The Truth About Love and Dukes

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  “Just so,” he cut in. “I must get clear of you, for if I do not, I will continue to seduce you. It is a galling thing for me to admit,” he rushed on before she could reply, “but I doubt I would be able to stop myself, and I fear I will bring all the advantages of my superior experience to bear. If you do not succumb, I will continue to be in torment, and if you do, the consequences for you—for both of us—would be dire.”

  “Sometimes, I think you think too much about consequences, Henry.”

  “Yes, well, I have good reason to do so, given my past.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He looked down at his hat, crushing the brim in his fists. He did not want to tell her, but he knew he had to. He had to make her understand what, precisely, he was capable of. He looked up and met her gaze. “I was married once.”

  “What?” Her pretty hazel eyes went wide. “But—”

  “No one knows. Well, Mama knows, but no one else. Not even my brother and sisters. It was a long time ago. I was at university. I was only nineteen, she was seventeen. She wasn’t my sort. I persuaded her to elope, and we kept the marriage dark. It was not—” He paused, drawing a deep breath. “It was not a happy union. We separated completely within a year, and we did not see each other again after that. She died the following year. Cholera.”

  “I see.” She bit her lip. “I’m so sorry.”

  He shook his head, waving aside sympathy. “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter now.”

  She frowned, puzzled. “If it doesn’t matter, then why tell me? What does it have to do with us . . . with our situation?”

  That, of course, was the tricky part, the sordid part. He did not attempt to coat it with sugar. “She was the daughter of a shopkeeper at Cambridge, a tobacconist. I fell for her, utterly and completely, the first time I ever saw her over a counter, before I even knew her name. I do not pretend that my intentions were honorable; indeed, they were not. I was the son of a duke, we were not suited at all, and I knew it, but I was determined to have her. The problem for me was that she was a virtuous, innocent girl, and I was wild with passion, oblivious to reason—Irene, why the devil are you smiling?”

  “Because I’m so very glad you are telling me this.”

  “Glad? Good God, why?”

  “Well, to be honest, Henry, you play your cards far too close to your chest for my liking.”

  Since he felt as if he must be emanating lust twenty-four hours a day for all the world to see, the knowledge that he wasn’t was rather a relief. “I am not the most open of men, I grant you.”

  “That’s putting it mildly. Most of the time, I’ve no idea at all what you’re thinking or feeling.”

  “Given the things I’m thinking about you,” he muttered, his gaze sliding away, “that is probably a good thing.”

  “No, it isn’t. And that’s why I’m glad. The idea that you would trust me with such personal information, particularly in light of my profession . . . it is . . . quite astonishing.” She paused, laughing a little. “Extraordinary, really. I’m honored that you trust me to that extent, and I promise you, I shan’t tell anyone.”

  “Of course you won’t. I mean, I know that.” He shifted his weight, keenly uncomfortable, and looked at her again. “But given the situation, and what is between us, it’s necessary for you to know my history.”

  “Why? Because you think that history is repeating—” She broke off, her eyes going wide again. “Good Lord, Henry, you’re not thinking of marrying me, are you? You’re not . . . are you falling in love with me?”

  “It isn’t love, Irene. At least, not the sort that would make for companionable marriage. That’s what I’m trying—badly, I admit—to explain. You are only the second woman I have ever met for whom my feelings have been too strong to be denied.” He gave a humorless laugh. “I have a penchant, it seems, for women who are not suited to my life, and it is a life I cannot change. I want you, yes. I want to kiss you, lay my hands on you as I did last night, ravish you, and bed you, and—forgive me if I presume too much—if I am near you for much longer, that might happen. If it does, I will have ruined you, just as I—” He stopped, for even now, over a decade later, it hurt to say it. “As I ruined her. We would then have to marry.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  “And yet,” he interrupted, feeling like the lowest cad a man could be, “I would do it. At this moment, I am so vulnerable where you are concerned, so weak, that if you agreed to do it, I would marry you, just so that I could have you. Yes, I would make that exact mistake all over again.”

  “I see,” she said, her voice cool, hot gold sparks in her eyes. “So marriage to me would be a mistake?”

  He did not want to argue. Normally, he did not shy from battle with her, but today, he had no stomach for it. “I know that I always manage to say the wrong thing with you, and I don’t know precisely why that is, but either way, do you not also think it would be a mistake for us to marry? Putting it another way, would you want to marry me? Join your life forever with mine? Be my duchess?”

  The appalled look on her face told him with brutal clarity the answer he already knew. “God, no.”

  Despite the fact that he had expected no other answer, he was a bit nettled by such an emphatically negative reaction to a position that thousands of other women would jump through fire to attain.

  “I’m not a tobacconist’s daughter, granted,” she went on, “but I’m not society, and I’ve no desire to be.”

  “Just so,” he said, still nettled.

  “I’d no longer be able to demonstrate for women’s rights.”

  “My duchess could certainly not march in the streets, if that is what you mean. And our family is political. We have always supported the Tories, but none of the parties advocate suffrage—”

  “Well, there you are! I won’t give up fighting for the vote, Henry. Never. And I’d have to give up Society Snippets, something I cannot ever imagine doing. I love my work, far more than I could ever enjoy being a duchess. Not that I really know what duchesses do, exactly, other than go to Ascot and hold dinner parties, and I only know that because we report on those sorts of doings all the time. But I know enough to know I should hate being a duchess, and I should make an utter mess of it and be bored silly, and—”

  “We seem to be in agreement, then,” he said, mustering his dignity in the face of this withering assessment of what being his duchess would be like. He also attempted to accept with grace the humbling fact that she’d prefer to run a scandal sheet rag than be his wife. But then, he’d known that all along. From the beginning, that particular fact was one of the things he found so damnably attractive about her. “And that leaves us nowhere, as I’ve been trying to explain.”

  “There is another choice, one it’s clear you haven’t thought of. We could have an affair.”

  It was his turn to be appalled. “We can’t do that.”

  Much to his consternation, she gave a laugh. “Why not? It isn’t a sin, what we feel.”

  “Isn’t it? Find a vicar who agrees with you, and I’ll concede the point.”

  “What I mean is that I don’t regard it as a sin, regardless of doctrine. Do you?”

  “I don’t know.” He tried to consider the question rationally, but he knew his ability to be rational could not be trusted, not when it came to her. “I was raised to believe it a sin, as I’m sure you were. More importantly, most other people think it is—and that goes straight to the heart of it. We are both unmarried. In everyone else’s eyes—if not our own—an affair between us is fornication, and unspeakably immoral.”

  “When you touched me, Henry, I did not feel immoral.” She looked at him, her face softened and lovely, calling to the devil inside him.

  He persisted, as much to remind himself as to explain to her. “The consequences would be dire, especially for you. You’ve been accepted into society through your grandfather, and if anyone found out we were intimate, you would instantly become soiled go
ods. You would come to bitterly regret it, and I would hate that—”

  “I would not,” she interrupted. “I can’t imagine any circumstance in which I could ever regret a love affair with you, Henry.”

  The tenderness in her voice was almost his undoing, and he worked to push her further away before he gave in to this unspeakable idea. “Such lofty sentiments are easy to say, but what of your family? What happens when the world finds out, you are disgraced, and your family is disgraced along with you? What happens when your competitors splash your ruined name across their papers and discuss our sordid affair with relish? Do you think they wouldn’t?”

  “Well, of course we’d have to be extremely careful! I shouldn’t like anyone to find out, for Clara’s sake. And for yours.”

  “But not for your own?”

  She smiled, as if her own ruin was a trivial concern. “Society isn’t going to accept me either way, Henry. These two weeks have been more enjoyable than I had ever thought they would be, granted, but this sort of thing can’t last, not for me. I run a scandal sheet newspaper. I have a career. I am a suffragist. How long do you think it will be before Ellesmere finds out I have no intention of giving up these things or my radical views? Clara will be all right. He’s taken a shine to her, and she can still benefit from his good will and that of your family, regardless of the outrageous things I do.”

  “I’m not sure how much use my family will be in regard to protecting your sister once Mama marries her Italian. But of course, we would do what we could for both of you.”

  “As I said, it’s wasted on me. Society, I fear, will never accept me, regardless of whether anything happens between us or not.”

  “That doesn’t have to be the case. As we discussed before, you’d have to avoid flaunting your profession, and you’d have to soften your views, but—”

  “Soften them how? By not doing work I love? By abandoning a cause I believe in? I won’t, not for you, not for my father, not even for Clara. I am working to form a union with other women to petition for the vote, and when that happens, my competitors, I have no doubt, will take great delight in writing accounts of my unwomanly doings in their papers, especially when I’ve been arrested and the police have dragged me to jail.”

  “Oh, God,” he groaned, terribly afraid that prediction might one day come true.

  “So you see? I fear condemnation and ruin are inevitable for me, one way or another, and I do not want to miss this chance with you in order to avoid what is inevitable. Such an association between us is also a risk for you, however, so if you . . .” She paused, looking suddenly uncertain. “If you don’t want me under those conditions, I would understand.”

  Not want her? God, that she could think such a thing, even for a moment. Didn’t she know by now he’d crawl to the devil on his belly in order to have his way with her? But it wasn’t only about him and what he wanted. He knew that well enough. He forced himself to remain on honorable ground.

  “There are different kinds of ruin, Irene.” He paused, considering how best to say it, but there was no delicate way to conduct an indelicate conversation. “Even if we are discreet, even if can conceal our affair from all prying eyes—which is difficult enough—there is always the possibility of a baby to consider. At that point, discretion goes to the wall.”

  She blushed again, and he hoped perhaps he was finally making her see sense, but her next words told him otherwise. “Yes, well . . . ahem . . . I’ve already thought of that.”

  He was never, he decided, going to understand this woman. That fact, alas, did not dim his desire for her in the slightest degree. “You have?”

  She gave him a look of reproach. “Well, really, Henry, I may advocate following one’s passions, but I’m not an idiot.”

  “Of course,” he agreed at once, not knowing what else to say. “But you are an advocate of free love, apparently. What of the love children that accompany it?”

  “Well, as we’ve been discussing, I do think people ought to be free to love whom they choose, as long as it truly is a choice by both parties and neither are already married to someone else.”

  Despite the damnable circumstances, he couldn’t help a laugh. “You realize your view on this is completely opposite that of society? Among my set it’s perfectly all right for married people to have affairs, just not the unmarried people.”

  “All the more reason your set has its priorities completely backwards. But as to children, no, given society’s strictures, bringing children into such a situation would be cruel. For they would be illegitimate and condemned for what is not their fault.”

  “And, therefore . . . ?”

  “I seem to recall at the last suffragist meeting I attended, there was mention of . . . of . . .” She stopped, her gaze veering away as she touched a hand self-consciously to the back of her neck. “Ways to . . . umm . . . prevent that . . . ahem . . . particular eventuality.”

  Two weeks ago, Henry would have been shocked all out of countenance that a young lady would know about such things, that anyone would tell her about them or that she would be talking about them, especially to him. He’d have been appalled to learn he’d be discussing openly such topics as illegitimate children and free love, or that he would be considering the possibility, even theoretically, of deflowering a woman to whom he was not married. Even with Elena, he’d at least waited until after the wedding to claim that honor. Having an illicit affair with a heretofore innocent, unmarried woman was so far beyond the pale, it was unconscionable. But his conscience, he knew, was weak as water where this particular woman was concerned. As for her, he was coming to accept that Irene was a law unto herself. She had a way of blowing all his notions of proper behavior to bits. Rather like dynamite.

  Perhaps he was suffering from some form of shell-shock as a result, because his brain was not willing him to slam down this topic and make his body walk out the door. And since he was well past the point of refusing to discuss it altogether, there was no point in dancing around what she meant with the use of silly euphemisms. In for a penny, in for a pound. “You are talking of prophylactics,” he said bluntly. “Granted, they prevent pregnancy as well as disease, but they are also illegal. You know that, surely?”

  “Well, yes. Which is why you’d have to be the one to procure them. You’re a duke. The police would never arrest you.”

  That, he was forced to admit, was true. “You seem to have given this a great deal of thought,” he said slowly.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have. Oh, Henry, you said yourself it’s proving impossible for you to stay away from me, and you must know that I am finding it every bit as hard to stay away from you.”

  He started to speak, but she leaned over the desk, putting her fingers to his mouth to stop him. “If that kiss in the library didn’t make it plain enough, surely that carriage ride did.”

  At any other time, he might have found it very gratifying indeed to hear her make such an admission aloud, and the touch of her fingers was sending dangerous impulses through him, but at this moment, his conscience could not be allowed to savor either of those. He grasped her wrist, pulled her hand down, and let her go. “And after last night, you feel overwhelmed. I understand that, and it is completely my fault—”

  She laughed, much to his consternation. “Why? You are wholly to blame because in the face of your attentions, I’m helpless to resist you? I shall have to purchase some sol volatile, I can see, or I shall faint dead away the next time you kiss me.”

  “Please, Irene, do not tease me, I beg you. Not now.”

  She sobered at once. “I’m not overwhelmed, Henry. I know just what I’m proposing, and I’m making that proposition freely, that I promise you.”

  He turned away, walking to the tiny window of her office and staring out at the brick wall of the solidly middle class house next door, appreciating all the ramifications as he knew she could not. “But what I’m trying to explain to you is that it is not an informed choice. Not for you. It can’t b
e.”

  He forced himself to turn and meet her eyes, to face in her gaze the same yearning he felt inside himself and turn it down. “You can’t even begin to know what losing your innocence feels like, Irene. No one can, until it happens. And once it’s done, there’s no going back, regardless of the consequences. You have no idea what giving up your innocence to a man really means.”

  “That’s true, Henry. But,” she added softly, “you are the only man I have ever met that I have imagined losing my innocence to. If it isn’t you, I doubt it would ever be anyone. I don’t want that.”

  With those words, so simple and so sweet, he’d lost, and he knew it. From the very beginning, even before that kiss in the library and that hot, sweet carriage ride, even when all this had been nothing but his own erotic imaginings, he’d wanted this very thing from her, and despite the fact that it went against everything he’d been raised to believe about right and wrong, he knew his answer was inevitable. Perhaps he’d always known that.

  “Very well,” he said. “I will make the arrangements.”

  He turned abruptly away before either of them could change their minds, but he did pause at the door for one more thing. “You’ll need that god-awful hat,” he said without looking at her, then he opened the door and walked out.

  Chapter 17

  As Irene watched the door swing shut behind Henry, she felt so dizzy, she had to sit down. Suggesting an illicit affair, after all, wasn’t the sort of thing a girl did every day.

  Still, her bold suggestion wasn’t the only thing that was making her wobbly at the knees. The knowledge that he had wanted a girl with such passion that he had defied all the dictates of society in order to have her was every bit as stunning. Irene thought of that day two weeks ago when he’d come storming in here, when she’d thought him so cold, and she wanted to laugh at the idea. Henry, she was now discovering, was as cold as wildfire. Who’d ever have thought it?

  She knew the course they were about to embark upon was a reckless one, mad, foolhardy, even. And yet, she did not care. She was so exhilarated by the thought of it that she could barely breathe. She was willing to take any risk, pay any price. For to not be with him seemed unthinkable now.