A Duke Never Yields (16 page)

“Of course not,” she said, too quickly. “I always speak this way. Never could keep to a single topic. What were we discussing? Keys, or books? Or both?”

“Specifically, the key to the library,” said Wallingford.

“Oh. Well, there’s your problem, right there.” She made rustling movements, as if smoothing her dress.

“Problem? What problem? The library is locked, and therefore we find the housekeeper and obtain the key. Perhaps you might care to lead the way, Miss Harewood.” He spoke with stern authority. He was quite sure, now, that she was hiding something. The very hairs on his skin seemed to know it. Miss Abigail Harewood might flummox the rest of them, but
he
knew her cunning. He knew her, inside and out. She couldn’t hide a single flutter of that ebullient manner from
him
;
no, not a single hesitation of her voice nor wasteful movement of her hand.

“Ah, well, you see, Your Grace,” she said, “and perhaps you ought to know this already, if you were properly familiar with the library in question, but you see . . .”

“Yes, Miss Harewood?”

“It locks from the inside.”

Check
.

Wallingford folded his arms. His eyes were growing more accustomed to the ghostly light, and he thought he could pick out Abigail’s smile, just tipping the corners of her mouth, as if she were fighting to control it. Her dress rustled slightly, a shifting of petticoats around her slender legs. His right hand, he realized, was still warm from the accidental meeting with her breasts.

“What are you suggesting, then, Miss Harewood?” he said. “That the library door has locked itself?”

“Why, no. Of course not. But perhaps your brother has locked himself in. Did you think of knocking?”

“Why on earth would my brother lock himself in the library?”

“Why, for privacy, of course. To keep himself safe from interruption.” She leaned forward and warmed his collar with her sweet breath. “From Lady Somerton’s treacherous attempts at seduction, perhaps.”

Was she
laughing
at him?

“Lady Somerton hasn’t a treacherous bone in her body,” he said confidently, and leaned forward, too, ostensibly to intimidate, but really because he wanted to catch once more the sweetness of Abigail Harewood’s breath in his nose, the drift of warmth from her skin. “You, on the other hand, Miss Harewood . . .”

“I . . .
what
? I’m treacherous?” She laughed. “Surely not. I’m straightforward to an absolute fault. I’m a living monument to straightforwardness. Why, my sister would be
delighted
if I were less straightforward.
You must strive to obtain a few wiles, Abigail
, she tells me,
or you’ll never catch yourself a husband
.”

“Oh, you’ve wiles enough,” Wallingford heard himself growl. Almost as if . . . good God, it couldn’t be so. He couldn’t be
flirting
with her, could he? He wanted to jump back, but his shoes seemed to have glued themselves to the flagstones.

“Wiles enough for what, Your Grace?” Her voice twinkled in the shadows. “For a husband?”

“For anything you damned well please. Isn’t that right, Miss Harewood?”

She laughed. “You have a great deal more confidence in my abilities than I do, Your Grace. Why is that?”

“Because I have seen them at work. Now tell me, Miss Harewood, in the plain, straightforward language of which you own yourself proud: Exactly
what
is going on in that
library
right now
?
” He spoke forcefully, putting a feral snap into the words
what
and
library
, and looming over her so closely that scarcely an inch or two of empty space remained between their respective bodies.

“Oh,” she said breathlessly, “how I adore it when you speak like that! Towering over one like a colossus! It gives one the most delicious shivers, straight the way down one’s back.”

“Answer the question, Miss Harewood!” he thundered.

“It’s the same way you spoke at dinner tonight, and—I speak in confidence here, Your Grace—it was all I could do then, not to fling myself in your arms and insist you ravish me, right there on that enormous old table. Well, once you’d ordered all the others out of the room, of course. I am not so depraved as
that
.”

Wallingford opened his mouth and found he had not the smallest word to say.

“Now tell me, Wallingford,” Abigail continued, with perfect composure, “what you meant by all this business of raising the stakes? Of ousting us from the castle, lock, stock, and all that? It seems so excessive.”

Wallingford’s brain, still reeling, returned no answer.

“And smacking rather of hypocrisy, if you don’t mind my saying so. After all, strictly speaking, you and I are the guiltiest parties of all. Are we not?” She placed her hand on his sleeve, so gently he might not have noticed the pressure at all, except that this was Abigail and Wallingford’s every available faculty recorded her movements, her words, her expressions, in minute detail.

Not that many of Wallingford’s vaunted faculties were available at the moment. At the words
ravish me, right there on that enormous old table
, an image had leapt into his brain of such voluptuous depravity, such extravagant sensuousness, such luscious sexual possibility, it rendered him helpless as a newborn.

“Guilty?” he mumbled, fastening on a word at last. He wished she would take a step or two backward, to allow a little space between her tempting warm body and his. Perhaps then he could gather his wits about him.

“Quite guilty. If I hadn’t made that silly comment upstairs in your room—for which I am deeply sorry, Wallingford, I should
never
think of our liaison in such terms,
never
—why, I daresay I shouldn’t be standing here now, as I am.”

“As you are?”

“As a maiden, of course. You would have quite despoiled me, and I should have been very glad of being despoiled, and we would probably be upstairs furthering my ruin at this very moment. I say, are you quite all right? I haven’t been too
straightforward
with you, have I?”

“I think, Miss Harewood,” he said at last, in a strangled voice, almost a whisper, “you had better lead the way to the library directly, and I shall endeavor to forget this conversation ever took place.”

“I
have
shocked you, haven’t I?” She sighed. “You see? No wiles whatsoever. Here you are, a notorious seducer, and here am I, quite willing to be seduced, and yet somehow . . .”

“Miss Harewood,” said Wallingford, working frantically to stave off the imminent explosion of his brain, “the
library
!”

“Oh!” Her hand dropped away from his sleeve at last. “The library. Of course. Do you think it might be better to head ’round the bottom of the main staircase, or to . . .”

He was going to kiss her, Wallingford realized in horror, if only to stop her mouth. With heroic effort, he forced his shoes to separate from the flagstones, stumbling backward with the force of his momentum.

“Careful!” she sang out.

He didn’t answer. The narrow Gothic windows beckoned, outlined with moonlight, guiding his footsteps across the great hall to the passageway to the west wing. The library lay beyond, a great two-story cavern of a room, lined with ancient leather-bound volumes in a fine state of mildewed neglect. A warm room, despite its high ceilings; it caught all the afternoon sun through its windows (not a favorable location for a library, in fact, but perhaps the builder had not been a lover of books) and trapped it like an oven. Wallingford had spent many a well-intentioned hour there with a book sitting promisingly in his lap, only to fall promptly asleep.

Perhaps that was the case with Roland, too. A clever chap, his brother Roland, beneath all that laziness, but since the precocious days of his youth, he had seemed to settle into an intellectual somnolence that few books could penetrate.

Abigail’s footsteps tripped lightly behind him down the stone passageway. “Wait, Your Grace!” she called. “A word with you!”

He could not ignore her. Ass he might be—he admitted it freely—but certain breaches of etiquette were impossible even for him. He stopped and turned, warily. “Yes, Miss Harewood?”

The passageway was even darker than the great hall, without any moonlit windows to speak of, and only the distant glow at either end to lighten the shadows. Abigail was panting a little, from the effort of keeping up with him, and his fevered imagination fastened at once on the undoubted heave of her breasts—God, such breasts, he could feel their echo on his palm even now—beneath her dress.

“You never answered my question, Your Grace. Why change the terms of the wager? Are you so eager to see us away?”

“You and your friends, Miss Harewood, are an entirely unnecessary distraction,” he said, “quite antithetical to the purpose of our . . . our
sojourn
here in Italy.” The word
sojourn
sounded so pompous; he shuddered as he said it. “And what’s more, I strongly suspect that you’re attempting to do the same thing by us, only with rather more subversive means. It’s an act of preemption, nothing more.”

“But I don’t want you to leave at all. I’ve told you so.”

He hesitated. “Perhaps you don’t, Miss Harewood, but your sister does. And Lady Morley is even more inclined to have her own way than you are, isn’t she?”

A delicate pause settled between them, and then, quite unexpectedly, Abigail drew nearer, put her hand beneath his elbow, and spoke in a gentle voice. “Please, Your Grace. All this—it isn’t necessary. Can we not simply try to get along with one another? Must everything be battle and conflict?”

Her voice was so low, so sweet. Her hand cupped his elbow caressingly. He could not resist her like this, soft and pleading. He could not resist her elfin form with its graceful curves, her generous warmth reaching out to surround him, to breathe life into the stiffened cells of his body.
Yes
, he wanted to tell her,
I should be miserable if you left, more miserable than before; I should wither and die.

Wallingford took a step closer. His hand reached up to enclose the curve of Abigail’s jaw.

My dear boy
,
said the stern Duke of Olympia,
has the entire conduct of your adult life ever suggested your usefulness for anything else?

“Wallingford,” whispered Abigail, the smallest breath of a word.

He stood still, muscles locked, brain hammering. Abigail’s face was dark and shadowed; his eyes couldn’t seem to resolve a single detail of her, and yet he knew exactly how she lay before him, exactly how her eyes tilted, exactly how her ear curved beneath the soft chestnut wave of her hair. Her skin was pure warm satin beneath his palm.

He leaned his lips toward her opposite cheek. “Miss Harewood,” he whispered, even softer than she. “The library.”

*   *   *

A
bigail walked as slowly as possible along the flagstones, feigning uncertainty. “It’s so dark,” she said. “I can’t see a thing. I do hope Philip hasn’t left any of his toys on the floor, or we shall be done for.”

“For God’s sake, Miss Harewood,” Wallingford growled behind her, “hurry along.”

How long had it been since Lilibet had crept downstairs to meet Lord Roland in the library? Abigail didn’t dare check her watch, not that she could have made it out in the darkness. Half an hour, perhaps? An hour? How long had she been standing in the great hall with Wallingford, in the passageway with Wallingford, stringing him along while her nerves frizzled and her brain spun? Enough time for poor, lovesick Lord Roland to work his magic on poor, lovesick Lilibet?

The irony, of course, was that Lilibet actually
expected
Abigail to march through the library door and surprise them. That was the plan, after all, as Abigail had presented it to her cousin: Seduce Penhallow, and then Abigail would catch them in the act, and the gentlemen would be dispatched out of harm’s way before any attention—say, that of beastly Lord Somerton—could be brought to bear on the Castel sant’Agata.

Lilibet, therefore, would not be surprised to hear Abigail and Wallingford pound on the door to interrupt her in flagrante
with Lord Roland Penhallow on the library sofa. She would be ready to claim that Penhallow had come after her while she looked for a book, and Penhallow—dear honorable gentleman that he was—would immediately accept all the blame and that would be that.

According to plan.

Except that Abigail had not actually intended to interrupt them. She had intended to let nature work its undoubted course on the two of them, and then at least one loving couple under the roof of the Castel sant’Agata would be well on their way to reversing the ancient curse.

Until the Duke of Wallingford had blundered into things.

“Oh!” Abigail feigned a desperate stumble. “Oh, my ankle!”

“Shall I lead the way, then?” came Wallingford’s dark voice, unsympathetic.

“Of . . . of course not.” She limped on with gallant head held high, more slowly than before. “I can manage. Just. Only a little strain of the sinews. I shall be right as rain by morning, I’m sure, though I shall perhaps need some trifling assistance on the stairs.”

The end of the passageway drew near. Just around the corner lay the door to the library. A glow spread out along the stones, from the large window at the entrance to the library wing, which caught the moonlight at a perfect angle. Abigail put her hand on the wall and held up her foot like an injured hound. “Oh, how it twinges!” she said.

“Shall I carry you, then?” Wallingford’s voice nearly bowed under the weight of his sarcasm.

“Oh, how kind of you! I should like that very much. Shall I put my arm around your neck, like this, or can you manage without it?”

Wallingford’s skin quivered under her fingers, just above his starched collar. He removed her hand with great care. “I assure you, Miss Harewood, I was only making a joke. We both know how unsuitable it would be, were I to carry you unchaperoned through the castle at night. A clear breach not only of the terms of our wager, but of propriety itself.”