The Dressmaker's Duke

by Jess Russell

  Biden rose, casting the button away, and turned as if toward some imaginary phantom. He was lost for a long moment. “As you know personally, she had a lovely mouth and knew how to use it.” Biden bent and touched the rag in Olivia’s mouth. He frowned but struggled on, as if he were trying to connect dots in a children’s puzzle. However, in the blink of an eye, his face cleared, as if nothing was amiss. “But thankfully she is no longer able to tease any other poor unsuspecting gentleman with her tricks. Bitch was too far gone to be worth anything when I finally found her. She could barely string the words together to beg for a fix much less blackmail you. I did her a favor by putting her out of her misery.”

  He turned to Rhys. “And finally,” he said, with a flourish of his arm, “we come to Mrs. Daria Battersby. Ha! Last and certainly least. I can see why you dumped that old bat, Roydan, I could barely stomach to have her suck me off, much less fuck her.

  “But now we have the lovely Lady Olivia to delight us. Come, my dear.” He sat back down. Olivia craned her neck to look at Rhys, her gaze cutting to the end of the rug. By God, she had managed to push the legs of the chair off the edge of the rug.

  Biden jerked her hair. “Blasted woman, look at me when I speak to you. It is time for Roydan’s lesson. Dear Daria told me you would never allow this particular pleasure.” He fumbled to release his cock and began to pull the wool from Olivia’s mouth. His girlish, giggle shattered the quiet of the room, popping like ice encountering fire.

  Would Biden’s loss of control be their saving grace, or their doom? But Rhys had to take the chance. The time for thought ran out as Biden pushed Olivia’s head toward his cock.

  “Are you comfortable Roy—” Biden jerked to the door. “What now!”

  The distraction was all Rhys needed. In a burst of energy, he thrust forward over the rug’s unanchored edge. As it unrolled, images flashed like a Magic Lantern show. Biden throwing Olivia aside, the chair falling over as Rhys crashed into it. Next, a shovel glancing off Biden’s shoulder, the gun clattering to the floor, and finally, Biden wresting the raised shovel from a young woman. Bringing it to her head—

  Slam! Rhys barreled into Biden, clipping the backs of his legs and felling him.

  Rhys leapt on the man. He saw only Biden’s crazed eyes and a thin trickle of blood running from his mouth down his chin. Rhys heard nothing but roaring in his head and the sick thud of bone cracking against wood. The eyes were rolling back in the head now. Good. The blood leaked faster. Good.

  Something pulled at him.

  “No-o-o-o-o-o!’ he shouted through the roar. He was not finished. He needed to finish. Please God let him finish the bastard. But he was too far away.

  He heard crying. Someone was crying? Who? Finding that person was suddenly more important than anything else. Even more important than smashing that evil bastard. The world rushed back to him.

  “Olivia!”

  The woman who had the shovel was kneeling next to her softly crying. Crying? Rhys pulled free from the arms holding him and started toward the pair. The young woman’s apron bloomed deep red, her hands covered in red, as she tried to staunch the flow of blood from Olivia’s head.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Earthy leather, sweet tobacco, sandalwood, starch and—

  She pushed into softness—a pillow—and turned toward the lovely smell, wanting to be closer. Could one smell in dreams? She couldn’t remember, but it didn’t seem possible. Images flashed over her memory, like a child’s picture book. But the pages turned too fast, and she couldn’t make sense of them—an older man with a bloody head, Egg weeping, a stranger with intense blue eyes and Rhys…

  It must be a dream. A tear slipped from the corner of her eye, and she turned her head, pressing her eyes and nose into the pillow, blotting out the tears and smell of memories.

  “Olivia?”

  Hmm…now a warm pressure on her hand, smooth and paper dry. So real. And the voice…Another tear slipped out and a moan.

  “You must awake now, my love. We have much to plan.”

  My love? Definitely a dream.

  But the liquid voice and the small circles being drawn on her wrist felt so very real.

  She steeled herself for disappointment and opened her eyes.

  Oh, sweet Saint Anne. She shut them, sure when she opened them again he would be gone. A fleeting mirage.

  But he wasn’t. He bent his dark head to brush warm breath and lips to her knuckles. She drank him in. His hair was longer, his skin paler than she remembered—

  “The babe?” She pulled her hand from his to feel her belly. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes as she cradled the familiar and comforting swell. It was still there. She closed her eyelids, and she offered up a silent prayer.

  When she opened them again his hand hovered over her belly, his eyes so intense, so haunted.

  Looking at him now, she knew she was not strong enough to resist him. She would be anything to him if he only asked.

  Abruptly he pulled away without touching her, his vulnerability snuffing out like a candle.

  “Why did you not write to me?” His voice sounded rusty. He swallowed and his jawline flexed.

  She swallowed too. She needed time to make sense of all this. She had so many questions herself.

  “We must marry.”

  Marry? His declaration sounded harsh, almost an order. What? Besides he was already married. Wasn’t he? She had the paper to prove it.

  “What of your wife, Arabella Campbell? Your duchess?”

  He waved his hand. “There was no marriage. She is gone.”

  Gone? It took but a moment for anger to replace confusion. But once she pushed the bewilderment away, rage flooded through her.

  How dare he waltz in to play the hero? Obviously something had gone wrong with his betrothal. But why now—other than the babe—why was she suddenly suitable? Ah, she had it.

  “Now you have found out I am a lady, suddenly I am good enough for the great Duke of Roydan.”

  All she got for her sarcasm was that blasted raised eyebrow.

  She tried again, wanting a real reaction from him. “Or is it because your pride won’t tolerate a bastard?” She hated even saying the word—a word she would never associate with a child of hers—but she was so angry.

  His jaw jumped, but otherwise, nothing. He drew himself up taller, if that were possible.

  “I am not one of the clocks you unearth from a dusty heap, dissect, and put back together when the mood strikes you. I will not keep your bloody time!” Still nothing. He was looking at her as if she had two heads, but she would not back down. “So what is it, Your Grace? Why do you want to marry me? You will make me an answer.”

  He slowly flexed his hands and then tucked them behind him and rolled his shoulders.

  “I thought I had made it perfectly clear, Mrs. Weston.”

  It was her turn to raise an eyebrow.

  She watched him closely as he crossed to the window and looked out; she could not see his face; she could not tell any of what he was feeling. But, then again, could she ever? After a few very long moments, he spoke.

  “Mrs. Weston”—he turned to her—“Olivia. I am a man of few words. Perhaps it is a fault, but I believe actions to be the clearer indicator of feeling.” He paused, and slowly closed his eyes as if to harness some enormous emotion. They opened; pools of warm honey. “I have made myself, and I dare say my servants and certainly poor Wilcove, half mad with searching for you these past five months, seventeen days, six hours and”—he glanced at the clock on the mantel—“forty-two minutes. I have given Lady Bertram no peace, even when it was clear the poor woman knew nothing of your whereabouts other than your being in London, and that I had to drag out of her, after reducing her to a quivering mess.

  “My uncle finally threatened to call me out if I harassed her again. I believe I was one of the reasons they took their extended honeymoon. But I digress.

  “I have hounded Sir Richard and various other Bow Str
eet Runners till they refused to see me anymore, me, the Duke of Roydan.

  “Tinsley has despaired of ever recovering me from the abyss to which I have sunk and has tendered his resignation on three separate occasions.

  “My affairs are in shambles, I have not once been to the House of Lords, I have suffered being a laughingstock and the darling of that infernal Gillray once again for being ‘thrown over’ by Arabella Campbell, when, in fact, it was she who ran off with her maid—”

  “What? Not Daisy?”

  “Yes, I believe that is the name.” He raised an increasingly dear, ducal eyebrow. “Please, if you will allow me to finish. After she ran off with…Daisy, I, of course, told her father I could not marry her. But I had determined that even before the debacle with the maid.”

  “But there was nothing in the papers!”

  He gave her a quelling look. “The announcement of the break did not come for some two or more months after the event.

  “The Campbells were, as you may imagine, extremely grieved and begged me to give them some time to recover their footing, as well as their daughter. I’m not sure they achieved either, but I did grant them the time and offered to have it come out that she threw me over. That is when my dear friend Gillray reared his ugly head again.

  “So, my dear woman, I hope you will look at these actions and see the picture of a man…a man…quite hopelessly”—he knelt beside her—“and most desperately in love. You have me at your feet, Lady Olivia Jayne Ballard Weston, not that I give a damn if you have one ounce of blue blood, or that you are carrying my child—well, that is not strictly true—I cannot imagine a finer thing than you bearing my child. I will simply be no good to anyone if you will not have me. So will you please put me out of my misery and do me the great honor of becoming my wife and duchess?”

  Realizing she had been gaping like a starved fledgling, she shut her mouth. This was the most she had heard him speak. Ever.

  She looked deeply into his beautiful brandy eyes. “Why did you not say so in the beginning?” She could not help but tease him, if only a little.

  “You will have me then?” He suddenly put her in mind of the little boy he must have been.

  She smiled at him then and put both hands to his dear face. “Oh yes, most assuredly. But I must warn you, now that you have found me; you shall never be rid of me again.”

  Then, Rhys Alistair James Merrick, the great Duke of Roydan, with infinite gentleness, laid his hand reverently over their child, bent his head, and kissed the middle of her palm. She felt, rather than saw, his hot tears as they pooled in her open hand.

  Epilogue

  She had thrown him out!

  Slash, went number forty-seven as he made a pass at the invisible fiend who was tormenting his wife upstairs. At one moment it was Dr. Asher, next it was Jeb and Albert who had been summoned to throw him out, then it was he, himself, for getting her in this predicament in the first place.

  Yes, he ought to be skewered on old number forty-seven and roasted on a spit. He did not know how he was going to manage keeping his hands off his wife, but he—slash—would not—slash—risk having her go through this torment again.

  Rhys jerked his head up. Yet another agonized moan from above.

  He should be up there. Slash! With her. Slash! Helping. Slash, slash!

  But she did not want him. She had actually shouted at him. Threatened to smash every one of his “bloody and infernal clocks and watches, if he did not stop reporting the time of every bloody contraction!”

  Really, he was only trying to be useful. What could be so objectionable in that? And Dr. Asher had been very happy to give him something to do.

  “My boy”—it was his uncle, who had long ago stopped cowering, and taken to heavy drinking instead—“do you imagine that your…efforts…are doing anything at all to help the duchess?”

  Slash! The sword came within a hair’s breadth of Uncle Bert’s nose. Bertram did not even flinch; he merely drank deep.

  “I don’t see how you can sit there drinking, Uncle, when Olivia may very well be dying and the babe with her.” Rhys felt for his watch, his fingers closing over its familiar heart shape, and pulled it out. “Bloody hell, it has been over forty-nine minutes since I was ousted. How long am I expected to endure?”

  “I suppose, my dear boy, as long as your wife can,” his uncle said wearily. “You will do yourself and your lady no good, not to mention Mrs. Cotton, by wearing a hole in the carpet.”

  Rhys snorted and sat heavily in the nearest chair only to rise again in the next moment and listen at the door.

  “Uncle, did you not hear something?”

  He had been assured on five separate occasions by five separate people that the moment Olivia delivered, Jeb would summon him immediately. But he didn’t trust them. After all, they had the temerity to throw him out.

  He caught a look at himself in the pier glass above the mantel. His eyes were wild, a sheen of sweat covered his forehead and neck, his hair hung in an unkempt mess about his eyes; in short, he was a wreck. He threw himself into the nearest chair and reached for his discarded glass.

  Then he heard a cry.

  It was more of a mewl.

  His gut twisted. It was not the cry of his wife, or even one of her moans. No, this was a new sound. By God, this was their child. His child.

  He ran up the stairs three at a time, pounded down the hall, mowing down Jeb and nearly flattening Egg and Hazel as well, when he yanked open the door. Half-way into the room he slammed to a halt, computing the sight before him.

  There she was, blotchy and sweating, holding a tiny, red-faced, wailing creature. He wanted to speak, but the flapping birds that had taken up residence in his heart now saw fit to move into his throat making it impossible to speak through their choking feathers.

  She beckoned him to come. He did not know how he got to her side, but he supposed he walked like any other mortal.

  She held the babe out to him. Was he to take it? She would trust him with this most precious gift? She nodded.

  He wiped his hands over his breeches. Only dimly conscious of the bed sinking beneath him as he sat, he held out his arms.

  It weighed almost nothing, its face not even the size of a tea saucer. An arm came loose from the linen, its tiny fist pumping. Startled, Rhys caught it.

  Tiny fingers, soft as new-churned butter, gripped his own with surprising strength. Could there be anything more perfectly beautiful in this amazing world? Could God be so generous? Then his wife—his Olivia—looked up at him, closed her hand over theirs, and smiled. Yes, by heavens, the answer was a resounding yes.

  A word about the author...

  As a girl Jess Russell escaped the world of rigorous ballet class and hideous math homework into the haven of toe-wriggling romance novels. She never imagined in her dyslexic brain she would ever come to write one, but a small scene grew into a story, and contest wins, and finally a contract. Dreams sometimes do come true, just like the happy ending in the stories she loves.

  Jess lives in New York City with her husband and son and escapes to the Catskill Mountains whenever she can. She is a sometime actress, award-winning batik artist, and accomplished seamstress. Along with a sewing machine, she loves power tools and, what’s more, she knows how to use them.

  Jess is currently working on revamping her Manhattan kitchen as well as writing two other stories: (working titles) Heart of Glass, and Mad for the Marquess.

  Please visit her at jessrussellromance.com

  Thank you for purchasing

  this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

 

 

 
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