In fact, Frye had not drunk a drop in years, though he’d splashed a bit of whiskey on his cravat to lend to his general aroma of dissoluteness.
On the other hand, there was in fact an insulted woman: Serena Cavendish.
But Frye had excellent justification for that.
Freddie, however, still thought fences required mending with Lady Serena. The punches he was throwing now, and the taunts, were not entirely make-believe.
“Someday you will meet a woman whose good opinion you will want,” Freddie said, the snow falling all about them. He swung again.
Frye dodged the blow, intentionally stumbling over his own boots.
“An’ you know all there’s to know about women, I s’pose?” he mumbled, landing a weak left on his friend’s shoulder.
“I know a fine woman when she stands before me.” Freddie jabbed, pulling the punch just enough to make it look like a near miss. “What is your problem, friend?” His narrowed gaze slipped sideways for an instant.
“You’re my problem, friend.” He threw a sloppy right.
“You’re blind, man!”
Blind?
What was Freddie telling him?
There. At the doorway. That man must be their quarry. He fit the description perfectly: fifty or so, narrow cheeks, pale gray hair, and a complacent smile that masked a mind bent on nefarious gain.
Then he saw her.
Framed in snow and haloed in firelight from inside: a woman.
The woman.
Full pink lips. Pale cheeks stained with pink from the cold. Dark curls tumbling over her brow. And gray eyes fixed on him, snapping with vexation.
The world abruptly glittered all about. Then tilted.
Charlotte Ascot.
Here.
Everything slowed—the snowfall, Frye’s heartbeats, Freddie’s voice coming to him as though through a tunnel.
Oh, no.
No, no, no.
Not here. Not now. Not when he had a job to do. Not in front of so many people.
Not in front of her.
But he felt no pressure in his chest, no numbness in his hands, and there was no light glowing across his vision, only the aura of bemusement caused by a pair of snapping gray eyes.
“Do you need to be hit over the head with it?” Freddie exclaimed.
Then Freddie’s fist slammed into his jaw.
Frye was sitting in the snow, shaking his head, and blinking hard when his friend grasped his hand.
“Mon Dieu,” Freddie whispered as he hauled him off his arse, his dark brow pleated and eyes full of worry. “What in the devil?”
Stumbling to his feet, Frye snatched his hand away and managed to mumble, “Damned slippery— Think you’ve broken my jaw, ol’ friend.” He tested it back and forth and cut a glance toward the doorway.
The man was gone.
But she still stood there. And the daggers her smoky eyes were throwing hit him like little jolts of lightning straight to his groin, with predictable effect.
Then again, Charlotte Ascot had always been able to make every part of him lose control.
“Sir,” the innkeeper said to Freddie as he came toward them from the doorway. “This is unacceptable.”
“A friendly disagreement, my good man,” Freddie said pleasantly. He offered the innkeeper an easy smile, grasping Frye’s shoulder.
Frye obligingly staggered anew.
“S’a friendly bout,” he muttered, struggling not to look toward the doorway. Toward her.
Blast, his jaw hurt.
“Bring us a pot of your strongest coffee,” Freddie said, pushing Frye toward the door.
“Begging your pardon, Mr. Fortier,” the innkeeper said. “My missus and I run a respectable establishment. There are women and children within, you see. This gentleman,” he said with a frown. “Well, Mr. Church here isn’t welcome inside till he’s fit for decent company.”
“Sir!” Frye let his mouth hang open a moment, then lifted his fisted hands up before him. “I’ll beg your pardon with my fives here!”
“Enough, mon ami. You have made your bed. Now you must sleep in it—a straw bed,” Freddie said with a chuckle and a placating smile for all. “Monsieur Innkeeper, point my friend to your stable where he can sleep away this unseemly inebriation.”
Which is how Frye came to be stumbling toward the stable, where he would seek out their quarry’s coachman and commence the next stage of their mission, and stumbling away from the lady with the smoky gray eyes whom he had once thought never to see again.
Chapter Three
An hour later.
The taproom and stable.
In the taproom, Monsieur Fortier was charming everybody. It was hardly to be wondered at. He was handsome, expensively dressed, delightfully amusing, and telling tales of heroic deeds of war against Napoleon’s army. A gentleman of obvious wealth and education, he was not in fact French but Haitian, and had fought in the war of rebellion in which his young country had thrown off the “yoke of French tyranny,” along with the entirely non-metaphorical shackles of slavery.
With the end of England’s war with France only a year and a half earlier, everybody was happy to join in the toasts celebrating the sound trouncing of that wretched little Corsican.
Under normal circumstances, Charlotte would have raised toasts to Napoleon’s defeat too. But Monsieur Fortier had, only an hour earlier, beaten the Duke of Frye quite literally into the ground. That the duke had apparently deserved it—he had gravely insulted a woman, everybody whispered—and that the two seemed to be bosom friends—and that the duke had been obviously intoxicated—were factors to seriously consider.
But it was Christmas. At Christmastime especially, everybody deserved compassion. Also, as her mother had told her long ago, a true lady was measured not by the blood in her veins but by the courage in her heart.
As much as she dreaded speaking with him, Charlotte had no choice now.
Gathering from the kitchen a pitcher of warm water, a washbowl, soft linens, and a little jar of salve from her luggage, Charlotte went outside into the thickly falling snow and followed the short path to the stable. Within, all was quiet: the only sounds were horses snuffling in their stalls and somebody piping a little tune on a flute at the stable’s other end.
Male laughter tumbled along the stable corridor. His laughter. She would recognize Horace Church’s deep, wonderful laughter from her grave.
Pitcher and basin clutched in her damp mittens, she went forward.
From the cozy warmth of the taproom, she had imagined a much worse scene than that which she came upon now. Lit in the glow of a lantern, four men lounged about the neat little tack room on benches, sharing a bottle.
Holding a slab of meat against the side of his face with one hand and lifting a glass of spirits to his mouth with the other, the man she had seen pummeled to the snow an hour earlier was smiling. Every one of his beautifully straight white teeth was showing.
All four men turned their eyes toward her.
Her family’s coachman Fields, the ostler, and the other coachman came to their feet at once.
“Milady,” Fields said. “How may I be helping you?”
“Not at all, thank you, Fields,” she said. “It seems, Mr. Church, that you do not need nursing after all.”
The duke stared at her. Then, shaking his head once, sharply, he dropped the slab of beef and stood up.
“My lady,” he said.
He had tanned skin, dark hair cut short to suit fashion, the most intensely blue eyes, and high cheekbones, to one of which now clung several filaments of raw meat and a quantity of beef blood. Beneath the filaments, the skin was split and a bruise was forming on his gorgeously firm jaw.
She set down her burden and stripped off her mittens.
“You must allow me to tend to that wound,” she said, pouring water into the basin and soaking a square of linen in it. “If you do not, it will fester, and then where will those handsome good looks be?”<
br />
He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Best allow milady to do as she wishes,” Fields said with respectful affection. He had, after all, taught her to ride when she had barely even learned to walk, and to drive when she was still shorter than the gig. “Takes after her sainted mum, she does.”
“Thank you, Fields. I suspect nobody here is interested in that inaccurate account of my virtues. Now sir, will you sit down voluntarily so that I can reach that wound, or must I level you as your friend did earlier?”
He reseated himself on the bench, not removing that brilliant blue gaze from her and saying nothing. Which was for the best. His voice did things to her insides. Hot, inappropriate things that had precipitated her flight to America two and a half years earlier.
The ostler and the other coachman departed and finally the duke’s gaze shifted away from her. It looked as though he was sorry to see the other men go.
“Fields,” she said, “don’t let my presence keep you from your work. I am certain Mr. Church here would not think of giving insult to a lady.”
“That’s not what that other gentleman was saying, milady,” Fields said.
“Well, that must have been a mistake. Wasn’t it, Mr. Church?”
“Upon my oath,” the Duke of Frye said quite sincerely. He had a beautiful voice, rich and sonorous and deep, as though created for oratory or song.
“Call if you need me, milady,” Fields said. Then her coachman was gone and she lifted the damp linen to the duke’s jaw and found herself looking down into his striking blue eyes now filled with pleasure.
“‘Upon my oath’?” she said, hand hovering over his face. “And what is that oath worth, Mr. Church? A ha-penny, I daresay?”
“Why didn’t you tell them?” he said without preamble, as though they had last seen each other perhaps yesterday at a ball and not two and a half years ago in the park in the rain.
“Why didn’t I tell them that you are not humble Mr. Church? Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps because I wish you were mere Mr. Church, then you would not have recently broken the heart of one of my best friends.”
“It was unpardonable of me,” he admitted. “But her heart is not broken.”
“That is not true. Alexandra wrote to me only two days ago that Serena is miserable.”
“Misery and heartbreak are not necessarily one and the same.”
There was something in the tone of his beautiful voice that suggested he had experienced both misery and heartbreak. That gave her some consolation.
She tried very hard to focus entirely on his wound and not his lips that put her in mind of kisses. Long, slow kisses. Deep, passionate kisses. She had never had either. But her American sister-in-law had told her about such kisses. After that, fantasizing about those sorts of kisses from the Duke of Frye had become something of a habit.
Thus her flight overseas.
“Why are you traveling incognito?” she said, chancing another glance at his eyes as she dabbed at his jaw. They were smiling and, she realized, they were clear. She jerked back. “You are not intoxicated, are you?”
“Which question would you like me to answer first?” he said, the corner of his tempting lips curved upward.
“I suspect they lead to the same answer.” She recommenced her ministrations. In the charitable work she and her Aunt Imogene had done in America, she had occasionally nursed wounded sailors. None of that had made her heartbeats pound violently. But she had not been this close to the Duke of Frye in many years. She had ensured that again and again. “Now tell me, Your Grace: what shenanigans are you and your friend engaged in? Are you both pockets-to-let, as Mr. Clayton guessed?”
“Who is Mr. Clayton?”
“One of our fellow guests at this inn. Very starchy and righteous. His wife and son as well. As we all watched your friend pound you into the snow, Mr. Clayton suggested that you must be on a repairing lease from town, having spent all of your money on gaming and women.”
“Risqué talk for a starchy fellow, wouldn’t you say?” he murmured upon a half-smile.
“I should have instead said that he is my fellow guest, not yours—yours being Fields’s team and the other horses. Oh, and a cat.” She lifted a brow.
“No shenanigans.”
“No?” she said skeptically.
His hand came around her wrist, big and warm and strong.
“Will you tell them?” he said very seriously.
“Will I tell the innkeeper that he has banished a duke to the stables?” She pried her arm free and dipped a corner of clean linen into the salve. “I am surprised Fields did not recognize you. But I suppose he hasn’t seen you since we were children. My mother was still alive when we last visited Kentwood. Now, hold still.”
“You haven’t answered me.”
“Is it so important that I keep your secret?”
“It is.”
“As important as your broken vow to Serena?”
“Yes.”
She backed away. “Horace Church, you are a cad.”
“Charlotte,” he said, coming to his feet and taking the single step that brought him within inches of her. This time he grasped both of her wrists. “I beg of you, do not reveal me.”
His voice was very deep and her heartbeats were very fast. Her tongue was dry too. In all of the years that she had known him, he had been a duke. As a boy he had behaved according to his rank: when other boys had scrapped and threw fisticuffs in the dirt, he had negotiated truces. As a man, he had worn the mantle of his responsibility with grace and sobriety. Even when his friends took mistresses, according to Charlotte’s brother Trent, the Duke of Frye had not. He had always honored his long-time betrothal to Serena.
Charlotte had never thought to see him again before his wedding. Of all the forbidden fantasies she had had about her friend’s fiancé, she had never imagined this moment: a moment when he was no longer betrothed.
“H—How is your mother?” she heard tumble from her lips—her lips at which he was now staring.
His gaze shifted up to her eyes as though it cost him effort.
“My mother?” he said a bit hoarsely.
“Your—Yes, your mother. I understand she took on your responsibilities at Kentwood when you went abroad with Mr. Jones.”
“You know I went abroad?”
“Word gets around.”
“How? You were in America.”
“Boats sail there. Boats with people on them. And letters.”
When his perfect teeth glimmered between his curving lips, it made Charlotte dreadfully warm inside. Hot.
That, of course, had been the principal reason she had sailed on one of those boats for America. A lady was not supposed to have lascivious thoughts about her dear friend’s betrothed. A lady was not supposed to have lascivious thoughts at all.
Horace Church, therefore, was the devil.
“I thought you had moved there,” he said. “Permanently.” His hands about her wrists were loose, but warm and large and strong. It felt wonderful.
She extracted herself from his grasp yet again and stepped back.
“I really don’t see how my travel has anything to do with your subterfuge here. Didn’t you imagine anybody would recognize you?”
“No one has until you,” he said, and then blinked, as though his own words surprised him.
She frowned, and the dart of displeasure between her feathered brows was as pretty as the rest of her. Frye had fantasized about being alone with Charlotte Ascot again. Now here they were, yet his tongue would not function. Nor his brain.
No one has until you.
For pity’s sake, he might as well come right out and tell her that he and Freddie regularly did tasks for the government.
“Fortier and I are on holiday,” he managed to say. “Taking a breather before he’s got to return home.” Not far from the truth. “Thought we’d relax, enjoy the journey, don’t you know? And bachelorhood, finally,” he added upon a lazy grin. “Easiest to do
that if nobody’s sending tales back to my mother, of course.” He hated himself. But the fewer people who knew his and Freddie’s purpose at this inn, the better.
The disappointment in her eyes was the color of the rain the last time he had seen her in that park in London.
“Then Mr. Clayton, it seems, was correct,” she said. “You are a pair of heedless rowdies with only pleasure in mind.” She raked him with a troubled gaze. “You have changed, Horace Church, and not for the better. I admit that I am sorry to discover it.” Taking up her bandages and ointments, she went to the door.
Frye’s ribs cinched about his heart.
“Since I received Alexandra’s letter,” she said, looking over her shoulder, “I have felt poorly for Serena. Now I think she has had a fortunate escape. Good evening.”
When she was gone he sank down onto the bench, dropped his head into his palms, and tried not to think of her expressive eyes and beguiling smile, and failed. But he didn’t berate himself too harshly for it. He had already been failing at that task for years.
Chapter Four
Two days before Christmas.
The taproom.
Dawn came the following morning all gray and white, the sun covered entirely by clouds, and those clouds continuing to disgorge quantities of snow upon the countryside.
Descending to the taproom, Charlotte found the other guests all taking breakfast as the innkeeper and the serving girl moved in and out of the room with dishes and pots of tea.
Only the Duke of Frye and his friend were absent.
Finding Miss Mapplethorpe and her niece in the corner closest to the kitchen door, she went to them.
“May I join you?”
“Oh, good gracious, my lady, would you not rather break your fast with Mr. Clayton’s family?”
From across the room, the starchy Mrs. Clayton lifted her nose from her teacup, perused Charlotte’s gown, and offered her a condescending nod.
Charlotte turned back to Miss Mapplethorpe.
“I so enjoyed our conversation last night.” She offered Miss Jameson a warm smile and sat beside her. Calliope wore a yellow muslin gown that, while simple and thoroughly out of season, showed her youthful beauty off to remarkable advantage this morning.
At the Christmas Wedding Page 19
