe at Diana. “Yellow clashes with my hair.”

  “That’s not yellow,” North said. They all turned and looked at him. He grinned. “Saffron, Viola. Saffron.”

  He was an agile man, and deftly caught the shoe when it flew through the air at his head.

  “These are more than enough,” Diana said, happily wiggling her toes in the cross-hatched slippers.

  “Take this pair as well,” North said, holding up the yellow shoe. “Viola is right. The color would make her skin appear jaundiced.”

  In the resulting mêlée, as Betsy defended the color of Viola’s skin, and Joan protested that Viola’s chestnut hair went extremely well with yellow, he handed the shoe to Diana and watched her slip it on.

  It was a frivolous shoe, delicate and spangled. Peeping from the hem of Diana’s worn gown, the yellow silk was a glimmer of sunshine.

  “You must.” Viola gave Diana the other shoe. “Yellow is brilliant with red hair, but not with chestnut, no matter what Joan says.”

  “Yours is copper, but Godfrey’s is more like a rusty gate,” Betsy said. She was helping Godfrey arrange his horses, and she reached out and tousled his hair.

  “Diana’s sister might have had darker red hair.” Joan had brought her scissors with her, and was busy cutting up one of her last prints.

  Diana’s eyes flew to his and he knew exactly what she was thinking. He nodded. Yes, they all knew.

  And no, they didn’t care.

  Chapter Twelve

  For the next two nights, Diana set out bread and honey. It was as if she were feeding a house elf, she thought amusedly on the first night. One of those Norse sprites she’d read about in a storybook given to Artie. A housewife might set out milk and honey as thanks, or to trap an elf into granting her wishes.