A Duke of Her Own

by Eloisa James

  She threw the ball, scooped—and the sixth knucklebone slid, smooth as butter, under her spreading skirts. She closed her fingers around the bones.

  “You won!” Tobias cried, looking utterly shocked. “But I never lose.”

  She took a second to savor her victory. “That’s likely because you’ve never played a woman before.”

  “You think girls are better at knucklebones than boys?” She’d seen that jutting jaw before. Villiers had it. Well, every boy had it when they were confronted with an unpleasant reality.

  “I’m better than you are,” she pointed out. “Why shouldn’t the two of us stand as emblems for our sexes?”

  He thought his way through that language. “I’ve played lots of girls before,” he reported. “And I always win.”

  “Pride goeth before a fall,” she said. And then she relented, grinning at him. “I cheated.”

  “What?” His voice suddenly dropped a register, taking on, in its disbelief, his father’s low voice.

  She whisked aside her skirt and showed him the hidden jack. “You should always count the bones when someone claims victory.”

  “I do always count the bones!” he cried. “Well, normally. But you’re a lady!” His voice swooped from high to low. He would have his father’s deep velvet tones someday.

  “Your mistake,” she said cheerfully. “I cheated—but I still won. You tried to cheat and you lost. When I decided to cheat, I won because you didn’t see it.”

  Tobias narrowed his eyes. “You’re a strange lady.”

  “Very strange,” Villiers said from above her shoulder.

  “I have thought Eleanor strange since our nursery days,” Anne laughed. She sounded a little drunk.

  “Tobias,” Eleanor said, ignoring them, “do you suppose that you’re strong enough to haul me into a standing position?”

  He jumped to his feet. “You’re not so large.” He had decided to like her, she guessed. Now that she had cheated. Men were strange, no matter the age. “I’ll be taller than you in a month or so.”

  “You’re as boastful as my dog,” she told him. Sure enough, he managed to get her to her feet. She twitched her skirts so they flowed over her panniers.

  He was longing to tell her that she was crazy and that dogs didn’t boast, so she put him out of his misery. “My dog Oyster is a terrible braggart.”

  “What does he boast about?” Tobias asked.

  “His tail, for one thing. He loves his tail. The problem is that he can’t see it because he’s too fat. So he goes around and around, barking so that I realize how important and beautiful and special that tail is.”

  Tobias had clearly learned not to laugh, because he just watched her with those curious, intent eyes that reminded her of his father. It made her itch to comfort him, which was absurd.

  “Second, Oyster is ridiculously proud of his ability to defend me.”

  “Defend you? The nursemaid told me that he was the size of a piglet.”

  “I have to admit that there may be a certain resemblance. But my point is that he thinks he’s very fierce. Extremely so. He likes to pretend that the fire andirons are about to attack me. He creeps up, attacks them savagely, and manages to save my life.”

  Tobias hesitated.

  “I know…you wish to inform me that Oyster is not the brightest canine,” Eleanor said, sighing.

  Tobias almost smiled.

  “The third thing he’s very proud of is his pizzle,” she said.

  He grinned outright at that. “I thought ladies never mentioned such things.”

  Actually they didn’t, generally speaking. “You also thought you could beat any woman simply because you have a pizzle,” she pointed out. “Not to mention the fact that you thought a lady wouldn’t cheat, so you didn’t count the bones.”

  “I’m horrified,” Villiers said with a drawl. “Horrified.” He turned to his son, his eyes so serious that Eleanor wondered if Tobias would get the joke. “She’s no lady, son. I’ll have to find another duchess.”

  “Oyster has the smallest pizzle you can imagine,” Eleanor said, glancing at Villiers just to make it clear that she might be able to imagine one smaller. “More like a radish than anything to be proud of.”

  Tobias giggled, sounding like any other child.

  “But when he starts waving it around,” she said, taking another sip of her rum punch, “you’d think that it was a royal pizzle.”

  “What does he do with it?” Tobias asked. He sounded about five years younger than he had on entering the room.

  “Well, I hate to tell you this, because it’s going to reduce your opinion of him,” Eleanor said, “but he is uncommonly fond of Peter, one of our footmen. Or perhaps it is more accurate to admit that his object of passion is Peter’s leg.”

  Who would have thought it? Father and son laughed in exactly the same way.

  Eleanor finished up her drink, thinking about how utterly predictable the male sense of humor was. Tobias reacted precisely as her own brother would have, at the same age. It seemed that men never really got past that age, in fact.

  The Duke of Villiers. Age thirteen, going on…forty.

  Typical.

  Chapter Twelve

  By the time Squire Thestle and his family finally appeared, Tobias had been dispatched to the nursery, and the entire company had consumed three glasses of rum punch each. Villiers showed no signs of intoxication, but Anne was weaving a little as she walked.

  Eleanor prided herself on being able to manage several glasses of wine, but she was slowly coming to realize that rum punch was not like wine. Her head was swimming and she had to curb the impulse to beam.

  Luckily, her mother had reappeared and taken over the role of hostess, since Lisette didn’t even bother to rise to greet the squire. Lisette, seated on a couch beside Eleanor, had been talking, almost without breathing, for twenty minutes. Really, Eleanor thought sentimentally, Lisette was greatly misunderstood by the ton. She almost always made sense.

  “Lisette,” she said, interrupting, “Don’t you wish to marry someday?”

  “Of course I plan to do so. I’m engaged; did you know that?”

  Eleanor sat up. “You’re betrothed? To whom?”

  “Roland’s older brother,” Lisette said, waving her hand at the squire and his son. “My father and his arranged it eons ago. His name is Lancelot.”

  It must have been arranged when the betrothed couple were in their respective cradles, given the edgy politeness with which the squire nodded in the direction of Lisette. “Roland and Lancelot…No wonder Roland became a poet. Where is Lancelot?”

  “He went on a tour some years ago,” Lisette said with complete unconcern. “When he comes back, I suppose we’ll marry. I’m quite comfortable as I am. Or if I meet someone I like better than Lancelot, I’ll just marry him instead. The squire wouldn’t mind.”

  “What would you think of marrying Villiers, for example?”

  “Villiers?” Lisette seemed to have forgotten who he was, so Eleanor waved her hand toward the duke. He was standing with his back to them, talking to Anne. She didn’t know why Anne was so taken by his shoulders. She preferred his thighs. His muscles were positively immoral, the way they strained the silk of his pantaloons.

  “Oh, Leopold,” Lisette said. “I thought you had decided to marry him, Eleanor. I’m sure you told him so earlier.”

  “He did ask me,” Eleanor said defensively.

  “Really? He looked so surprised.” There wasn’t an ounce of condemnation in Lisette’s tone. Clearly, if she wanted to marry someone, she would simply go ahead and announce the impending nuptials. “No, I don’t wish to marry Leopold.”

  Eleanor felt quite relieved. Well, of course she was relieved, because she had lost her head and announced her intention to marry Villiers, though she would have backed down if Lisette had strong feelings for the duke. Possibly.

  “He does have lovely hair,” Lisette said. “I never really thought of him as a husban
d.” She bent her head to the side and peered at him.

  “Why are you bending your neck?”

  “People are so interesting viewed sideways,” she said. “Just look at Leopold, for example. His nose is even bigger from the side.”

  Eleanor bent her neck but began to sag to the side so she straightened quickly. It must be the Champagne on top of rum punch.

  “I wouldn’t mind marrying Leopold,” Lisette continued. “Leopold and Lisette sound quite nice together. Almost as nice as Lancelot and Lisette. What’s more, he saved me from a quite savage dog this afternoon.” She looked at Eleanor. “Did you hear about what happened to me?”

  Eleanor managed a smile. “It was my puppy, remember, darling?”

  Lisette blinked. “Oh, of course it was!” Her smile was a little forced. “I’ve been fearful of dogs since I was attacked by a mongrel in the village square. It was nearly the size of a wolf, starving to death, I expect. The villagers had to shoot it.”

  “That must have been awful,” Eleanor said flatly.

  “But that’s not what we were talking about. We were talking of marrying Villiers. You know, I am going to think about that very seriously. Thank you for suggesting it. My aunt Marguerite can be so annoying sometimes. Do you know that we almost never have visitors? I expect that people come to your house all the time, don’t they?”

  “At times.”

  “I feel as if my spirit is trapped here.” She flung open her arms and knocked Eleanor’s glass to the floor. “Oh, well, it must be time for supper,” she said, glancing at the spilled drink. “I’ll tell Popper that he should ring the bell this minute. Dinner!” she called, waving to the room at large.

  They all looked up. Eleanor’s mother was obviously enjoying a comfortable coze with the squire’s wife.

  “Time to eat,” Lisette said cheerfully. “Eleanor is getting tipsy and dropped her glass.”

  Eleanor quickly straightened her back again and tried to look sober.

  “Since Popper isn’t here, I’ll inform a footman,” Lisette said. She darted out the door and a moment later they heard the dinner gong.

  “Lady Lisette is remarkably spontaneous,” Villiers said, appearing at Eleanor’s side. His voice was far more admiring than she appreciated.

  “She has always had that quality,” Eleanor said.

  “We spend a great deal of our time hemmed in by customs and manners,” he said thoughtfully.

  Manners were certainly not Lisette’s strong suit, but Eleanor kept her mouth shut.

  Squire Thestle was a tall, thin man who had powdered his hair so heavily that little snowfalls kept drifting to his shoulders and then sliding, as if down a mountain slope, to the floor. He had melancholy eyes that reminded Eleanor of Oyster after a bout of incontinence and a scolding. His wife was even taller than he, and certainly broader in the shoulders.

  Strangely enough, these homely parents had produced a remarkably beautiful son. With a brilliant smile, Lisette introduced Eleanor to Sir Roland. “Lady Eleanor, I know that you will be so pleased to meet Roland. Or Roly-Poly, as we used to call him. Roly, will you escort Lady Eleanor to her seat, please?”

  Sir Roland clearly didn’t care to be reminded of this nickname; he looked at Lisette with the respectful dislike one reserves for a venomous viper. Eleanor certainly understood that feeling. She was starting to remember just how much she used to dread her annual summer visits to Knole House, before Lisette’s mother died and their families drifted apart.

  By five minutes later she was feeling much better. Roland didn’t look at her with cool eyes that made her feel as if he was secretly laughing at her. Lisette had been right about his Roman nose, but she forgot to add how handsome a nose like that could be when it was paired with a deep lower lip and a strong chin. A Grecian chin, didn’t she say?

  Whatever kind of chin it was, she liked it. And Roland apparently liked her as well. They found so many agreeable subjects of conversation that she had to remind herself to turn now and then and ask the squire a few more questions about the birds nesting in the church steeple.

  The admiration in Roland’s eyes was very soothing. “I’m so surprised that I’ve never met you before,” he was saying now.

  “I find Almack’s boring,” Eleanor said, ignoring the fact that she was there every Wednesday last season. No one who’d seen her in April would recognize her now. “So tedious…All the same people, and everyone on his best behavior.”

  “I know just what you mean,” Roland said, looking at her a little shyly. He had nice eyelashes. Not as thick as Villiers’s, she noticed, but long and curling. “How do you like to entertain yourself, Lady Eleanor?” He caught himself and actually turned a little pink. “I certainly didn’t mean that in an improper manner.”

  Anne answered him from across the table, which was a breach of etiquette, but it was that sort of dinner party. “Eleanor does what every woman does for entertainment.”

  Villiers cut a glance at Eleanor and she could see laughter in his eyes. Anne was definitely the worse for all that rum punch, not to mention the Champagne. Popper seemed to have decided that the best way to survive the evening was to float all the unwanted guests in a sea of bubbles.

  “And what is that?” Roland asked, looking adorably interested.

  Eleanor smiled at him. He was as fresh and sweet as an early peach. For all he must be older than she was, he seemed younger. He looked like someone who was ready to fall in love.

  “We watch men, of course,” Anne said with a tiny, ladylike hiccup. “Men are endlessly amusing.”

  Eleanor had discovered that if she leaned toward Roland, his eyes slid down to her breasts as if he couldn’t stop himself. And when he looked back up at her face, there was something in the depths of his eyes that made her shift in her chair.

  “I can’t imagine why you aren’t married,” he said, pitching his voice below the hum of conversation.

  She was boggled for a moment. If she admitted to her own ruling about dukes, she sounded like a snobbish fool. On the other hand, if she admitted to being tenuously engaged to Villiers, she would have to stop flirting. Rather than decide, or dissemble, she turned the topic back to Roland. “What do you do for recreation, sir?”

  “I write. Day and night, I write poetry.” He met her eyes again, steadily. “I feel as if we shall definitely meet many times in our lives, Lady Eleanor.”

  Her heart skipped a beat at the pure intensity in his gaze. “Ah—I hope so.”

  “I write poetry,” he said again. A lock of dark hair fell over his eyes and he threw it back. “Have you ever read the verse of Richard Barnfield?”

  “I haven’t read much poetry,” she confessed. “I’m halfway through Shakespeare’s sonnets at the moment, but I’m finding them slow going.”

  Roland picked up Eleanor’s Champagne glass and leaned toward her. “Shakespeare is all very well, but of course his work is terribly out of fashion. I prefer a line that’s more evocative. Her lips like red-rose leaves floated on this cup…and left its vintage sweeter.”

  “That’s lovely,” she breathed. “Did you just write it this moment?”

  He grinned at her, and his smile was even more enticing than his intent gaze. “I would lie to you about that, but I don’t want to lie to you, ever.” He handed her the glass. “Taste. Honey from Hyblean bees, matched with this liquor, would be bitter.”

  “Where is Hyblea?” It was Villiers, speaking across the table as rudely as had Anne.

  Eleanor blinked at him. She was caught in the web of Roland’s words. The last thing she wanted was a geographical discussion. She frowned and turned back to the poet. “Do tell me the rest of the poem?”

  “I’m afraid that the rest of the poem isn’t fit for the supper table,” he said with a glance from under his lashes. He put one finger on the inside of her wrist. “This blue vein touches your heart, Lady Eleanor.”

  “I would love to know the remainder of the poem,” she said, her voice dropping to a
near whisper.

  “So would I,” Villiers put in.

  She glared at him. Couldn’t he tell a private conversation when he overheard one? But now everyone was looking down the table, and Roland withdrew his finger as if she had burned him. She twitched with annoyance.

  “It is part of my own version of Romeo and Juliet,” Roland said. “I won’t share more; people find poetry tedious. Certainly my family tells me that mine is tiresome.”

  “Too flowery, in my opinion,” his father said. “Of course, he’s had quite a bit printed. He’s not just some ne’er-do-well with nothing better to do.”

  “Printed?” the duchess said, her tone dripping with disdain.

  “Likely you aren’t knowledgeable about the literary world,” the squire told her. “The very best have their poems printed, and no shame in that. The shame is in not printing.”

  “Humph,” was Her Grace’s response to that.

  “In fact, my son was knighted last year for his poetry writing,” the squire said, puffing up his thin chest.

  “A veritable troubadour,” Villiers said. His comment was perfectly pitched to make it unclear whether he meant it as a compliment or an insult.

  “When we tragically lost Prince Octavius last year,” the squire continued, “Roland wrote an exquisite verse in his memory. Truly beautiful, and the king himself thought so. He felt it succored him in his time of suffering, and he summoned the lad to Buckingham Palace and knighted him on the spot.”

  Roland’s lowered eyes were, perhaps, a bit more humble than Eleanor would have liked, but that was her ungracious, sarcastic nature coming out, and as Anne had told her, she needed to curb that trait. Luckily, Champagne had a mellowing effect.

  “Well, let’s hear a bit of this poetry, then,” Eleanor’s mother allowed, in a considerably warmer voice. “Not the piece for Princess Amelia. I can’t abide feeling sad. Something more entertaining, if you please.”