How to Dance With a Duke (25 page)

He waited in silence for her to say something, anything, in response to his argument.

Unable to see her eyes, he caught his breath in longing as her pink tongue darted out against her upper lip.

“Do you really not find my facility with languages off-putting?” she asked quietly.

Inwardly he cheered. Aloud he said, “On the contrary. I find it quite alluring.”

“And do you honestly believe we will have a better chance of finding Father’s journals if we are married?”

“I do,” he said.

“I would like to try to visit Egypt sometime in the near future, despite my fear of enclosed spaces,” Cecily said, lifting her chin in defiance. “My father refused to allow me to go. If this is something you would find objectionable I should like to know now before I give you my answer.”

“I do not foresee any reason why we should not be able to take such a voyage,” Lucas responded, not surprised in the least by her demand. He had expected her to mention it earlier. “Though I would suggest we postpone it until we have found your father’s journals.”

Cecily looked up at him, her eyes searching his, for what, he did not know. But she seemed to find whatever it was she sought, for she nodded as if coming to a decision, and said, “Then, my lord, I accept your proposal of marriage.”

“Excellent,” he said, taking her mouth in a kiss that left them both breathless with the memory of the passion they had shared only last night. Before he succumbed to the need in them both, he pulled back.

“You will not be sorry, Cecily,” he said, looking into her eyes, and pleased to see the flush in her cheeks. He reached out to caress her lower lip with his thumb. “I promise you, you will not.”

“I know that,” she returned, smiling ruefully at him. “I believe I must have known it already when I gave myself to you last night. Though I suspect I did not realize it until just now.”

The heat that her words generated in his groin, Lucas understood. What surprised him more was the constriction in his chest. Now that she had acceded he felt both relief and a vague sense of being on the cusp of something. Something important.

Badly needing to find some occupation, Lucas kissed her briefly on the cheek, told her he would inform her stepmama of their impending nuptials and would go in search of a special license. To Cecily he left the details such as where they would be married. He would brook no objections to the time, which would be the end of the week at the latest. When she objected to his haste, Lucas shook his head.

“I know you would perhaps like more time, but I will not take the chance. The members of society are perhaps mentally deficient in many ways, but they are all, to my knowledge, capable of counting to nine. I will not have you or our child exposed to the censure of polite society.”

Wordlessly, Cecily nodded. Watched him leave the room with a sense of unreality. She had awakened this morning knowing that he would propose. But now, having accepted him, she had the uncanny sensation of being on a runaway coach. No matter how she pulled on the reins, she realized, there was no stopping now.

She only hoped that her faith in Lucas would not flag once the vows were said. Because she very much feared he was the sort of man she could fall in love with.

And that, she realized, had been her real objection to the match all along.

*   *   *

She was resting in her bedchamber from the whirlwind that was Violet with a project, having spent the better part of the day being fitted for a wedding dress that she would wear in three days’ time, when Cecily heard a light knock at her door, followed by the sound of her cousins entering the room.

“Cecily?” she heard Juliet call. “Are you sleeping?”

“Of course she’s not sleeping,” Maddie retorted. “I just saw her twitch. She’s faking so that we’ll leave her alone.”

“That’s not very sporting of you, dearest,” Juliet chided. “Especially when you’ve got such news as this to tell.”

Knowing that resistance was futile, Cecily opened her eyes. “From the sound of it you already know the news, so there’s no need for me to tell it.”

“But there’s every need,” Juliet argued, tucking a lock of red hair behind her ear. “We’ve only heard the bare bones of the story. You must tell us the rest, with the pertinent details added in.”

“Then let us call for the tea tray first,” Cecily said briskly, leading them into the small sitting room adjacent to her bedchamber. “For it is quite a long story.”

When they were all seated, with the tea tray and a generous number of ginger biscuits laid out before them, she told them about her visit to the Egyptian Club the night before with Winterson. With certain details omitted, of course.

“But I don’t understand,” Juliet said with a frown. “If no one discovered you’d been there, then why is there any need for you to marry? It’s not as if you—”

A pointed look from Cecily stopped her in mid-sentence.

“Oh,” she said, her green eyes widening.

“Oh, indeed,” Maddie said wryly. “I should never have thought you’d be the one to compromise yourself, Cecily. I am quite impressed.”

Cecily rolled her eyes. “I hardly did it on my own, Maddie. Before you go leaping to the duke’s defense, he was quite a willing participant.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Maddie retorted. “He does not strike me as the timid sort.”

“No, he’s certainly…” Cecily stopped, her face turning red, much to her cousin’s delight. “Oh, do be quiet, Maddie.”

“But what was it like, Cecily?” Juliet demanded, her own face turning pink even as she asked the question. At the poke in the ribs Maddie gave her, she protested, “You know you wanted to ask the same thing, Maddie, so don’t look at me like that.”

Affection for her cousins overwhelming her, Cecily couldn’t help grinning at them. “I am so lucky to have you two, no matter how unsettling your questions might be.”

But Maddie and Juliet would have none of it.

“Stop trying to change the subject and talk,” Maddie said, crossing her arms over her chest. “We want details.”

“Not details so much,” Juliet said with a frown at Maddie. “But rather, confirmation of a few things. For instance, is it lovely? Or horrid, like we overheard Mama telling Lady Stepney?”

“Lovely,” Cecily said with a blush, remembering just what it had been like to lie in Lucas’s arms, to feel all that strength pressed against her softness. “Definitely lovely.”

“Oh, you were definitely compromised, then,” Maddie said with a brisk nod. “I had wondered if perhaps you hadn’t just kissed him, but now I know.”

“How do you know?” Cecily asked, frowning. Was it really that clear just from her expression?

“You’ve got that glow about you. Remember when Lavinia Parman was forced to marry Lord Langham after he compromised her at Vauxhall?” At Cecily’s nod, she continued, “Well, I saw her that evening just before her parents hustled her away. You’ve got that same dazed and knowing look.”

Since Lavinia had been dangling after Langham for the entire season before they wed, Cecily rather thought their circumstances were different, but she didn’t argue the point. The sooner she turned Maddie’s and Juliet’s minds to another subject, the better.

“Well, I think you look lovely,” Juliet said, reaching out to squeeze Cecily’s hand. “And I couldn’t be happier for you. Winterson is charming. And it’s obvious from the way his eyes follow you when you’re in the same room that he is besotted with you.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” Cecily said with a wry smile. “But I think we will get along well enough together.”

“But you love
him,
don’t you?” Juliet asked with a frown. “I mean, you wouldn’t have let him—”

“I am fond of him, of course,” Cecily began, “but I don’t really—”

“Of course she loves him,” Maddie interrupted before Cecily could finish her denial. Her eyes flashed a warning that made Cecily regret her words. She did think that Juliet had a little too much sensibility about such matters, but it would be cruel for her to dash her cousin’s hopes in such a cold fashion. “Now, tell us all about the wedding details, Cecily.”

Juliet looked as if she wished to question Cecily further, but she followed along without demurral into the conversation about the wedding plans.

When they were ready to leave, Cecily followed her cousins downstairs to see them out.

“I do wish you happy,” Juliet said, giving her an impulsive hug. “Even if you don’t love one another.”

At Cecily’s startled look, her cousin smiled. “I’m not quite so naïve as you and Maddie seem to think me,” she said. “I just wish for you to have a happy marriage. Happier than the other marriages of convenience I am familiar with.”

Knowing she spoke about her own parents, Cecily felt a rush of affection for her cousin.

“Thank you, dearest,” she said, with a squeeze of the other girl’s hand. “I wish that too.”

More than she was willing to admit. Even to herself.

Thirteen

It was with a sense of unreality that Lucas stood before the bishop in St. George’s Hanover Square three days later, Cecily standing tall beside him.

Though he had assumed planning so hasty a wedding would be at least a little trouble, once Cecily’s stepmother and aunts and cousins had become involved, the small ceremony he had in mind had transformed into a church full of friends, relatives, and curious onlookers.

But when he saw Cecily enter from the rear of the church, he had been proud to stand before them all and claim her as his bride.

A hush fell over the congregation as she walked up the aisle on Lord Geoffrey Brighton’s arm, looking lovelier than he’d ever seen her. Her gown was a pink satiny fabric under some sort of silver tissue material. He wasn’t sure what the style was called, but he loved the way it showcased her long-limbed beauty and her creamy white skin. When he took her gloved hand in his, he was startled to feel it tremble.

Something about the vulnerability in her eyes as she looked up at him made him want to lift her into his arms and run away with her. But instead, he squeezed her hand in his before placing it firmly in the crook of his arm. Nothing, not even an uncommon bout of nerves from his bride, would convince him to delay the ceremony that would make her his.

When the time came, however, she said her vows in a loud and clear voice, as did he. And when he slipped his grandmother’s sapphire that so reminded him of her eyes onto her finger, she gave a sigh that sounded very much like relief. That made two of them, he thought, grinning down at her. Not caring if the entire world knew how pleased he was to call her his at last.

Once the ceremony was at an end, there was the registry to sign, and in a very short time he was handing her into his crested carriage, where they rode the short distance to the Hurston town house, where their wedding breakfast would take place.

“The ring is lovely,” Cecily said, holding out her hand to admire the sapphire flanked by two diamonds set in a filigree band. “Was it your mother’s?”

“Grandmother’s,” he replied, watching her turn her hand this way and that to see the stones sparkle. “I would not have imagined you to be impressed by jewels,” he teased.

She blushed, and immediately dropped her hand into her lap. “I am not, particularly,” she said primly. “But anyone can have an appreciation for a thing of beauty.”

“Indeed,” he said, looking his fill of the thing of beauty that sat before him in the person of his new wife.

The carefully arranged curls that had been gathered in a knot at the back of her head, a rose pink silk ribbon threaded through them, gave her the look of a fairy princess or a wood nymph. Small eardrops dangled from her lobes, swaying against the soft spot of skin beneath her ear, a spot he himself had kissed not three nights earlier and knew from experience to be sweet with the mixture of rose water and a scent that was all Cecily.

Her eyes were bright, though a hint of shadow lingered beneath them, as if she had not slept well the night before. Lucas could certainly understand that. He felt as if he hadn’t slept since their encounter in the Egyptian Club. All the days since had been spent getting his affairs in order and preparing Winterson House and his various family and servants for the arrival of a new mistress in their midst.

“I have sent a footman to Hurston House to retrieve your things,” Lucas said, breaking the silence that had fallen between them.

“Excellent,” Cecily returned with more enthusiasm than the announcement warranted. Lucas stifled a smile at her forced cheerfulness. It was unusual to see Cecily made nervous by anything, he thought, remembering that trembling hand at the altar. He found some strange comfort in the notion that she was just as nervous about their new marriage as he was.

“I have a bit of other news as well,” he told her, watching as she twisted her handkerchief into a knot and then unwound it again. “Lord Peter Naughton is one of the nation’s foremost collectors of Egyptian artifacts, and I have it on good authority that he has been boasting of late about a particularly important find that gives the whereabouts of quite an important bit of pottery from the tomb of Ramses the Second.”

Cecily’s eyes lit up. “Father’s journals! There was a rumor that he’d found the tomb of Ramses, though since he was unable to verify the story himself I wasn’t quite sure how true it could be.”

“Yes,” Lucas said. “If Naughton knows where the journals are, then we might be able to persuade him that telling us would be infinitely safer than divulging the information to the other members of the society. At least with you and me he will not need to worry that we would steal the information and go in search of the treasure ourselves.”

“Speak for yourself,” Cecily said with a grimace. “If I were able to do so I would embark tomorrow on the first ship bound for Cairo in order to follow in my father’s footsteps.”

Seeing the mulish set to her new husband’s jaw, she continued, “Not that I have any intention of doing so anytime soon. I was merely expressing a dream, not one upon which I plan to act.”

Lucas hummphed, and continued, “With any luck we will have found your father’s journals by this time tomorrow. And you will be able to start the translation of them as soon as possible.”