An Unlikely Duchess (30 page)

“To ask for my hand?” Susanna said. “Will you wish to, sir?”

Sir Thomas still smiled. “Wrong tense,” he said. “There is nothing future about either my feelings or my intentions, ma’am. But you are very young. I will not rush you or ask again how long I must wait. I will be content to court you, to come to visit you occasionally.”

Susanna swallowed awkwardly. “My feelings are not future either, sir,” she said.

He looked at her with interest. He still held her hand. “Are they not?” he said quietly. “And what are those feelings? But that is an unfair question, is it not, since I have not explained what my own are. Let me be specific, then. I love you, Susanna. I was at first dazzled by your beauty, and then I came to admire your courage and fortitude and your devotion to your sister. And finally I came to love you for yourself. Will you tell me now what your feelings are?”

“You were kind enough to care for both Jo and me when we were not your concern at all,” she said. “And you were honest enough to confess to Bart that you had led us deliberately to Deerview Park, thinking that Jo and Mr. Villiers were going to Scotland. You need not have told us that. We would never have known. But it is not just gratitude I feel. I feel grateful to Bart too and to Mr. Villiers, though I have never met him. But I love you.”

Sir Thomas lifted her hand to his lips again. “One more confession,” he said. “You have met Villiers. Both at Deerview Park and in the library here a few minutes ago.” She frowned. “But there was no one else there except Papa and Grandpapa and Lord Ainsbury and his grace,” she said. But as she gazed at him, light dawned in her eyes and they grew wider. “Oh, dear,” she said, “Jo will kill him. She will really not take kindly to being so deceived, you know.”

“He is mortally afraid of the meeting,” Sir Thomas said with a grin. Susanna was smiling slowly. “But how very wonderful,” she said. “Jo is in love with Mr. Villiers, you know. I mean, with his grace. She has been pining for him for days.”

“Will you marry me?” he asked. “Is it far too soon to ask that? I have no experience at all in this sort of thing. Will you permit me to speak to your father? Or would you prefer me to wait?”

“Yes, I will,” she said quickly. “And no, I would not, if you please, sir.”

“Well, then,” he said, “I can only hope that my friend Mitford’s suit will prosper as well as mine today. And I can only envy him for having somewhere as private as the library in which to make his offer. He will be able to kiss his lady. I will have to wait for another occasion to kiss mine.” Susanna blushed and lowered her lashes.

“Perhaps,” he said, “I will ask your father for the use of the library too when it comes time to make my formal offer. Tomorrow, perhaps? And then I will kiss you.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Sometimes,” he said with a smile, “it is hard to wait for tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said.

Chapter 18

Lady Newman had smiled and nodded and assured her that she was looking very pretty. And she knew she was looking her very best. Betty has insisted that she sit far longer than usual having her hair done. And she was wearing the rose-pink dress that always had Papa calling her his pretty half-pint. Not that he had called her by that old pet name a great deal in the past week. In fact, perhaps he had not called her that even once.

Oh, dear. She had disappointed him a great deal. She must do better this time. Josephine squared her shoulders and raised her chin. He was tall and blond and blue-eyed. And arrogant. She gulped. And had chased her half over England, though she was still not sure if he had done so by coincidence or design.

She schooled her features to blandness as a footman opened the door into the library for her. She lowered her eyes and stepped inside—a lamb to the wolves, a Christian to the lions’ den.

The Duke of Mitford gripped his hands behind his back and schooled his features to blandness, and prepared to duck—a batter at cricket, without bat or pads, a victim to be used for target practice.

She looked so very familiar and yet so different—tiny, demure, neat. Mitford passed a tongue over dry lips. He had missed her. Life had been almost tranquil for the past week. Almost dull.

And then she looked up, and he wondered how he could have thought her different at all. Her face lit up and her mouth went into action. She hurtled across the room—in most unladylike fashion and with a most unladylike purpose. She came rushing straight into his arms—had he opened them to receive her? He must have done, because there she was against him, not an inch of air between them from shoulders to knees. And his arms had wrapped themselves right about her.

He had come. He had come! Looking so very dearly familiar that she could have wept buckets if she were given to tears and the vapors.

“Paul!” she cried, flying across the room to him before he could disappear and prove himself to be a mirage. “Paul, you have come. Oh, how wonderful. I was quite convinced that I would never see you again. And it has been such a very dull week without you. Nothing but scoldings and lecturings. But none of that matters now. You have come.’’

It must be more than five minutes since he had combed his hair, she thought, feeling it with her fingertips, running her fingers through it. It was all definitely unruly. And how could she have ever thought that he was not quite handsome but only nice? He was so very much more than nice. She stopped talking and smiled at him.

“I told you I would,” he said. “Did you not believe me?”

Tell her now. Now! Immediately. With not another moment’s delay. Tell her. She was looking at him with large and shining gray eyes. She was smiling at him with an eagerness he had seen before, usually when she was about to suggest some mad, harebrained scheme. But she had stopped talking.

He kissed her. And knew something that he had been suspecting all week, something that he had hoped was not true, something that had filled him with a certain dread. Something that both Tom and Angela had told him was so. Oh, Lord, it really was so. Though how he could have fallen in love with such a very improper little hoyden quite escaped logical understanding.

Not that he was quite occupied with logic at this precise moment, of course. He was kissing her again as he had kissed her twice before—in a totally improper manner, in a manner he had never even employed with Eveline, or with anyone else, of course. Except with this little pest, who should have clamped her lips firmly together and not allowed it even to begin.

Not that she should have allowed him even near her lips. Lord. Oh, dear Lord.

If she kept her eyes very firmly closed and kept her arms very tight about his neck and her body pressed very close to his, if she held her mouth open to his and allowed his tongue to continue its magic, if she wished very, very hard—if, oh, if.

Josephine abandoned herself for long and deliberately mindless moments to her love. And he felt so very right, so very dear.

“Paul,” she said eventually, “you have come. You should not have come. Oh, I wish you had not done so. I was beginning to forget you,”

“Were you?” he said, gazing into her eyes, a mere few inches from his own. Tell her! Oh, Lord, he was doing this all wrong. “So soon? I want you to marry me. Will you?”

The eagerness came back into her face for a fleeting moment only to fade right away again.

“Oh, Paul,” she said. “I cannot, you know. The Duke of Milford is come here today and I am to listen to his addresses and I am to accept him. I have promised Papa.”

“I have your father’s permission to offer for you,” he said. No, don’t do it this way. This is the road to sure disaster.

Soon now she would wake up. Oh, surely she would. She kept her arms clasped about his neck. If she let go for even one moment, he would fade away and be replaced by that horrid duke. “Papa has said I may marry you?” she said. “You mean I have a choice, Paul?”

He licked his lips. Well, here it was now. No longer any chance of avoiding it. And serve him right that it was the worst of all possible moments. “No,” he said. “Only the choice of yes or no, Josephine.”

“But...” she said.

And he could see it coming every inch of the way, just as if it had to work its way up from her toes through her body and into her face. For a moment he found himself wishing that she were seven feet tall.

He had examined the room very carefully with his eyes before her arrival. It was the worst possible room for such an encounter. Hundreds of books, among other things. It was rather like standing in the middle of a circle of heavy guns, all manned by enemy gunners.

Her first choice was the paperweight on the desk. Fortunately, the duke discovered over the next few seconds—or was it hours?—Miss Josephine Middleton had a very poor aim. She did not come even close with any of the weapons she chose, and she chose many. Any one of them would have decapitated him if it had crossed paths with his head.

She had never been so humiliated in her life. Never! All that time trotting about the country with him, telling him how much she hated the Duke of Mitford. And all the time he was laughing at her, allowing her to dig her own grave—handing her the shovel, even.

Oh, he was a horrid man. Horrid. A zillion times more horrid than she had ever imagined.

Oh, she would die of mortification. She would dig a hole for her head and put her head in and never pull it out again. All the time she had thought the duke was following her about. And all the time he had been leading her about. By the nose.

“Oh, how could you!” The paperweight from Papa’s desk went zooming past his shoulder. “Get away from me!” The paperknife flew past his other shoulder. “You toad!” A book died even before it had time to fly past him. “Get out of here. I hate you.”

And so on. She did not know what she screamed. It rained books in the library.

“Josephine...”

“don’t you Josephine me!” A cushion finally hit a glancing blow off his shoulder.

They would have the whole household in there in a moment witnessing the Duke of Mitford’s proposal to the Honorable Miss Josephine Middleton. Mama and Grandpapa would discover just what sort of a demure and proper young lady she was. Good Lord. She would wreck every book in the room. They would be wading in books soon. “Josephine. Enough!” he commanded eventually in his best ducal voice. But the voice was not enough to quell this particular little termagant. He had to step right up to her, catch her by the wrists, and twist them behind her back. “Enough now,” he said, feeling her bosom heaving against his chest.

“Unhand me,” she said, all ice now that her body had been put out of action. She glared fiercely into his eyes. “Or I shall spit in your eye.”

“Oh, no,” he said, “don’t do that. I should hate that.”

“Unhand me, then,” she said.

“Josephine.” He tightened his grip on her wrists
.
“What was I to do? You had told me that if you were back home again you would have had to marry me. The duke, that is. It would have been most ungentlemanly to have told you the truth then. It would have embarrassed you.”

He could hear breath being drawn into her. He could feel her breasts pushing more firmly against his chest.

“Embarrassed?” she said. “And how do you think I feel now, sir? Pardon me—I mean, how do you think I feel now,
your grace
? Charmed to know what a prize cake I have been making of myself? And how dare you hold me like this against my will! Unhand me immediately.”

“Josephine!” he said, his head tilting to one side.

She did not even have a hand free to put up over her eyes. And she was pressed so firmly to him that she could not even dip her face against his neckcloth. Oh, she would die of humiliation. She would. All those things she had told him about himself. Had she told him that he was tall and blond and blue-eyed? Had she? She could not remember. She would die if she had. Oh, dear, and oh, gracious, she had told him he was a womanizer! She ruthlessly suppressed the thought.

“Mr. Porterhouse lied,” she said. “He said you were tall and blond and blue-eyed.”

“Alas,” he said, and he had the gall almost to smile, “the man is a born liar, Josephine. You might have known that he meant small and mousy and plain.”

“Your hair is not mousy,” she said indignantly. “It is a wonderful brown. And you are not plain. You are—nice. And if you were tall I should feel like a veritable infant tripping along at your side.”

“You are planning to trip along there in the future, then?” he said. And she almost exploded with wrath when he tipped his head still more and kissed her neck beneath one ear.

“I am not!” she said firmly. “And I do not recall giving you permission to touch my person, sir—your grace.”

The Duke of Mitford choked, his mouth still against her neck. “Jo!” he said. “I will not ask you if you have heard the one about the stable doors and the bolting horse. Everyone has heard that one. Don’t you think it is time you forgave me?”

“You dare to laugh at me?" she said. “And you ask for forgiveness? Never. I hate you.”

“I don’t think you do,” he said, daring to approach her mouth with his own. She would probably bite his nose off. “I don’t think you do. I think you love me...”

“Love you?” She injected as much scorn info the word as she could muster.

“...as I love you.”

“What did you say?”

“I don’t think you do,” he said.

“After that”

“I think you love me.”

“After that.”

“Ah.” Mitford raised his eyes to the ceiling and frowned. “Did I say something else?”

“Tell me!”

“Mm,” he said, looking back into her eyes. “As I love you.”

“You don’t!”

“Yes, I do.”

“You don’t.”

“Do.”

“You don’t.”

“All right, then,” he said with his best ducal hauteur, “I don’t.”

“Paul?”

“Josephine?”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Oh!” She twisted away from him with one mighty jerk and grabbed a volume from the shelf behind her with a wrist that bent beneath its weight. “Do I have to throw it?”

“What is it?” he asked.