What I Did For a Duke (10 page)

Chapter 9

G
enevieve woke in a marvelous mood as usual to the music of three or four noisy birds perched in a tree outside her window. She lifted her hair away from her face where it seemed to have adhered during the night, smiled faintly, and—

Bloody hell.

Memory, as it would do, came crashing back into place, and along with the anvil of misery came to sit on her chest again. She accustomed herself to the weight of it, then slid out of bed and made her way to the window and rudely pushed aside the curtains. She was tempted to shoo the birds away.

She glanced down at the garden at the place the duke had stood just last night.

She must have imagined it, she decided.

Or dreamed it.

A
t breakfast, Moncrieffe was reminded why he disliked house parties so thoroughly. Something to do with all of the
people
to whom he was obligated to be civil. The fact that people grew considerably quieter around him helped matters, however. The conversation, a cheerful buzz, decidedly dropped in volume when he made his appearance, shaved, dressed expensively.

About a half dozen more servants appeared as well.

He spooned mounds of eggs onto his plate, and added kippers, selected a slice of ham, and then carried it to a table which had gone . . . well, not altogether silent. But he was reminded of letting a cat out into a garden when songbirds were in full voice. The chirps instantly became significantly less confident and frequent until the birds decided whether the cat was hungry and dangerous or elderly and toothless.

His was not an easy presence. He’d never minded. He was like the dam that redirected rivers. It was his role in life.

Still, breakfast wasn’t entirely unpleasant. It smelled like a breakfast room ought. The air was thick with the strong dark scents of coffee and smoked meat and good bread, toasted. Filtered light came in through fine lace curtains. Silver and porcelain clinked together in a sort of music as hungry guests passed about jam pots and attacked their plates and slurped down beverages.

Housemaids buzzed about the room as excitedly as flies.

Genevieve Eversea was in a green wool walking dress, and she was such an island of stillness his eyes were drawn immediately and he rested them briefly.

She glanced up at him. Her eyes were suspiciously red-rimmed. But perhaps she’d had a very late night of it?

He didn’t think so.

Jacob Eversea saw the duke and began to rise from his chair.

The duke gave his head a firm little shake. Eversea lifted his brows cheerfully and tipped his head in a gesture toward the empty chair next to him:
Sit here
. And the duke did.

Despite how he might feel about his son and what he intended to do to his daughter, he found himself liking Eversea the elder. He conveyed respect for Moncrieffe’s station without obsequiousness. He was economical with words, the way men who’d lived through so much they cease to be impressed by overmuch are, and it was clear life in general amused him while very little unnerved him, but then his tolerance had been shaped by his offspring.

But the duke, despite himself, was curious about the Eversea marriage. His wife sat at his elbow and presided over breakfast with an air of detached amusement and the patience of a shepherd. Alex didn’t mind her, either. She was very pretty, like her daughters. She didn’t natter on the way some women did, filling the air with words for the sake of hearing their own voices, like a lonely bird hoping to attract other birds, the inevitable result of too many years married to a too-quiet man.

But he sensed a prevailing tension between the two Everseas. He didn’t assume it had a thing to do with him, despite what he may have done with the youngest daughter. Marriages were mysteries, and well he knew. And tension could not set in where closeness hadn’t once been.

“Good morning, Your Grace,” Lady Millicent said bravely and cheerfully.

The duke reached for a knife in order to spread butter on a thick piece of fried bread. When he lifted it, he went still. Frowned a little. Then arched his brows in, as though inspiration struck. And then he hefted it thoughtfully in his hand.

And then looked pointedly down the table toward Ian.

Ian’s fork had been midway to his mouth when he intercepted the duke’s black stare.

It missed his mouth by an inch, bounced off his chin, and a confetti of scrambled eggs showered Harry and Millicent and Olivia.

Everyone leaped from their chairs.

Harry was at a loss at whom to see to first. “Thank you, Ian, but I learned to feed myself years ago.”

Much laughter ensued. Ian’s sounded strained and his eyes weren’t involved in it. They were fixed on the duke.

The duke eyed him in return until Ian at last looked down, becoming fascinated by his upside down reflection in a spoon.

Maidservants swarmed the table, curtsying like accordions for the benefit of the duke and all but wrestling over the opportunity to sweep up the eggs, jostling one another and nearly cracking their skulls at one point in a competition to clean.

“I’ve never seen you move so fast on my behalf before, Harriet,” Ian declared.

“Beggin’ yer pardon, Master Ian, but it ain’t on yer behalf. Ye ain’t a duke, are ye now?”

“No,” he confirmed darkly.

“And we’ve one in t’ ’ouse.” This was unassailable logic as far as Harriet was concerned.

The duke, accepting the uproar as his due, calmly attended to cleaning his plate with the speed and efficiency with which he did nearly everything he considered necessary rather than a luxury.

He looked across the table at Genevieve, who had surgically incised what appeared to be a triangle on the top of her fried egg. With the tine of her fork, she delicately lifted off the limp white ceiling of it to expose runny yoke. Satisfied, she laid her fork down and dipped the corner of her toast into it.

She paused mid-bite when she noticed the duke watching her with rapt fascination.

And then she shrugged with one shoulder, smiled a little, and snipped off the corner of the toast with her teeth.

I
t was decided—no one knew where or when the idea originated, but it had been taken up with enthusiasm—that a walk would be undertaken to enjoy the weather while it lasted. The ladies would bring their sketchbooks and embroidery and the men would bring their cricket bats out to perfect their swings ahead of cricket season, and presumably to impress the women.

Since Genevieve could conceive of no place where she would be happy, outside was as good as inside, and it hardly seemed likely that Harry would propose to Millicent whilst surrounded by friends and holding a cricket bat.

And so walk out they did.

The day had remained insultingly bright and clear. It hardly seemed fair to her that autumn had divested the trees of their leaves and left them to stand embarrassingly nude in a relentlessly lemony sun, let alone the fact that made the world seem cheerfully indifferent to her internal chaos.

Everyone
seemed to be oblivious. Chase, if he were here, might have noticed. Chase was seeing to business in London; he’d sent a brother and a sister he’d recently met, Liam and Meggy Plum, to live in Pennyroyal Green. And Colin could be very observant, but he was generally a rascal before he was sensitive, and he was at home with his wife a few miles away. Olivia assumed her head hurt. Louisa sent concerned glances and said nothing. Marcus didn’t notice.

Ian
had
asked her if her head hurt, which seemed to be the extent of male knowledge of female complaints. She’d asked Ian if his head hurt, as he’d looked a little wobbly, too.

They both denied a thing was wrong.

She drifted away and found a place on the scrupulously barbered lawn far enough away from the cricket horseplay to spread out an old shawl. She sat down, tucked her dress neatly over her knees and leaned back on her hands and she watched the men, and ached, and thought.

Harry was all but glowing in the autumn sun. It was both soothing and bittersweet to watch him. A painter could create an entire palette and call it “Harry’s Hair,” and include in it gold and wheat and flaxen and—

A shadow blotted her view before she could add another color to the palette in her mind.

The shadow turned out to be the Duke of Falconbridge.

He settled down next to her on the grass. His pose almost mimicked hers. He stretched out his legs and leaned back on his hands. He plucked off his hat and gently laid it alongside him.

He said nothing at all for a time.

Merely shaded his eyes and followed the direction of hers.

She wondered again if she’d imagined him walking through the garden. So sodden and exhausted had she been she somehow doubted she’d actually seen him. And yet . . .

She wasn’t going to trouble to be polite.

She was certain he would find something to say that she would object to or be uncomfortably fascinated by.

“He’s handsome.” The duke gestured with his chin toward Harry. “Osborne is. No
lines
.”

She froze.

And then slowly, slowly turned toward him and fixed him with what she hoped was a subject-quelling incredulous stare.

“I suppose,” she agreed warily. When one looked from Harry to the duke, the duke certainly suffered by comparison. And it wasn’t as though sunlight wouldn’t have anything to do with him. But he was certainly Harry’s chiaroscuro opposite. He didn’t
glow
. His hair was . . . his hair was black. Apart from that frost of gray at the temples, that was. And it was straight and just a bit too rakishly long, just in case anyone should forget his reputation for being dangerous. His skin was so fair that his dark eyes and brows were like punctuation on a page.

She turned away again, her body tensed against any further insights he might volunteer. Olivia and Millicent and Louisa looked like an autumn bouquet in their walking dresses. She focused on that soothing sight instead, deliberately blurring her vision until they were only color, rather than people, one of whom Harry wanted to marry.

“And you’re in love with him?”

Holy—!

She actually yelped. It was as much his tone as the observation: conversational. She turned away again and looked straight ahead, her vision blurring in shock.
I am a glacier,
she told herself.
I am a slippery ice wall against which his insights can gain no purchase. He will stop talking. He will stop talking.

“And he’s . . . somehow broken your heart?”

He said this almost brightly, as though they’d set out to play a guessing game.

Oh God
.
Pain.
She made a short involuntary sound. As though a wasp had sunk a stinger in.

She whirled furiously on him again, eyes burning with outrage.

So much for glacial control.

Oddly, he didn’t look triumphant. He looked almost sympathetic.

“I’m afraid it’s evident, Miss Eversea. To me, anyhow. If I’m not mistaken, no one else seems to have bothered to notice, if that’s any comfort. Unless you’ve confided in anyone? Your sister, perhaps?”

Rather than claw him in fury, she curled her fingers into the grass, and would have yanked it up by the roots if she wouldn’t have felt guilty about killing innocent plant life and creating more work for the groundskeeper.

And no. Olivia was the last person she would burden with the news of hopeless love.

“No,” she said shortly. Thereby admitting her deepest, darkest secret.

“And has he kissed you?” he asked, lightly.

Each impertinent question shocked her anew and flayed fresh welts over raw and newly exposed secrets. All of her muscles contracted, as if colluding to shrink away from him.

Why was he doing this? How did he
know
?

“He’s a
gentleman
,” she said tightly.

How quickly could she spring up and bolt away? Could she pretend she was being chased by a wasp? If she ran screaming from the duke surely a scandal would ensue. If this was his idea of courtship then she had no doubt his fiancée had abandoned
him
.

“And has he
kissed
you?” he repeated in precisely the same inflection apart from a fresh and maddening hint of amusement.

Her heart rabbited away in her chest, kicking, kicking painfully. This kind of misery was entirely new, and she hadn’t yet learned to accommodate it. Her stomach was roiling, her cheeks were flushed, and she wondered if she ought to go have a lengthy heartfelt chat with her handsome cousin, the vicar, to ask if there was any particular penance she could do to stop the unprecedented variety of suffering raining down upon her this week.

“He has kissed me,” she confirmed coldly.

What made her say it? It wasn’t entirely a lie. Perhaps pride had made her say it. Perhaps the very notion of another man kissing her would drive him away.

But Harry
had
kissed her hand once, lingeringly, as though her hand was a precious thing. It had surprised her; in her mind it had cemented their attachment.

“
Has
he?” Amused and clearly disbelieving. “Point to the part of your body he kissed.”

She stared rigidly across the expanse of green, eyeing her brother’s cricket bat and contemplating other more satisfying uses for it. Ian was demonstrating a swing for Harry. And for Olivia and Millicent, of course, so Olivia and Millicent could admire his form.

As if they knew or cared anything about form.
The things we do for men,
Genevieve thought.

She was silent. She could simply refuse to say another word to the man.

“Was
this
the part?” The duke tapped the back of her hand with one long finger.

She snatched it away from him and cupped it in her other hand as though comforting it and glared daggers at him.

“If you
please
, Lord Moncrieffe.”

The anguished embarrassment and her glare deterred him not at all. He raised his brows, waiting with infinite, infinite, downright
evil
patience, unruffled. His eyes were dark and deep, as reflective in the sunlight as the polished toes of his boots. Like a body of water, where one couldn’t tell whether you could wade safely through or step in and be swallowed whole by depth. She had the strangest sense he could absorb anything with those eyes and reflect back the same irony: a glare, a smile, a tragedy, a comedy.