The Spinster and the Duke

The

SPINSTER

and the

DUKE

{London Ladies, Book 1.5}

by

JILLIAN EATON

OLD PASSION REKINDLED…

“You never thought of me during all this time?”

Abigail’s lips compressed to form a hard, flat line. “I would be lying if I said I didn’t. Of course I thought of you, Reginald. I loved you. I was going to marry you. What I felt for you… It did not vanish when you left.”

He took one step towards her, then another. He saw the quiver of her pulse in her neck and smelled honeysuckle on her skin. She had her hair pulled up in a bun, coiled loosely beneath a lace cap. A few tendrils had escaped and dangled down on either side of her flushed cheeks, tempting him to reach out and see if her hair felt as silky as he remembered. “Is what you felt for me gone now, Abby?”

She stared at him, her hazel eyes unflinching even as her bottom lip wobbled. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Liar.” He dipped his head, closed his mind to what should have been, and indulged in what was.

The Spinster and the Duke
s a work of fiction.

All of the characters, organizations, and events

portrayed in this novel are either products

 of the author’s imagination

or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © by Jillian Eaton 2013

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All Rights Reserved.

Except for use in any review, the

reproduction or utilization of this work in whole

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Other Titles by Jillian Eaton

The Risqué Resolution

The Winter Wish

London Ladies

The Runaway Duchess

The Spinster and the Duke

The Forgotten Fiancee

Rookery Rakes

The Duke of St. Giles

A Dark Affair on Dower Street

Wedded Women Quartet

A Brooding Beauty

 A Ravishing Redhead 

A Lascivious Lady 

A Gentle Grace

Praise for Jillian Eaton

“My first book from this author and it won’t be the last. Once I got started I couldn’t put it down.”
A Ravishing Redhead
(Laurie, Bitten by Paranormal Romance)

“A must read for any historical romance readers who love a good romp through England.”
The Runaway Duchess
(My Book Addiction and More)

“Love at its most romantic heights.”
A Brooding Beauty
(Lauren, Amazon Reviewer)

“Jillian Eaton finds the perfect balance between intense emotions, sizzling chemistry, and light-hearted humor.”
The Runaway Duchess
(Steffi, Swept Away by Romance)

PROLOGUE

June, 1785

Ashburn Estate

The ring felt heavy on her finger.

Staring down at the thick gold band with the Ashburn family crest engraved into the middle, Abigail blinked back tears.
Do not cry in front of him
, she ordered herself silently.
Don’t you dare
.

“Abby, I… I am sorry.” Looking supremely uncomfortable, Rocky – better known to his peers as Reginald Browning the Third, Marquess of Rutherford and future Duke of Ashburn – ran his fingers through his thick brown hair and scowled down at the floor. “I never wanted it to end like this.”

Abigail never wanted it to end at all, even though some small part of her knew – had always known, perhaps – that it would. She was the daughter of a baron. Rocky was the sole heir to a dukedom. Their love was never meant to last.

“I want you to take the ring,” she said softly.

“No, Abby, you keep—”

But it was already off her finger. She clenched it tight in her fist, feeling the weight of it, the smoothness. It had felt so
right
on her hand that she’d let herself believe… but no. Some things were simply not meant to be, no matter how much you wished it otherwise.

“It was never mine to keep.” She opened her fingers and the ring fell with a quiet
plink
onto the table between them. Straightening in her chair Abigail gazed past Rocky to the window. It was partially open, allowing a warm breeze to flutter through the stuffy parlor. She pulled at the high collar of her gown and took a deep, steadying breath. “I should be going now.”

For one fleeting moment she thought Rocky was going to change his mind. A tiny flame of hope flickered within her, only to be abruptly extinguished when he stood up and formerly offered his arm as though she was a passing acquaintance instead of the girl he had pledged his heart to.

Do not cry. Whatever you do, do
not
cry.

Her chest aching with the force it took to hold her tears at bay, Abigail walked beside him in stiff legged silence. When they reached the grand foyer she hesitated, her gaze trained on the door that would not only take her outside to the carriage that waited to take her home, but out of Rocky’s life forever.

“Abby…”

She detested the quiet plea in his voice. He wanted her to leave without a fuss so he could go on with his life as though she never existed. So he could sweep the memory of her beneath the rug as though she were dust.

Abigail lifted her chin. She may not have been the woman the Dowager Duchess of Ashburn wanted her eldest son and heir to marry, but that did not make her
dirt
. She was not some secret mistress or scandalous affair. She was Rocky’s fiancée – or at least she had been, before she took his ring off her finger and put it on the table.

“I am going to live with my sister in Leeds,” she informed him. 

Reggie’s blue eyes went wide. “I do not want you to leave.”

Abigail regarded him steadily, schooling her countenance to hide the fact that she was perilously close to tears. “But you do not love me enough to want me to stay.”

He dropped her arm and stepped back, his jaw tightening and clenching as he fought to disguise his own emotions. At twenty-two, Reggie was a boy on the verge of manhood. He was undeniably handsome with dark hair, piercing eyes the same color of the sky on a cold winter’s day, and chiseled features. He would be handsomer still in time, and Abigail felt a renewed sense of loss as she realized she would never know the man he would one day grow to be.

“Do not do this Abby,” he said gruffly. “We said our goodbyes. There is no need to make this harder than it already is.”

There was every need, but Abigail merely nodded. The time for words had passed. There was nothing else she could say. Nothing else she could do. “I hope you have a happy life.” Shoulders pulled back, hazel eyes sparkling with unshed tears, she took a deep breath and walked out the door.

As he watched her leave, Reggie knew only one thing for certain: with Abby gone he would never know true happiness again.  

CHAPTER ONE

September, 1815

Marseilles, France

The funeral was short and bittersweet.

Standing over the freshly dug grave of the woman he had called his wife for twenty seven years, Reginald disguised his quiet grieving behind a mask of stoicism. The stiff autumn air pulled at his cloak, sweeping it off his shoulders. Beneath the swath of black fabric he stood tall, a formidable man even at the progressed age of fifty and two.

His hair was more gray than brown now and wrinkles creased his face, but time had treated him fairly and aged him well, rather like a fine wine that grew more potent as the years passed it by.

Murmuring a quiet prayer, Reginald knelt to lay a single white rose on the overturned earth and with one final, lingering glance bowed his head and walked away from Theresa’s final resting sight. She was beside her parents now, which he knew she would have vastly preferred to being brought back to England and buried at Ashburn, an estate she had never cared for nor frequented more than a handful of times.

Their lives had been in France, much to his mother’s everlasting dismay. It was where they built a home. Where Theresa bore him three daughters. Where one of them died before her fifth birthday. Where they learned to live, and even occasionally laugh, together. Their union was never intended to be a love match, but there had always been affection and respect both given and received.

If they found physical comforts beyond the marriage bed neither complained and in the later years of their marriage when they lived separate lives, both of them were content in the knowledge they had always been kind to one another. 

Leaving the small, well tended graveyard behind Reginald followed a narrow footpath to the bluffs that ran along the edge of the property. It was a cold, blustery day and the salt air stung his eyes, summoning tears he wiped briskly away.

Soon it would be winter. Theresa’s beloved gardens would go dormant and the cold would gnaw mercilessly at his aching bones. Pinching the bridge of his nose, Reginald wondered when the bloody hell he’d grown so old.

This winter would be his fifty second. It was a lifetime for some. A fleeting second for others. Where had the time gone? To a wife he cared for but did not love. To children he loved but did not know.

With Theresa dead and buried, there was nothing left for him here. His two daughters had moved on years before, drawn back to England to begin and raise families of their own. He missed them, but as he stood on the edge of the cliff and stared down at the waves crashing violently in a spray of raging white surf against the rocks below, Reginald did not think of his daughters or his grandchildren or even his deceased wife. He thought, as he always had, as he always did, of Abby.

And he yearned.

Abigail had only one thing on her mind.

Crumpets.

Bustling through her small, tidy townhouse – the passage of the time may have given her more gray hairs than she would have liked, but it had done nothing to dull her energy – she zipped through the parlor, whisked through the foyer, and came up short in the kitchen, an expression of horror slowly dawning on her face as she took in the porcelain plate sitting empty on the table.

“The crumpets. What happened to the crumpets?”

“I ate them all.” Stepping out from behind an  open cupboard balancing a stack of white serving plates trimmed with delicate pink roses, Lady Dianna Foxcroft – Abigail’s beloved niece and apparent devourer of sweet – smiled innocently at her aunt.

A remarkably pretty young woman with short blond curls, a heart shaped face boasting two matching dimples, and cornflower blue eyes, Dianna lived on the other side of the park with her parents but frequented Abigail’s townhouse more than she did her own. The two shared a close bond, one that had been forged during Dianna’s childhood when her parents dedicated more time to their various social causes than they did to their only child.    

Since her best friend Miss Charlotte Vanderley – Graystone now, following her impromptu and rather scandalous wedding to Gavin Graystone, a handsome entrepreneur – had retired prematurely to the country, Dianna had been calling upon her aunt more often than usual. Normally Abigail would have welcomed the extra attention, but not at the expense of her beloved crumpets. 

“Did you truly eat them all?” she said, aghast at the very idea.

Dianna giggled. “No, Aunt Abigail, I did not eat them all. Calm yourself,” she said with a disapproving cluck of her tongue. “You know too much excitement is not good for your digestion. I put them by the window to cool. They will be ready to eat in a moment or so.”

“Brat,” Abigail said with great affection. “I thought I raised you better than to play practical jokes on poor old women.”

Dianna set the serving plates down on the table and pulled out two chairs, one for Abigail and one for herself, before she went to the window to fetch the plate of crumpets. She set them down in the middle of the table before sinking gracefully into her seat with only a slight flutter of blue muslin. “First of all, you are not old. Second of all, you are the one who used to
encourage
my pranks! Do you remember when you coaxed me into putting a frog in Mother’s drawer of unmentionables?”

Abigail sniffed even as she hid a smile behind her hand. Dianna may have inherited her poise and ladylike grace from her mother, but her mischievous nature came purely from her aunt. “I am quite certain I have no idea what you are speaking of,” she said.

Unfazed by Abigail’s prim denial, Dianna continued, “She was cross with me for weeks. Not to mention when we put some of Father’s scotch in the lemonade at the picnic—”

“Eat your crumpet dear, it is getting cold.”

They ate in companionable silence, and when the plate was empty and the dishes wiped clean retired to the parlor for a spot of tea. Dianna sat in front of the pianoforte and began to play a soft, lilting tune that brought to mind flowers in the springtime and rolling fields covered in sparkling dew.

“You have been practicing,” Abigail observed with no small amount of pride.  Crossing her legs at the ankle, she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes with a little sigh, letting the music wash over her in a tinkling wave of notes. This was what she had always wanted and never let herself dream: a house filled with music and children and light and laughter. She could have had all of that, she supposed. But without Reginald beside her it would not have been true, and having something be only half of what you wished it was far worse than not having it at all.

“Aunt Abigail, I have been thinking about what you said all those weeks ago in the carriage,” Dianna said suddenly.  

Abigail opened her eyes to find Dianna had stopped playing and was watching her, a troubled expression marring her fair countenance.

“Oh?” she said, her brow creasing in thought as she struggled to recall what conversation would give her niece reason to remember it after so much time had passed. As Dianna’s chaperone she accompanied the younger woman on nearly every outing and they often discussed a myriad of topics ranging from the weather to Dianna’s tenuous relationship with her parents. Nothing out of the ordinary immediately came to mind, forcing her to ask, “What did I say?”

“Charlotte was with us,” Dianna began, referring once again to her dearest friend, “and we were on our way to Twinings Tea Shop.”

That hardly helped to narrow it down. “I am afraid you will have to be more specific.”

“Your engagement to the Duke of Ashburn.”

Reginald
.

Abigail’s breath escaped in a little
hiss
of dismay. She had never meant to tell Dianna and Charlotte of her one time fiancée, but given Charlotte’s predicament at the time it seemed a rather fitting story to share.

They had been on their way to Twinings, just as Dianna said. Charlotte was meeting with her maid to learn more information about the heinous man she was engaged to against her will, and Abigail was attending as their chaperone.

Now that she had a reference as to what conversation Dianna was referring to, it played back through her mind as though it had happened yesterday instead of weeks ago.

“I was engaged to a duke once, you know,” she had said, setting aside the book she had been reading on the carriage seat beside her.

“A duke, Aunt Abigail?” Dianna had repeated dubiously. “Are you certain?”

“Am I certain who I was once engaged to?” She smiled, amused by her niece’s incredulous expression. “Yes, I do believe I am. I may now spend my days with my nose buried in a book, but it wasn’t always so, my dears. I once led quite the exciting life.”

“What was his name?” Charlotte asked.

“And what happened?” Dianna piped in.

Taking a moment, she smoothed her skirt into place before resting her hands across her lap. She gazed out the window, her countenance softening as she remembered a time long since past. “His name was Reginald Browning the Third, Duke of Ashburn.” The corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled. “I called him Rocky. We grew up next to each other and as a result became fast childhood friends, even though he was destined to inherit a dukedom and I was the third daughter of a Baron. He asked me to marry him on my seventeenth birthday. He was the impulsive sort. We both were.”

“Oh, how romantic,” Dianna sighed.

“Romantic, yes. Practical, no. Rocky’s mother was furious with him, and with me. She demanded he break the engagement. By then it had gone public, of course.”

“Oh dear,” Dianna murmured. 

“Yes,” Abigail agreed, “‘oh dear’ sums it up quite nicely. Rocky said he loved me, and I believed him. But we both knew the engagement could not continue, and he ended it a week later. We fell out of touch after that. I saw him occasionally in London, but after his father died and he became a duke he ran with a more exclusive set than I did. He ended up married to the daughter of a marquess, I believe, and moved to France to be near her family. I have not seen him since.”

“Were you heartbroken when it happened?”

Dianna’s question, bluntly spoken, drew Abigail out of the past and into the present. Had anyone else asked her about Reginald she would have changed the subject, but if Dianna wanted the truth, then she would receive.

“I was,” she confessed. Her hands twisted in her lap and for a moment she stared at her left ring finger where the Ashburn crest had once rested. She wondered now, as she had wondered then, how different her life would have been if the ring remained there still. But she banished the wayward thought with an inward shake of her head, chasing away all of the “would haves” and the “could haves”.

Dianna bit her lip. “I do not mean to pry, but I have been giving my own engagement considerable thought lately. I never loved Miles as you loved your Rocky, but it still hurts.”

The Mannish women, Abigail reflected dryly, were quite unlucky in terms of love. Of her three sisters only Martha
had ever married, and it was not precisely what one would call a happy union.

Rodger Foxcroft, a baron of some wealth and property, had swept Martha off her feet in a matter of weeks and she was married before the season’s end. Unfortunately, by the time Dianna was born the passion between Rodger and Martha had cooled considerably and they lived completely separate lives; a sad, albeit not uncommon, occurrence within the
ton
.

That did not stop them from forcing the same fate upon their daughter, however, and Abigail’s mouth twisted in anger as she thought of the ridiculously outdated betrothal contract her sister and brother-in-law had made Dianna enter at the young, impressionable age of nine.

To her surprise and relief, however, it seemed for a time as though all would be well. Dianna and her future husband – a charismatic lad who would one day inherit the Earldom of Winfield – got along splendidly as children and continued their friendship into young adulthood. But the day they were to be married Miles left to travel the continent.

That was four years ago, and no one had heard a word from him since.

“It must be positively dreadful for you,” Abigail said sympathetically. “I cannot imagine.” To lose Reginald was bad enough, but at least she knew what had
happened
to him. To go through her life never knowing… It was unbearable to think about. “I do not mean to upset you, dear, but do you know how much time must pass for one to be declared legally deceased? If that were to happen then you would be free from the contract.” 

“His mother claims she still receives letters from him,” Dianna said, a rare sliver of bitterness creeping into her tone. “I fear she lies, but what proof do I have?”

“What proof indeed,” Abigail murmured. She sighed and straightened in her chair. “When I lost Reginald, it was a decision we came to together.”
More or less
. “We were foolish to ever think we could be married.”

Dianna’s blue eyes darkened. “You were not foolish, you were in love.”

“Stupidly so,” Abigail agreed.