A Duke Never Yields (25 page)

Morini rose and closed her fingers around two of the glasses. “Signorina, you are not listening. You wish to have the night with the handsome duke, it is so?”

Abigail eyed the two glasses and said, warily, “If the opportunity should arise, I wouldn’t say no.”

Morini held out the glasses. “Then here is your chance, signorina. The duke, he is proud, he has the honor, he does not make the try to seduce you.
This
, signorina.
This
will make him forget these things. This will open the arms of the so-handsome duke.”

The lamp flickered on the table next to the tray, giving the liquid an oily gleam, almost iridescent. Morini gave the glasses a little swish.

Abigail crossed her arms. “What’s in it, then?”

“A little of the limoncello, a little of other things.”

“What other things?” Abigail narrowed her eyes at the jars on the table.

“Is a secret, signorina. Is nothing harm.” She jiggled one glass enticingly near Abigail’s fingertips.

Abigail watched the drink catch the light. She ran her tongue along the roof of her mouth, which had gone strangely dry and thirsty. With unsteady fingers she plucked the glass from Morini’s fingertips and held it up to her eyes. “Nothing harmful? Are you certain?”

“Is pure, signorina. It give only the love.”

“I suppose,” Abigail said, stretching her words to the limit, “there are no priests nearby, should my intellect be overturned.”

“No, signorina. Is only for the love.”

“And it’s such a beautiful night, such a perfect night, a night for . . .”

“. . . the lovers,” Morini finished for her.

Abigail turned the glass this way and that, admiring its clarity, its brilliance, almost lit from within. The faint scent of lemons drifted into her nose. She tilted the glass closer and inhaled more deeply, lemon and something else, something lovely, and at once a sense of peace overcame her, a delicious, languorous anticipation. “Oh, that’s nice,” she breathed.

“You see, signorina? Is no harm. Is destiny.”

“Destiny. Yes. I shall take this to Wallingford at once.” Abigail turned on her heel.

“Wait, signorina! Is not working, just for one.” Morini held up the other glass and dangled it gently, back and forth, between her fingers. “There must be two. One for the gentleman, one for the lady.”

A little frisson of warning snaked across the haze of delight in Abigail’s brain, and then disappeared. “One for the lady?”

“Is so. There must be two, signorina. There must be equal.”

It seemed to make sense. Everything seemed to make sense at the moment, an absolute exquisite rightness, all the way through the world. Abigail plucked the glass from Morini’s fingers. “Very well. If I must.”

“You must, signorina. Now go find the handsome duke. Give him the great desire of his heart.”

“I will, Morini! I will!” Abigail exclaimed, and she danced on air across the kitchen and through the door, holding her precious burden in each hand.

An instant later, she poked her head back through the doorway.

“Ah, Morini. Just a slight . . . a little detail. I don’t suppose you know . . . of course, there’s no reason you
should
know . . . that is to say, I was rather wondering . . .”

Morini was already picking up the tray from the table. Without turning, she said, “In the library, signorina. The duke, he is in the library, all the evening.”

FOURTEEN

T
he tuba pounded through the open window of the library, the same two bloody notes, over and over again, until the Duke of Wallingford would willingly have given up one of his lesser estates for the chance to stuff a full-grown male pheasant down the bell, feathers and all.

He had tried closing the window at first, but the old glass hardly blocked the sound, only filtered out the obscuring effect of the other instruments. Moreover, he soon realized he had cut off the only source of fresh air in the stuffy book-lined room, which had been baking in the sun through most of the afternoon.

Suffocation, or slow descent into madness? The choice was his.

At last he opened the window again, reasoning that he was already far down that well-beaten path to insanity, and might as well finish the journey in style.

He returned to the desk, removed his jacket, slung it across the back of the chair. Hardly had he straightened his shirt cuffs and resumed his seat when the doorknob rattled, and into the library danced Abigail Harewood.

At least it seemed to be Abigail. A white feathered mask obscured her face, and her dress—what there was of it—had been cut so low in front and so high at the leg, Wallingford could not quite focus his eyes on any remaining identifying features.

“Oh, hullo,” she said. “There you are. May I come in?”

Wallingford lowered his eyelids to eclipse the sight of her overflowing bosom, but it was too late: The image was seared on his brain, in flawless photographic negative. “I would rather you didn’t,” he said.

“Disturbing your studies, am I? I do apologize.”

She sounded not the slightest bit contrite. Wallingford looked back up. She was balancing a pair of small glasses in her hands, and she glanced at him with a smile he might have described as shy, if he hadn’t known better from long experience.

She looked at him expectantly, and he realized he hadn’t answered her. “You are, as a matter of fact. What the devil are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be serving olives to the villagers?”

“Oh, the olives were finished long ago. They’re dancing now. The villagers, I mean, not the olives. What are you studying?” She wandered across the room toward him, looking . . . hesitant? Not Abigail Harewood. Surely not.

Wallingford slid the sheaf of papers back into the leather portfolio. “Nothing of particular interest.”

She laughed. “Why on earth are you studying nothing of particular interest?”

“You mistake me. What I’m studying is of no particular interest to you, Miss Harewood.” He sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, rather like one of his more pompous tutors at Oxford. “It is, however, of immense interest to me.”

She stopped a few feet away, holding the glasses before her. The lamplight shone like a nimbus on her chestnut hair. “I see. You’re still angry with me.”

Wallingford sat in his chair, regarding her, trying to ignore the lush picture she made in her mask and her provocative costume, trying to set aside all that he knew of her and felt for her. The effort was immense, like pushing a boulder away from the mouth of a cave to look inside. “Tell me something, Miss Harewood,” he said, in a soft voice.

“Don’t say that. Don’t call me Miss Harewood, in that tone of yours, that dreadful distant tone. You sound exactly like a duke.”

“I am a duke.”

She stepped forward, set the glasses down one by one, and curled her hands around the edge of the desk. “You know what I mean.”

He pinned his gaze firmly to her face, to stop it from wandering fatally downstairs. “Tell me, Miss Harewood, exactly how long you’ve been acquainted with my grandfather, the Duke of Olympia.”

Her start of astonishment was so instant, so profound, it nearly buckled his chest.

“Your grandfather? I beg your pardon.
Do
I know your grandfather?”

“You tell me.”

“I . . . I don’t know. I don’t think I do, but then Alexandra’s always introducing me to chaps at dinner parties, and I can never keep them straight. What does your grandfather look like?”

Wallingford wanted to place his elbows on the desk and lean forward, but as Abigail’s bosom happened to be overflowing its bodice exactly at eye level, he forced himself to remain at ease. “Pale gray hair, quite tall, overbearing disposition.”

“You in fifty years, then, more or less.”

Wallingford’s mouth twitched. “Breeding will out.”

“Well, I can’t say for certain. Half the fellows down the pub might be your grandfather, on that description, and the other half are merely too short. Does he dress well?”

“Exceedingly.”

“I suppose that rules out a few. But in all seriousness, Wallingford, if I
have
met him, I can’t recall his face, let alone a single conversation. Why the devil do you ask?”

Because I suspect my grandfather has played me for a fool
.

“You’re certain?” he asked.

“Didn’t I just tell you I
wasn’t
certain? What are you driving at?” Her eyes, behind her mask, looked as if they were narrowing at him.

Wallingford pressed the pads of his thumbs together with bone-crushing force and said, in a conversational tone, “You haven’t, for example, met him over the course of the winter, and concocted a scheme with him, whereby you gain yourself a ducal coronet, and he brings his licentious disappointment of a grandson to heel at last?”

The instant the words were out of his mouth, he recognized their absurdity. He reached forward and placed his hand on the portfolio, as if to reassure himself of the reality of what he’d studied throughout the afternoon and evening. Without so much as a bite to eat, his stomach reminded him, with a decidedly undignified growl.

Abigail, meanwhile, was laughing without restraint. “A ducal coronet? You’re not serious. A scheme with your
grandfather
?” She collapsed helplessly into a nearby chair. “Are you quite mad, or are you only having a laugh?”

“Certain facts have come to my attention . . .”

“And after I rejected you so gracelessly just this morning. Really, Wallingford!”

“No lady accepts the first proposal.”

Abigail’s laughter trailed off. She leaned forward in her chair and twisted her hands together. “You
are
serious. You
do
mean it.”

Something about her bewildered tone made his chest give off that infernal buckle again, that crumbling of the brickwork. “I only thought . . .”

“Was it what I said this morning? I
am
sorry, Wallingford. I didn’t mean to throw it back at you like that. You took me by surprise, that’s all. I should never have hurt you like that.”

“
Hurt
me?”

She rose with her fairylike grace and flew to his chair, sinking to her knees beside him. “Yes, your tender heart. You’re so abominably ill behaved at times, my darling, I forget just how tender it is. Do forgive me.” She put her hand on his leg, just above the knee. “You know I adore you.”

Wallingford’s mouth had gone shocked and dry. His every muscle was paralyzed with indecision: whether to embrace her, or to dash away. “Mad girl,” he managed at last.

“Yes, I am. I’m
your
mad girl. It’s just that it simply wouldn’t work, marriage. We are so much better off as we are.”

“As we are? As
this
?” He made a helpless motion: the library, the castle, the
oom-pah
of the tuba outside the window.

“Exactly like this.” She took up his hand from the arm of the chair and kissed it. “Don’t think for an instant I’m not honored, terribly honored. You’re the Duke of Wallingford; you have this extraordinary gift in your power, to raise some fortunate young lady to the highest in the land, and you have offered it to
me
,
you dear and thoughtless man.” She kissed his hand again. “It’s magnificent, and there
is
some lovely girl in England right now, some sweetly perfect rose of a girl, who longs for that gift, who longs to be your duchess. She’ll be so much better at it than I would.” She laid his hand against her cheek. “But you have my
heart
, Wallingford. You must believe that.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but she laid her finger over his lips.

“Hush. Don’t say anything. You don’t need to make up any sentimental rubbish. It does tax you so.” She rose in a sinuous motion and picked up the two glasses from the desk. “I missed you tonight. I was looking so much forward to serving you dinner.”

“Abigail, I . . .”

“But you must at least share this with me. It’s traditional.”

He took the glass and frowned at it. “What is it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Some concoction or another, a special recipe of Morini’s. Limoncello, I think, and a few other things.” She lifted her own glass. “Come along, my love. Buck up. To . . . oh, let’s see. To love affairs. Long may they prosper.”

The scent of lemons rose up from the glass to surround his intellect. “To love affairs,” he heard himself say, and he clinked his glass with hers and drained it.

The liquid burned delicately down his throat to his belly, spreading a lemon-scented warmth into each individual corpuscule of his body. He looked up and found Abigail’s bright eyes gazing at him adoringly from behind her white feathered mask. The entire world seemed to sigh and settle around him. “Oh, that’s very good,” he said.

“It’s perfectly lovely, isn’t it? Even better than I dreamed.”

“I want to kiss you, Abigail. May I kiss you?”

She took the glass from his hand and set it down, together with hers, back on the desk. She turned back and placed her long-fingered hands along the sides of his face, framing him with herself like a work of art. “It’s all I want in the world, Wallingford.”

Her lips tasted like lemons and enchantment. He wanted to devour them, but instead he kissed her gently, inquiringly, savoring each movement of her mouth, each movement of his. With one arm he reached underneath her and hoisted her into his lap.

“Oh, it’s divine,” she whispered. Her body melted against his; her arms twined around his neck. He could feel her in every nerve, his pulsing, living Abigail, more beautiful than air. Her feathers tickled his nose; her hair fell against his cheek as he kissed her, and when he rubbed it between his fingers he could not imagine a silk more fine, more perfect and unbreakable than Abigail’s chestnut hair.

I love you
.

She drew away, and for an instant Wallingford was afraid he’d said the words aloud, and then—because the world around him had mellowed into such a lovely and forgiving place—he was
glad
he’d said them aloud.

But if he
had
said the words, Abigail gave no sign. She only caressed his cheek and said, “Wallingford, let’s go down to the lake. It’s such a beautiful evening.”