The Duke's Disaster (R) (8 page)

“I’m old too?” Noah was now about the same age as Meech had been when Noah had gone to university half a lifetime ago. At the time he’d thought Meech not elderly, exactly, but…past his prime? Whatever the male equivalent of matronly was.

Jesus on the Mount.

“You think like an old man, and you always have,” Harlan declared. “The sisters say it’s because you were oldest when we were orphaned. I say it’s because you were born crotchety.”

The day was lovely, the countryside on that sweet edge between spring and summer. Noah had the smarmy, ridiculous thought that it was good to be alive.

“I wasn’t crotchety until you came along,” Noah rejoined. His duchess thought him capable of good cheer.

In the morning. Noah had been more asleep than awake when he’d realized exactly where and with whom he was starting his second day of married life. Thea, thank heavens, had taken his behavior in stride—once she’d stopped blushing.

“Crotchety, crotchety, crotchety,” Harlan singsonged. “Race you to the woods.”

Noah won, mostly because he was the more ruthless of the two, and Harlan’s seat was rusty. Oxford did not afford a great deal of opportunity to ride, but the race settled them both into another of their awkward reunions.

“You said you liked my new wife,” Noah observed as the horses came down to the walk. “What do you like about her?”

“The way she looks at you,” Harlan said, patting his beast, who was breathing like a bellows. “She doesn’t have a hard look in her eyes. Her gaze is soft, a little worried, but worried for you as much as anything.”

“A damned poet in the family,” Noah muttered. “That’s all we need.” Thea was probably fond of the poetical sorts.

“Better than Uncle’s dirty rhymes,” Harlan countered. “I wish you’d keep him from school, though the fellows all think he’s a capital old thing.”

“He
is
a capital old thing.” An expensive capital old thing. Noah ducked forward as True sidled beneath a low-hanging branch.

“He is, until all your mates go around quoting, ‘They all look the same in the dark, whether in bed, in the scullery, or the park,’ and ‘Never discount the charms of an older woman, my boys, as she’ll be discreet, grateful, and generous with her toys.’ It wears, after about the third telling. Then old Pemmie goads him to sing.”

Pemberton provided the harmonies, obliging sot that he was.

“Pemberton’s not so bad,” Noah replied, but viewed through the eyes of an idealistic seventeen-year-old, Meech wasn’t so charming, either. “He and Pemberton claim to have come up with those rhymes when they were younger than you are now. Besides, Meech will spend the summer at his various house parties, flirting with all and sundry, swiving the maids and companions.”

“Our sisters attend house parties, Noah.”

“As do I,” Noah said gently. “But our sisters are all safely married, Harlan, so you needn’t fret, and Uncle is mostly bluster.”

“Right.” Harlan snorted, batting aside an oak branch. “Which is why you forbid him funerals for young widows. Why wasn’t he at your wedding?”

Because God was given to the odd mercy. “Off on his rounds. What manner of grades can I expect regarding my baby brother’s most recent term?”

“I took a first in Latin,” Harlan said, fiddling with his reins. “My only first this year.”

“Isn’t there some award for the top scholar in Latin?” Noah asked casually. “If there isn’t, there should be.”

Harlan’s gaze stayed on his reins. “Such as?”

“One never knows.” A first in Latin was a fine, fine thing, particularly for a Winters male. “One might want to examine the loose box across from the saddle room when one is done moping about before one’s thoroughly impressed older brother.”

“Might one!?” Harlan’s horse bounded forward, and Noah let him win the race to the stables.

Harlan was still bubbling over with enthusiasm for his new gelding at dinner that evening, and Thea was fool enough to encourage the boy with well-timed questions.

“How is he over fences?”

“Do you suppose you’ll take him up to school in the autumn?”

“Have you seen the sire?”

As a matter of tradition, Noah challenged his brother to a billiards game after dinner, but Harlan’s fondness for his sister-in-law trumped the weight of family rituals.

“I’ll play you, Noah, but Thea gets to play the winner, and ties go to me.”

“Ungrateful, bottomless puppy.” Noah’s gaze rose to the cupids sporting about on the ceiling. “This is what an Oxford education gains us, Wife. Be warned: we’re having only daughters if this is what our sons will be like.”

“I’ve never met anybody who took a first in anything,” Thea said, linking arms with Harlan as they removed from the dining room to the game room. “I trust you will explain the finer points of billiards to me, Harlan?”

“She abets him,” Noah said to the house at large. “My own wife, corrupting the youth of the nation, and my own heir, colluding with my duchess. The pair of you pay attention, and I will show you how the game is played.”

“For form’s sake,” Harlan stage-whispered to Thea when the cue sticks had been chosen, “I will allow Noah to win the first game, because the elderly must be allowed their crotchets.”

“Hush,” Noah muttered. “I’m about to break, and this is a holy moment.”

Thea giggled, causing Noah to straighten, wait her out, and then position himself again to break, only to hear her snorting with laughter as he drew his cue back.

“Stop encouraging her with your drollery,” Noah warned his brother. He broke smartly, balls rolling all over the table, two finding their pockets. Though Noah hadn’t planned it, he sank every ball in succession, such that Harlan got not one shot.

“This is war,” Harlan said, brandishing his cue stick. “And recall, Brother dear, you taught me everything you know. I’m not elderly, like certain people, so I didn’t forget half of it while eating my pudding.”

Noah stepped over to his wife, and whispered with not a little pride, “He’ll sink them all, just watch.”

“No colluding with my sister-in-law,” Harlan said as he took a shot. “She plays me next.”

Because Harlan also sank every ball, they agreed Thea would break and take every other shot in the third game. Eventually they played to a draw, but it was late enough that Noah declared the game at an end.

“My duchess is tired,” he announced. “She needs her rest, because adjusting to marital bliss is taxing.” Adjusting to marriage was making
him
daft, in any case.

“Marital bliss?” Harlan looked puzzled. “But she’s
your
duchess, last I heard.”

“Go to bed, your puppy-ship,” Noah said, putting up the cue sticks. “Go directly to bed, do not visit your new horse, do not stop by my room to leave a toad in my bed, do not put eggs under my pillow, and do not think for one instant to turn a rooster loose in my bedroom tomorrow morning.”

“Harlan would never indulge in such childish pranks,” Thea sniffed. “Really, Noah, your imagination is prodigious.”

She’d called him Noah.
This morning Thea had referred to him as Noah Winters in a scolding fashion, but this was merely talk among family.

“Yes, really, Noah,” Harlan intoned gleefully, dancing away as Noah would have swatted him soundly on his backside. When they parted from Harlan at the landing, Noah slipped an arm around his wife.

“Harlan likes you.” Noah liked her too, more with each passing day.

And each passing night, and each passing morning.

“I like him,” Thea managed around a yawn. “Will you sleep with me tonight?”

Noah’s duchess was skilled at the marital ambush. “Are you asking me to?”

“I am asking you to. I like sleeping with you.”

And her aim was faultless. “You needn’t harp on it.” Noah opened her door. “I’ll join you shortly.”

“Going to cage up a rooster, Noah?”

He was off to bay at the moon, for the chicken coop was locked every night as a matter of course.

“Of course I’m seeing to the welfare of my roosters. I’ve missed the boy, but there’s no sense leaving temptation in his path.”

“There’s always tomorrow night,” Thea mused, tousling Noah’s hair in a caress he felt straight down to his damned, idiot, demented balls. “Maybe sleeping with you will be more excitement than I bargained for.”

Noah did not reply. He absolutely, positively did not allow himself to reply.

Eight

Thea had retired early, along with her husband, as a function of exhaustion sufficient to stifle even Harlan’s volubility. Haying had started, which meant both Winters men were on horseback much of the day, while Thea had supervised the preparation of food and drink for the crews. When Thea awoke, the room was still in darkness, though birds sang outside the open windows.

Her husband’s hand caressed her hip, then glided over the curve of her flank. She’d had several mornings to savor that very caress, and to decide she liked it.

Wicked of her, and she shouldn’t admit it, but the duke’s movements were slow and soothing, but also…
not
soothing. His hand was warm on her bare skin, and she knew that hand, knew the power in it, the competence, and yet there was gentleness in his caress as well.

“Thea?”

“Hmm?”

“Let me touch you.”

Not a request, more of an unacknowledged entreaty. She settled her hand over Anselm’s, squeezing his fingers. He wasn’t asking to couple with her, but he was asking something.

Anselm must have sensed her acquiescence, because he rolled to his side and spooned himself along her back and her legs and everywhere in between.

“You don’t mind?” he asked.

A question, now that Anselm was blanketing Thea with his warmth, and his erect flesh was fitted into the juncture of her thighs. The sensation was odd, intimate, and vaguely unsatisfying too. Peculiar.

His hand paused on her hip.

“Noah, I don’t know what to do.”

The rest of him went still, and Thea realized she’d used his name—not Husband, not Your Grace, not Anselm. Well, he’d told her his name for a reason, though maybe not this reason.

“You relax,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “You go back to sleep if you like. You forget I’m here.”

Anselm’s caress traveled over Thea’s hip, up to her midriff. She was accustomed to him holding her thus, his embrace secure without being confining. This time, though, his arm was banded across her bare skin, her nightgown bunched above her waist.

“Shall I take off my nightgown?”

His teeth grazed her nape, sending a shiver down her spine and beyond.

“You must do as you like.” His voice was a rasp in the darkness, and he was using his teeth again. Thea got her nightgown off by bracing on one elbow, and then Noah was
there
, the entire expanse of his chest, his thighs, his intimate parts, his arms, all naked, warm, and enveloping her from behind. The sensation was novel and overwhelming, like being possessed by a combination of primal elements.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

His lips traced the path he’d scraped with his teeth, and Thea wasn’t sure of her own name.

“I’m sure,” she said, her voice thready in the gloom.

“Close your eyes, Thea.” Anselm’s hand glossed down her face, as if to close her eyes for her. She complied, and for a long moment, the only sound was the birds’ bright, silvery caroling in the cool, predawn air.

Anselm hunched closer, that warm, competent hand hiking Thea’s leg up, then folding it down over him, over his most intimate flesh in an approximation of coitus. Did it hurt him, to be pressed like that?

The duke shifted and pushed against her several times, then stopped, and slipped his hand up, to cup her naked breast.

“Push back,” he whispered, flexing slowly forward then retreating. Thea tried to move as he directed, but she’d never felt a man’s hand on her naked breast—save perhaps for her wedding night—had never wanted to, and focusing was difficult. Noah’s caresses were powerfully distracting, sending currents of wanting to places a lady didn’t take notice of.

All the while, Noah kept up a slow, steady rhythm with his hips, until Thea grew damp between her thighs.

She knew so little.

“That’s it.” Noah’s hand closed gently around her breast, and heat uncurled in the pit of Thea’s belly. “Keep moving with me, and don’t…stop.” He shifted up, so he was half lying over her from behind.

Thea arched into his hand, and the heat turned molten when he closed his fingers over her nipple.

“Thea, God in heaven…” Noah pushed firmly against her, and pulsed his hips hard several times before going still, his open mouth on her shoulder. “Holy everlasting sweet…” His weight eased but did not leave her. “Sweet, holy baby…Jesus.”

The duke wasn’t cursing, more like praying, and Thea was rendered nearly as inarticulate.

What had just happened? She was wet between her legs, which she suspected was Noah’s seed. She was all jumbled inside, and she was sleepy, and yet not.

“This will be delicate,” her husband muttered, drawing back. “Don’t move.”

He
moved. He slid away from Thea, tenting the covers around her so she was still warm, but bereft, too, somehow. Water splashed behind the privacy screen, an odd counterpoint to the dawn song of the birds, and then the mattress dipped heavily.

“It’s cool,” Noah said from behind Thea, and he again carefully lifted her leg, and under the covers a damp cloth—cold, not cool—was pressed between Thea’s legs. “Sorry for the mess.”

“What are you doing?”

Another stillness from him, while Thea was blushing madly, and wondering how anybody found words to describe such an odd activity.

“When I spend,” Noah said, swabbing at her with the cloth, “it’s messy.”

“That…”

He moved the cloth again, high along the crease of her sex. “Yes?”

“It provokes peculiar sensations.”

“Does it?”

“Most peculiar.”

A few more minutes of silence, while Thea tried to study those sensations. Noah had slowed the movements of his hand and was applying a firmer pressure.

“I could make you come like this.” He sounded intrigued, and devilish, and that cloth was focused on one little spot that wreaked havoc with Thea’s reason.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said. “Maybe you should stop.”

“Maybe I should,” he agreed, sounding amused now, damn him. “The first time I make you come, I intend to be inside you.”

“You speak in riddles, Husband.”

“Noah.” He patted her bottom. “I’ll give you a minute to settle.”

“Gracious of you, but you sound pleased with yourself.” Thea would need much more than a minute to gather her wits.

“I’m pleased with the day so far,” he said, taking his pleased self back to the privacy screen.

Thea felt again the sense of loss at Noah’s absence, but he was soon back on the bed, gathering her in his arms. To turn toward him, to conduct their intimate business face-to-face, was a relief.

“You are not very experienced, Wife, for a woman who came to my bed in used condition.”

Noah’s arms were warm and secure around Thea, his heart beat steadily beneath her ear, and she didn’t know whether to be pleased with his conclusion, insulted, or simply…sad.

“I never said I was very experienced,” she replied, her voice admirably even. “You will have to explain these things to me.”

“I will.” Noah rested his cheek against her hair, still sounding pleased. “In due time, I most assuredly and thoroughly will. Now grab a bit more sleep. You’ve earned it.”

Thea didn’t think she could sleep, so disconcerting had the morning’s developments been. But Noah was pleased, the birds were singing, and for the first time, Thea’s hope progressed to the real possibility that her marriage might develop into something more than a cordial exercise in guilt and disappointment.

* * *

The rains came later that morning, in sheets and torrents, and patters and showers, and in brief drippy intervals when the world seemed to wait for the next drenching. Noah hacked out with his duchess before the heavens opened up, but only just made it safely home. The first ominous crack of thunder boomed as they handed off their horses to the grooms. Noah grabbed Thea’s hand, and they made a dash for the house between fat, splatting raindrops.

“Why must everything be a race with you?” Thea panted as Noah bundled her under the overhang of a balcony on the back terrace.

“Why lollygag when you can get more done if you’ll apply a little speed?” Noah countered, wrapping his arms around her. Her riding habit was wool and would probably keep her warm, but a new husband was allowed some privileges.

“You don’t always apply speed.” Thea tucked in closer and then hid her face against his chest.

“I can take my time when the situation warrants.” Too late, Noah realized the words were flirtatious. “What will you do with your day today, Wife?”

A pillowcase went kiting by on the next wet gust of wind.

“Lollygag with my husband under the eaves. Watch the rain.”

Thea implied that she’d enjoy spending time with that husband. Noah held her as the wind buffeted the trees, the rain came sheeting down, and the shouts of the stableboys battening down the hatches came bouncing across the gardens.

What if Thea had been chaste on their wedding night? If Noah could risk lollygagging with her under the eaves or in their bed with no thought that his self-restraint might desert him before paternity of their first born could be safely assured?

He stepped back. “Come along. We’ve watched it rain, and I’ve neglected my correspondence while I played land steward these past few days.” He led Thea under balconies and eaves to the kitchen door, and when they were in the back hallway, he drew off her gloves.

She had pretty hands, a lady’s hands, and she’d used those hands just hours ago to—

“I haven’t given you the official tour of the staterooms,” Noah said.

“That can wait, Your Grace, if you’ve correspondence to catch up on.”

He leaned in close, his words only for Thea, because they were not far from all the bustle in the kitchen.

“You and your proper address. We are married,
Your
Grace
. You didn’t call me Your Grace this morning.”

She’d called him Noah, which was apparently justification for a blush.

“You take my point.” He straightened. “My day is well begun, then. Should you need me, I’ll be in the library for the morning. After luncheon, if you would afford me some time, I will acquaint you with more of the house.”

“Until luncheon.”

Thea turned to go, but Noah’s pride—or something—rebelled at how easily she parted from him. He tugged her gently back to him, kissed her on the mouth—lollygagged over kissing her on the mouth, the cheek, the chin, the forehead—and when Thea began to give as good as she got, he let her go, patted her backside, and took himself off.

If he weren’t mistaken, Thea remained in the hallway, fingers on her cheek, trying not to watch a certain part of his anatomy as he retreated.

* * *

“Are you our new cousin?”

Thea halted abruptly, her hand on the door of Mr. Erikson’s conservatory. A little girl and a littler girl, both dark-haired and blue-eyed, stood across the corridor. They were holding hands and regarding her with the solemn intensity unique to uncertain children.

“I am Lady Thea,” she said, hunkering down. In fact, she was no longer Lady Thea, but rather, the Duchess of Anselm. “Who might you be?”

“That’s the name of Cousin Noah’s new duchess,” the younger child stage-whispered to her companion. “Lady Thee.”

“Thee-a,” the older child replied, keeping her gaze on Thea. “Cousin Noah said we might be crowded, with you moving in here at our house.”

“It’s a very large house,” Thea observed. Large enough to hide two children who resembled Noah in many particulars. “So large I sometimes get lost here.”

Was usually lost in some fashion or another.

“Will you play hide-and-seek with us? We know all the best places to get lost.” That from the younger one, while the older looked vaguely worried.

“Before you show me how to get lost, why don’t you tell me your names?” For
Cousin
Noah
had already told them Thea’s name.

“I’m Evelyn,” said the older, “and this is Janine, but we call her Nini. We live here.” This last was offered with a pugnacious emphasis.

Thea straightened and held out one hand to each child. “Can you show me where, exactly, your rooms are? I’m sure I couldn’t find them without knowledgeable escort.”

“She means us,” Evelyn concluded, but it was Janine who took Thea’s hand first.

“Come along.” Evelyn took the other hand. “Maryanne and Davies are having their tea, and they never notice when we get to rambling when they’re having a cup. Cousin Noah says it’s our besetting sin, but we asked him to find where in the Bible it says rambling at tea is a sin, and he hasn’t yet. Cousin Harlan said Cousin Noah was hoist on his own petals, which makes no sense at all, for Cousin Noah isn’t a flower.”

“Petard,” Thea said as the girls towed her along. “Like being speared with your own pikestaff, by accident.” Or by bad luck, or poor timing.

“Cousin Noah would
never
have an accident like that,” Janine pronounced, clearly dismayed at the very notion. “Not Cousin Harlan either.”

“Maybe when he was little, like us,” Evelyn temporized. “Harlan that is, not Noah.”

The girls debated the possibilities until they’d led Thea to the opposite end of the corridor, down a short cross hallway, and halfway up another corridor.

“They’ve done took off again,” said an exasperated female voice. “The dook will turn us off for this, Davies, see if he don’t.”

“We’ll just have to find them and hope…” The second voice fell away when the girls drew Thea into a cheerful, cozy nursery suite.

“Good morning, Your Grace.” The two nursery maids bobbed nervous curtsies in unison.

“This is Lady Thea,” Evelyn said, swinging Thea’s hand. “We went to visit Mr. Erikson, and we found her.”

“You were naughty.” Maryanne closed her eyes. “You were both very, very naughty, begging Your Grace’s pardon. You’ve been told and told not to wander, and I can only imagine what your—what His Grace will have to say about this.”

Your
father?

Thea shook her hands free and sauntered over to the windows. “His Grace has best not take very great exception. Today is a boring old rainy day, and if nursery maids can take a short break over their tea, perhaps children can be forgiven for visiting Mr. Erikson in his lonely conservatory on the same floor of the house.”