An Unlikely Duchess (11 page)

He got quietly to his feet, rolled his greatcoat and set it carefully down the center of the bed, and climbed gratefully between the blankets on his side, balancing himself on the edge of the bed. He did not think he had ever in his life lain on a softer, warmer, more inviting surface.

But he did not have long to rhapsodize. He was sleeping within minutes.

All good things must come to an end, of course—sometimes sooner than necessary. He awoke with a jump when a bolt from heaven landed on his left eye. Except that it was not a real bolt, he realized as soon as he shook himself free of his dream, but a feminine fist.

The owner of the fist was not, apparently, awake. She turned over onto her side facing him—and when had he moved to the center of the bed facing her?—with a great deal of wriggling and rustling and sighing, had discovered that his shoulder was warmer and more comfortable than her pillow, and burrowed her head against it. There was some muttering, and the arm and hand that had smacked him curved around his waist. She settled back into deep sleep again. The rolled coat was still between them.

Oh, Lord! Oh, good Lord. Her hair was tickling his nose. And during the extended ten minutes of his absence at bedtime, she must have washed and put something on herself. Something with a soft feminine fragrance. Something good.

The Duke of Mitford was no expert on feminine fragrances. Eveline had always worn a strong, sweet perfume. He had never liked it, though he had never been impolite enough to tell her so.

Miss Middleton smelled good. And her breath was warm at his neck. And where the deuce was he supposed to put his arm? It was dangling rather awkwardly over hers, down along his side. He set it at her waist—a soft and small and warm waist. And good Lord, there was nothing except a very thin shift between his hand and her.

“I won’t marry the duke, Papa,” she said in a voice of firm determination, making the Duke of Mitford jump and then lie very still, holding his breath. The words were followed by mutterings and grumblings and more head burrowing against his shoulder.

“The ring fell off,” she muttered, and she was still and quiet again.

What a coil! If he tried to move away, she would doubtless wake up and think he was trying to ravish her. If he did not move away, she might wake up before he did and think that he was responsible for this cozy arrangement of bodies.

Oh, Lord, what was he to do? The Duke of Mitford wished fervently that he had had more experience with the worldlier side of life. Of course, there was no chance whatsoever that he would sleep another wink that night anyway. Perhaps after a while, when he was quite sure she was fast asleep, he could ease his way over to the side of the bed and down onto the floor again.

“Nice,” she muttered against his neck. She sighed deeply, sending tickles right down to his toes. “Nice.”

The Duke of Mitford, who would not have a wink of sleep for the rest of the night, had a deep sleep instead.

***

It was far more comfortable to ride inside the old coach than up on the box, Bartholomew discovered. And the riding was smoother too. Not that it was the driver who made the difference, of course. It was a fact that the road north was kept in far better repair than the one they had traveled early that morning.

However it was, Sukey was not sick any more. Sam said it was because she had eaten some breakfast. She said it was because the ride was smoother. Bartholomew said it was because she had grown accustomed to the motion of the carriage.

And Sam had turned out to be something of a tyrant. He had stopped to change horses long before Bartholomew thought it was necessary.

“The little lady needs a rest and some tea and vittles,” the new coachman said quite firmly when his new master voiced his objections. And so Susanna had her tea and some cakes while her brother fumed at the delay.

And Sam stopped for the night long before it was quite dark.

“The road is still quite clear to me,” Bartholomew protested. “And it is going to be a clear night, doubtless with moon and plenty of stars.”

“The little lady needs ‘er dinner and ‘er rest,” Sam said. And who was to argue with such a giant? Certainly not Susanna, who looked quite exhausted although she had valiantly withheld all complaints. “The gent won’t escape with the jewels,” he added with a reassuring grin. “Nor the other gent with the lady. The trail is clear enough.”

And it was too. There was no lack of people who had seen the gaudy blue and yellow carriage with the handsome gentleman, and the gentleman’s curricle with the lady passenger. They would catch up to them the next day or the day after, Sam said with the greatest confidence.

But who the devil was Paul Villiers? And what the deuce was Jo doing with him?

Josephine was awake a full five minutes before the knock sounded on the door. She woke feeling warm and drowsy and quite unwilling to be roused. She simply must remember to ask Betty what new soap the sheets were being washed in. A musky smell. Nice.

“Nice,” she heard herself mutter, and then felt remarkably foolish and remarkably something else too, for she was not, of course, lying in her bed at home but in the bed at the inn that Mr. Villiers had paid for. And she was snuggled up warmly against Mr. Villiers’s person, her head against his shoulder, her nose against his neck, her arm about his waist and her leg pushed up against his—except that the blankets or something had got bunched up between them.

She opened her eyes and closed them again, afraid that her eyelashes would tickle his neck and waken him. She was afraid to breathe for the same reason until she discovered that doing so was necessary for survival. His own arm was over hers and clasping her shoulder.

Over hers. That meant that her arm had gone into place first. She was responsible for this most embarrassing situation. Embarrassing? Mortifying in the extreme. Papa would kill them both. Grandpapa would read her a week-long lecture. Even Bart would be shocked.

Oh, goodness gracious, and oh, dear. However had she got herself into such a dreadful state of affairs? She was quite beyond redemption. If she had sat down at home and dreamed up the very worst predicament she could possibly get herself into, she could not have imagined something quite as bad as this. She would have thought of something like having to marry that toplofty duke.

It was a good thing, a very good thing, that Mr. Villiers was a nice man and such a kind one. She would be in a very nasty case indeed if he were not. In definite peril of a fate worse than death.

Fortunately, she did not feel in great peril at all. Indeed, if she calmed down and stopped thinking of Papa and Grandpapa and Bart, she did not feel in any peril at all. She felt decidedly safe. She had known before that Mr. Villiers’s shoulders and arms were well muscled. She could feel some of those muscles beneath her head now. And yet his shoulder was comfortable too. She did not think she would be afraid if a whole army of Mr. Porterhouses were to come storming into the room. She felt quite safe and warm and comfortable.

Paul. It was a nice name. If someone had asked her the day before to say what her favorite men’s names were, she would have said Justin or Nicholas or Christopher or Robert. Never Paul. That would have been low on her list. But only because she would not have thought of it. If she had thought of it, surely she would have put it quite at the top of the list.

She liked his smile. Oh, not just the social smile, though that was nice too, but the one he used when he was really amused, the one that dragged the right side of his mouth higher than the left and set his eyes to dancing. It was quite the most attractive smile she had ever seen.

Paul.

Josephine’s eyes snapped open when she realized that she was on the verge of dozing off again. Oh, goodness gracious, she must not sleep. She had a very important job to do. She had to extricate herself from an embrace that would surely have him thinking her a brazen hussy at the very least if he were to wake up. She edged her head away from his shoulder and tried to slide her arm from beneath his.

“Mm,” he complained, and she stopped moving.

He moved his hand up from her shoulder to the back of her neck and rubbed lightly over the smooth skin beneath her hair. Josephine felt shivers twirl down to her stomach and cause it to perform a complete somersault. She swallowed hard.

But he was not awake. And there was one thing she must do before edging farther away from him. There was one thing she could not resist doing any more than she had been able to stop breathing a few minutes before. She lifted her hand and touched one of his curls very lightly. She was smoothing the hair over one finger when the knock sounded at the door.

A gentle tap, not a loud pounding.

But Josephine rolled toward the edge of the bed with such speed that she teetered at the edge for a moment. And Mr. Villiers leapt straight up in the air—she would swear until her dying day that he did—and came down on his feet beside the bed.

At least he would never know, she thought, what he would have discovered if he had woken of his own accord at that particular moment. He glanced at her—looking quite adorably rumpled—and answered the door.

A few minutes later Mr. Villiers had been borne off to see if any of Warren Hennessy’s shirts would fit him—was it going to be very obvious that he had slept in the one he was wearing? Josephine wondered—and she was in the blessedly competent hands of Caroline’s maid. And Lucy, glancing a little consciously at the untidy bed, congratulated her on her marriage two days before.

Oh, dear.

Chapter 7

“What I should have done,” the Duke of Mitford was saying, “was take Mr. Hennessy to one side last night and explain the whole to him. He could have taken you home with his family and I could have continued in pursuit of your jewels.”

“But what would he have thought about the fact that we were together and had been all day?” she said.

“I could have explained,” he said, “that I met you yesterday morning after you discovered your loss and had agreed to chase after the thief with you. It would have seemed unwise, but not too, too improper. I wish I had thought of it.”

“But he would have sent me back home,” she said. She clung to her usual fistful of his coat sleeve as the curricle swayed around a bend in the road. “And perhaps I would have arrived back before the Duke of Mitford, and I would have had to marry him.”

“And what is so bad about that?” he asked. “You have never met him. Perhaps he is not near as bad as you think. Perhaps he is a very personable man.”

“How could he be?” she asked reasonably. “There is his man.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “There is his man. Incontrovertible evidence against the master. I had forgotten about him.”

“Besides,” she said, “I would rather be with you than with the Hennessys.”

“But good Lord,” he said, aghast, “you should not, ma’am. My mind is quite plagued with the thought of the past two days and all the terrible impropriety of them. And the lies!”

She looked at him in that way he wished she did not have— all large and soulful gray eyes. “I have inconvenienced you terribly, have I not?” she said. “You have no wish to be wasting your time with me any longer. Perhaps I should after all throw myself on the mercy of Mr. Hennessy. I have been very selfish.”

Mitford passed a hand over his brow. “It’s not that at all,” he said. “If you are mad enough to travel about England with a strange gentleman, ma’am, then I would as soon it was with me. And it is too late by far to be telling the Hennessys the truth. They would collapse with a collective apoplexy.”

“Yes,” she said, still clinging to his sleeve, “I suppose they would. You are willing to continue with me, then, sir? You are very kind.”

“Kindness has nothing to do with the matter,” he said fervently. “Insanity has everything to do with it.”

She smiled at him, but he deliberately did not look down to see the smile. He kept his eyes on the road ahead. Good Lord, Mama would go into a permanent decline when she discovered just what sort of bride her own father had picked out for him.

They had had breakfast with the Hennessys and repeated their promise to consider accepting the invitation to stay at Hawthorn House if they did not find their baggage coach that day. And they had laughed and blushed a great deal at Mr. Hennessy’s insistence that they both looked as if they could do with another few hours of sleep.

“Or perhaps I should not use the word
another
,” he had added, so that everyone at the table had blushed except Mr. Hennessy and his good lady.

They were far later setting out than Mitford had intended. But it seemed that a bride and her groom did not rush anywhere, except perhaps to bed at night, and they had been forced to play the part to the end. And of course, there had been some delay while Caroline Hennessy’s maid sewed up the hem of the borrowed dress a good three inches.

And then when they had set out, it had been in quite the opposite direction from the one he had planned so very sensibly the night before. For the Hennessys turned out in force to wave them on their way, and it would have looked peculiar indeed if they had turned south in order to continue their wedding trip to Scotland.

Though, of course, they could have turned south in search of their missing baggage coach. Now, why had he not thought of that at the time? Oh, Lord, if he only had had some practice at intrigue!

The trail was still very easy to follow until they lost it abruptly and completely late in the afternoon. At one inn the blue and yellow carriage and the tall, dark, and handsome gentleman were clearly remembered. He had changed horses there during the morning. At the next inn, no one recalled seeing anyone fitting the description, though there had been a black and yellow carriage carrying an elderly couple south, one groom had informed them helpfully.

At the next inn it was the same story, except that no one mentioned the southbound carriage.

“But we would have passed him if he had turned back,” Josephine said, frowning and contorting her lips to one side so that she might bite at the inside of her cheek. “He is not getting away with my jewels, that is for certain. If he thinks I will abandon the search so easily, he is sadly mistaken.”