He was wrong. There had been a street filled with gentlemen and not a single one had rushed to the aid of her or that child.
Nick returned his attention to the lady at his side. “And my sister, Cecily, the Countess of Dunkirk. Cecily, may I present, Miss Barrett.”
Justina sank into a belated curtsy. “My lady.”
The woman smiled. “It is a pleasure.” By the dimple in the lovely lady’s cheek, she could almost believe it, and yet there was a strain to that grin that matched so many of the false smiles her own mother donned through life. What accounted for the lack of joy there? Disapproval?
“Were you playing hide and seek?” Felicity piped in. At her back, Marisa made a choking sound that sounded very nearly like a laugh.
Justina curled her toes into the soles of her boots.
“If so, I would dearly love to play. I’ve just Uncle Dominick to play with and he only comes but twice a week to visit.” The duke visited his sister and niece twice weekly. All of Society took the gentleman as a rogue, but a chance meeting with a child who prattled like Justina herself had revealed that he was something else—a loving brother and uncle.
The warmth suffusing her heart spread.
Felicity frowned at her uncle. “Except he has been missing for nearly a fortnight, away—”
“I expect the lady was not playing hide and seek,” Nick said abruptly.
His niece furrowed her brow. “She might have been, though. She was ducking behind the boulder.”
Oh, please let the earth open and swallow me whole. “I was attempting to write,” Justina said weakly. That was vastly safer than the whole I-was-watching-you-with-your-uncle business.
The countess gave her brother a pointed look that Justina would have to be blind not to see. “Then, we should allow the young lady to her writing.”
Cecily’s disapproval could not be greater than had she climbed herself into the oak tree beside them and shouted the words into the empty park.
Concern had lit her eyes the moment she’d gleaned Miss Barrett’s identity. Given his intentions to woo, win, and destroy the lady, his fortuitous meeting with Justina Barrett was surely the fates way of nudging him on to the path of victory over Rutland. But God help him, the minute he’d caught her peeking out from behind that boulder, he’d been transfixed, so that the last person or thought he’d had was of Lord Rutland…or anyone else.
“Would you care to join us, Miss Barrett?”
The lady flared her pretty blue eyes, and looked between him and Cecily. Had she detected his sister’s disapproval? If so, she could not know that all disappointment was reserved for him. “Oh, I would not wish to intrude—”
“My uncle is a writer,” Felicity happily announced.
Justina blinked wildly. “Is he?”
Nick tugged at his cravat. “I would hardly call myself a writer,” he said truthfully. At one time, he’d aspired to it. Long ago, he’d abandoned his scholarly pursuits and traded them over for lessons and a life of treachery. The only verses or sentences he drafted now were ones for children—his only niece.
As though he’d not protested, Felicity nodded excitedly. “He is quite wonderful, isn’t he, Mama?”
Justina’s eyes went soft.
And with the unintended aid of his beloved niece, Nick would wager he’d earned another sliver of the lady’s heart. And in this fleeting moment, a courtship built on deception felt all too real. He battled back the disquiet churning in his gut.
Cecily alternated her stare between him and Justina before settling on him. “Indeed,” she said grudgingly, pleading with her eyes. “My brother once favored his books above all else.”
Ignoring her silent appeal, he gathered Justina’s writing case and held out an arm. The lady hesitated and then placed her fingertips on his sleeve. He guided her to the blanket he’d abandoned moments earlier.
Felicity broke the tension left by Cecily’s annoyance. “What were you writing?” she asked as they reached the previously abandoned blanket.
“Felicity,” his sister chided.
“No, it is quite all right,” Justina urged. Disentangling her arm from Nick’s, she fell to a knee beside the girl. “I was attempting to write a poem.” She dropped her voice to an exaggerated whisper. “I’m rather rubbish at it.” She lifted twinkling eyes to his and winked.
He blinked slowly at the unfettered lightness in their crystalline depths. Since he’d ascended to the title of duke, he’d had debutantes, dowagers, and ladies of the demimonde all throw themselves at his proverbial feet for nothing more than his title. Not a single one of them had ever had a smile reach their eyes.
“…Isn’t that right, Uncle Dominick?” Felicity’s inquiry yanked him back from the maddening spell Justina Barrett had weaved.
“I…uh…” Hadn’t a single bloody idea what was right or wrong, in this moment.
Justina cocked her head.
“I saiiiiid,” Felicity said in an exaggerated drawl, “since you are friends with the lady, that you could read her one of your verses.” Friends with the lady? And with Justina Barrett blushing and his niece innocently believing his intentions could only ever be honorable, Nick felt something he didn’t wish to feel, an unwanted, unpleasant emotion that only confused him—shame.
As his niece continued to sing his undeserved praise, he shifted, suddenly wishing he’d adhered to propriety and wanting distance between himself and Justina. Her sitting alongside his family, the people who mattered to him above all others, created this artificial bond that would never be. Could never be given his intentions for her own family. And what was more, there would be an additional bond he severed when he saw his plan through. It was a detail he’d not considered—until now. What else did I not think through? Nick balled his hands.
“Tell her one of the poems you wrote for me,” Felicity implored, drawing him back from the tumult of his thoughts.
He coughed into his hand. “I’m certain Miss Barrett would rather not hear my paltry attempt at—”
“But I would,” Justina blurted.
Felicity clapped. “Please, please. Tell her the one about nighttime.”
Grinning, Justina urged him on with her eyes.
“Oh, very well. I will tell you,” Felicity groused with a roll of her eyes.
“Shadows dancing, moon a’glowing. Nighttime creatures call.
Man is slumbering, and the earth is celebrating the peace that comes, only when darkness, at last falls.”
Justina clapped her hands. “That is lovely,” she said softly, holding his gaze.
Disconcerted, Nick forced a grin. Other than for Felicity, he’d neither penned nor shared a single verse. Not since that day Rutland had paid a visit and his father had hanged himself for it. That stark reminder ushered in a familiar cold.
“Uncle Dominick wrote it for me,” Felicity explained. “When I began having nightmares about—”
“A walk,” Cecily squeaked, surging to her feet.
Three pairs of eyes went to her, Felicity’s filled with confusion. “Mama?” Of course, as a child of seven, she had yet to learn not to bare secrets to anyone. In time, she would. Eventually, life jaded them all.
“Let us go pick flowers,” his sister said, gentling her tone.
Excitement immediately replaced the child’s befuddlement and she hopped up. With a final wave for Justina, mother and daughter walked off, leaving them alone.
Together, they stared after them. Justina drew her knees to her chest and looped her arms about them. “She is lovely.”
She was an image of the person Cecily had been before life had left her broken. Unnerved by Justina’s effortless move into his life, Nick turned his focus to the writing box. The sun’s rays cast a soft light upon her heart-shaped face. “Most ladies sneaking about the parks only do so with scandalous intentions,” he whispered temptingly, coming closer. His body burned at her nearness and he dropped his gaze to her lips. I am going to kiss her. I am going to kiss her here
in Hyde Park in view for everyone to see, in a move that has nothing to do with the Marquess of Rutland. Where was the dread and panic that thought should bring?
Justina waggled her eyebrows. “I am not most ladies,” she rejoined on a loud whisper that cut across this mad haze of desire.
His lips tugged at the corner and the tension went out of his broad shoulders. “No. You are not.” In so many ways. Ways that had nothing to do with her status as Rutland’s sister-in-law and everything to do with her spirit and wit. Fear over this inexplicable pull turned his mouth dry. Where was the strength he’d prided himself on these past thirteen years? In a bid for control, he turned the subject. “Tell me, what is the verse that has you so stumped, Miss Barrett?” he managed gruffly.
“Your niece indicated you are a poet,” she countered.
Couldn’t she be one of those ladies who only wished to speak about herself? She was clever. She was modest. She was a damned conundrum in every way. Unnerved, he patted his hand along the side of his leg. “I’m hardly a poet.”
“But you write?” she pressed, unrelenting. Again with her questioning, proving the lies Marianne had gathered about the lady. Justina was no self-absorbed miss, eager to talk only of herself and her accomplishments.
He ceased his distracted tapping. Personal revelations about himself and his past had no place here. And yet… “I was,” he murmured, looking out. As a boy he’d hovered at a dwindling flame into the early morn hours, capturing his own verses. “Not any longer,” he said, feeling her gaze on him.
“Why did you stop?”
The wind whipped at his hat and he took it between his hands, beating it against his opposite palm. He stared into the distance where Felicity played alongside her mother, seeing in the child his sister as she’d been long ago. Before life interfered. Before their happiness had been shattered. “Because life happened,” he said quietly, more to himself. “And eventually, the words just stopped coming.” His skin pricked with the feel of her gaze on him.
“What happened—?”
“Uh-uh,” he cut in, killing the question on her lips. He’d not allow her in, any more than he already had. It was too dangerous—for the both of them. “My turn. Which verse has you so stuck?”
Justina nibbled her lip as though she wished to say more. With a sigh, she layered her cheek atop her knees. “All of them,” she muttered.
Setting aside his hat, Nick stretched his legs out before him and then hooked them at the ankles. He cast her a sideways look.
“I also haven’t written anything,” she conceded. “But where you were once able to write verse and can still manage them for your niece, I simply stare at the page and jot down ideas.”
Since he’d been thrust into Polite Society two years earlier, he’d chafed at the falseness of the lords and ladies. Those same people that Nick and his family had been invisible to. The ladies were stilted and brittle. The lords, diffident and insincere. Then, there was this woman. He would have preferred Rutland’s sister-in-law to be like everyone else. It would be easier to maintain a wall of indifference toward her.
Alas…
“It must be joy and you are making it work. As long as you see it as so, then you’ll never have any words to write.”
“Is that what it became for you?”
She was tenacious. “No more questions about why I stopped writing.” Nick grabbed her writing box and flipped open the top. Withdrawing a sheet of parchment, a crystal inkwell, and a pen, he set up a makeshift desk.
Justina scooted closer to him, her eyes taking in his every movement. A light spring breeze pulled at the corner of the parchment and he layered it to the surface. Her fingers shot out to hold down the corners for him as she peered around his shoulder.
“What do you find joy in?” he asked.
“Reading,” she said instantly.
Books. And here, everything he’d gleaned from the baroness had touted Justina Barrett as one with a love of pretty bonnets and ribbons. What else had they failed to correctly gather about the young woman? Shoving aside the worrying thought, he stared expectantly at her.
“My sister, Phoebe,” she added. He froze. Rutland’s wife. Ice shot through his veins as he forced his fingers to still and he wrote down that hated name. “As well as my brother, Andrew. My mother.” It did not escape his notice that she carefully left her father off that list. Deservedly so.
Nick studied the concise but telling list, gathering one overwhelmingly clear truth about Justina—her family mattered to her. It was a bond between them that he didn’t want. It had been far easier to plot their destruction when he’d seen them as nothing more than pieces upon a chessboard. Now, the Barretts were real. Too real. Loyal and loving, and about to be destroyed by him. I should find a thrill at that thought. Where was it? Why did it feel, then, like a boulder had been dropped on his chest and was weighting him down?
“There is also my brother-in-law, Edmund,” Justina added. Nick unfurled his hands feeling burned by that page.
It was the Devil’s reminder, a necessary one. “Look to the emotions your family evokes and write to that,” he said, his voice coming harsher than he intended. Nick hurriedly retrieved her sheet and turned it over. Then he shifted the desk from his lap. With stiff, jerky movements, he returned the instruments to their proper place inside. “As my sister said, I should allow you to your writing, madam.”
Did he imagine the flash of disappointment in her revealing eyes? Would she feel that same regret if she knew of his association with her beloved brother-in-law? “Of course,” she murmured, and he helped her to her feet.
With Justina at his side, he carried her writing box back to the spot she’d previously occupied. “Miss Barrett,” he murmured after he’d set her desk down on the spread blanket.
“Your Grace,” she returned, sinking into a flawless curtsy.
He searched his gaze over her face a moment and regret tightened his chest; regret that life had ordained their future together long ago as one riddled with darkness.
With a final bow, he left her, hating that allegiance she carried for Lord Rutland.
Chapter 9
After Justina’s entrance into Society, she’d found herself courted by gentlemen with little interest in her beyond the possible arm ornament she might make. From that moment, she had not looked forward to a single ton event—until now.
As her father’s carriage slowly rolled through the crowded streets of London with her father and brother seated on the opposite bench, she stared out the window. Her mind was occupied by thoughts of Nick.
He was a poet. He was a gentleman who encouraged her to find her own words and speak her own mind. Her heartbeat sped up. No one, not even her beloved siblings, had seen more in her than a whimsical miss. Where Polite Society had very specific expectations of and for a lady, expectations that they embroider and paint stunningly boring floral arrangements, Nick had proven wholly unlike any other man she’d ever known.
Questions lingered in her mind about the enigmatic duke who’d once written…and then stopped. …Life happened… What had he meant—?
“Tennyson will be in attendance, gel,” her father boomed from the opposite bench. Justina jumped as he slashed into her musings.
She was surely the only lady in the realm whose father was uninterested in the possibility of securing a duke for a son-in-law. “I’ll not have you skirting the gentleman, this time,” he went on, scratching at the paunch that bulged over his too-tight, purple pantaloons.
Andrew gave her a sympathetic look and she ignored it. She’d little use for his pitying glances. Actions and words were far more potent and she’d use them to save herself. “I’ve told you before, I’ve no interest in marrying Lord Tennyson,” she informed him, proud of the steady rebuttal. All her life, she’d been meek and biddable. Nick had helped her find her voice.
Her sire flared his nostrils. “Is this because of your silly thoughts about Huntly?”
Her cheeks blazed.
For a man who’d proven such a lackwit in so many ways, how very accurately he came to that supposition. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she managed, weakly. She’d always been a rotted liar, incapable of artifice. “I’d never marry Lord Tennyson regardless of my exchange with the duke.” That was, at the very least, steeped in truth.
“Your exchange?” He scoffed. “He pushed you out of the way of a runaway carriage—”
“Horse,” she gritted out. A father who couldn’t even be bothered with the details of her near death. “It was a horse.” She’d not sully their last exchange in the park by sharing it with this man.
“It was more than that, Father,” Andrew added helpfully from beside him. “Very heroic stuff.”
“Bah, horse, carriage, it matters not.” No, because, ultimately, she’d never truly mattered. Ever. Not beyond the match he might make with her. She hated the stabbing pain that reminder still had the power to inflict. Her father raked a methodical stare over her. “I don’t owe Huntly a pence.” And the gentleman rose all the more in her estimation for it. “The man cannot do a thing to erase my debt to Tennyson.” Or any other man. The viscount mopped at his perspiring brow. “Either way,” he barked, “rogues like Huntly don’t wed chits like you. You want Huntly? Then make him your lover after you wed Tennyson.”
“Father,” Andrew said sharply over Justina’s gasp.
“Mind your business, boy,” their father snapped, earning a blush from his son. “Or I’ll use you to make a match,” he threatened. “Cut you off unless you find a lady with a fat dowry.”
All the color leeched from Andrew’s skin and his throat worked.
“That is better,” Father said with a grunt. He nudged his chin so quickly in Justina’s direction, his jowls jiggled. “I’ll not speak to you again about Tennyson. Are we clear?”
A breathtaking hatred stole through her, gripping into her like vicious talons at the unneeded reminder of their father’s ruthlessness. What manner of depraved father spoke so crudely to and about his own children? Mayhap five days ago, she would have given a weak nod. Mayhap looked to her brother for his intervention, once more. Looked to Edmund or her sister for help.
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