Page 11 of A Duchess Worth Stealing (Saved by Scandal #2)
Chapter Nine
C ordelia had never intended to trespass into the Duke’s woods. Well, not seriously.
She had thought about it often, as one might dream of fleeing to Constantinople in a hot-air balloon, but idle fancies were hardly crimes.
However, it was a very different matter when the cook’s two daughters, Eliza and Ruthie, whom she had befriended within the first forty-eight hours of her arrival, had come to her in great distress.
“Miss Brookes, Miss Brookes! Poppy’s gone!”
Cordelia had leapt up from her embroidery, which was a rather ill-executed rendering of a thistle, as though her own house had caught fire.
“Gone? But where can a rabbit go in a country estate? Is she clever or silly?”
“She’s very silly, miss,” Ruthie sobbed. “She saw a robin and bolted.”
“Birds are terribly distracting,” Cordelia murmured gravely, already reaching for her boots. “Fetch my shawl. No, my green one, the one with the fringe. If we’re to break the unofficial law of this house, we ought at least to do so in style.”
And now, half an hour later, she found herself pushing through damp underbrush, her skirts disgracefully muddied, her bonnet hanging askew by its ribbons, and no sign of the wretched rabbit anywhere.
She squinted up at the canopy of trees above where the light filtered through in dapples, like sunlight through old lace.
The woods were quieter than they ought to have been.
She would call them ominous, perhaps, though Cordelia had always believed that most ominous things only became so when grown-ups spoke of them too seriously.
Still, she paused and glanced behind her.
She had been walking in circles for perhaps twenty minutes when something white flickered at the edge of her vision.
Cordelia froze, squinting her eyes. Then, it flicked again.
There it was, just between the gnarled roots of a moss-laden tree, a blur of twitching pink nose and ears like crumpled silk.
“Poppy!” she gasped, pitching forward with such enthusiasm, she very nearly toppled into the bracken. “Oh, you idiotic creature, do you know how much trouble you’ve caused? How much trouble I shall be in when it’s discovered I’ve taken to the forest like a milkmaid with romantic aspirations?”
The rabbit, in the true fashion of all things small and deaf to human pleading, did not so much as turn its head. Instead, it gave a great quiver and darted forward, deeper into the shadows.
“Oh no, you don’t!” Cordelia gathered her skirt in one hand, the other already reaching out uselessly. “You ungrateful morsel of fluff, come back! I am risking reputation, limb, and possibly death by duke for you!”
Then, she ran. Or rather, she stumbled, gasped, and charged in the general direction of forward, crashing through branches that clawed at her shawl and leaves that smacked her smartly in the face as if to say, You are no woodland creature, madam; return to your parlor.
Still, she pressed on as her hair loosened from its pins and her slippers grew damper with every squelch through unseen puddles until the manicured edges of the estate had well and truly vanished behind her.
The trees grew denser here. Somewhere up ahead, she heard the rustle of tiny feet and a soft thump… rabbit paws? Or merely her imagination which had always been inclined toward drama?
“Poppy,” she whispered though she was breathing hard now and rather wished someone had thought to follow her. “Poppy, you are the worst example of domesticity I have ever seen. You should be ashamed of yourself. If you were a child, I would have sent you to bed without—oh!”
She tripped spectacularly over a root half-buried in the moss and tumbled forward into a patch of ferns. For a moment she simply lay there, stunned, with her bonnet crushed beneath her chin and her limbs tangled in her skirt.
The canopy above seemed to sway gently, uncaring.
“I am going to perish,” she announced to no one, still facedown. “They shall find me here in a week, all because of a rabbit with no regard for propriety. The Dowager shall weep. Eliza shall blame herself. And the Duke shall have the dreadful satisfaction of being right.”
Cordelia had just caught her breath when the rabbit bolted again, dashing away from the base of the ash tree and through a hedgerow as though it had not just led her on the most maddening chase of her young life.
“Poppy, I swear to you,” she muttered, “if you do not expire of natural causes by year’s end, I shall consider it a personal affront.”
She followed more cautiously now, for her slippers were soaked through and her hem hung heavy with burrs and damp earth. The path, if one could call it that, opened into a small clearing, and there, nestled at the foot of a hill, stood a cottage.
It was no hunting lodge or picturesque folly made for romantic picnics and decorous sketching. No, this was a home . It was stone-built and had a thatched roof with smoke curling from the crooked chimney and a henhouse off to one side from which a chorus of irritable clucking now rose in protest.
Cordelia stopped. So did Poppy. Then, the bunny slipped beneath the chicken-wire gate and vanished into the henhouse, as oblivious as ever to the havoc she trailed in her wake. Cordelia hesitated on the edge of the clearing.
This is someone’s home.
She could not just march up and demand the return of her stolen rabbit as though she were collecting a lost umbrella. What if the residents were suspicious? Or worse… curious?
But before she could muster the courage to approach, the cottage door opened with a soft creak. Cordelia froze, and then her stomach gave an odd little lurch, for it was him .
The Duke of Galleon stepped out into the sunlight with his sleeves rolled up. He looked far too at ease for a man of such famously rigid character. Cordelia’s heart thudded against her ribs.
She spun instinctively and pressed herself against the rough bark of a tree, just within the shelter of the hedge.
No, no, no. He cannot see me like this. Mud-stained, bonnetless, trespassing, breathless!
Oh heavens, she was breathless. She must look like a madwoman!
But then, a woman followed him out, and she was lovely.
Of course, she was. She was also tall and fair with a crown of honey-blonde hair braided elegantly around her head and a gown that clung in all the correct places, as though it had never once been caught on brambles or soaked through with swamp water.
Cordelia’s chest tightened. She did not know who the woman was nor why the Duke was here with her, but her traitorous mind began building reasons fast enough to scorch her.
The woman laughed and stepped closer to him. Then, she wrapped both arms around Mason Abernathy’s neck, hanging around him like a lovely necklace. Cordelia almost choked on her own breath.
“Will you come back soon?” the woman asked, looking up at him with wide, adoring eyes.
The Duke smiled. Yes, he smiled! And then, he touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “I promise.”
Oh no.
It was only two words, but they landed like stones in her belly. He had never spoken to her like that. He had never touched her like that. And here she was, wild-eyed and hiding behind a tree, muddy and torn because she had chased a rabbit into his secret domestic interlude.
Cordelia pressed her back harder into the bark, her hands trembling slightly.
Calm. Breathe. Compose yourself. Do not cry, you idiot; he is not yours to grieve.
She breathed shallow and fast then deeper, willing the tears to recede.
She was fine. At least, she would be, for she had known what men were like.
She had seen what love became after vows were exchanged.
She had promised herself she would not want this for herself. But she had not counted on wanting him.
A moment later, she dared peek again through the branches.
He was gone, and the woman was, too. Cordelia let out a long breath, willing the knots to unravel.
She looked around. Perhaps she could retrieve the rabbit and steal away before her absence became gossip.
Perhaps she could pretend none of this had happened.
Perhaps, if she were lucky, the earth would simply swallow her.
But before she could move, she heard it.
“Looking for me?” His voice was low and dangerous, almost like a growl, and it made all the little hairs on her body stand on end.
The world seemed to quiet around her. Even the birds, those impolite gossips, had gone silent. She turned slowly, and there he was. Mason Abernathy, the Duke of Galleon, was standing behind her. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.
He took one step closer, gaze sweeping over her muddied hem, her flushed cheeks, and her windswept hair.
“Well?” he said, voice still low. “Are you?”
Cordelia could not breathe. Or rather, she could but only in short, sharp bursts, like a bird beating itself against the inside of a cage.
The Duke stood before her, impossibly close, every inch of his frame radiating cool authority and that confounding, infuriating silence.
It was as if the forest itself had bent to his presence.
She, meanwhile, was a crumpled sketch of a lady: smudged, startled, and hopelessly ill-equipped for conversation.
“I wasn’t looking for you,” she said too quickly and far too loudly. “Obviously not. That would be… I mean, I wouldn’t look for you, ever, Your Grace. You told me not to come into the woods and so, naturally, I… well, I did, but that was for entirely unrelated reasons and had nothing to do with?—”
“Miss Brookes,” he said, a single brow lifting with excruciating calm.
Cordelia took a breath. Then immediately lost it again.
“I was chasing a rabbit!” she blurted, pointing accusingly at the henhouse, where Poppy, the treacherous beast, had now decided to nap.
“She belongs to the cook’s daughters. Very stupid and very fast. The rabbit, I mean, not the girls.
I adore the girls. The girls were crying, Your Grace.
And what was I to do? Leave her to be devoured by foxes and forest spirits?
Obviously not. So, I climbed the fence, which is a great personal failing, I know, and—why are you here? !”
He blinked. “I live here.”
“No, you don’t! I mean, you do—in the house. The big one with drawing rooms and portraits of scowling ancestors. Not—” she flung her arm toward the modest cottage, “this secret second residence with hens and… domestic entanglements!”
“Domestic—?”
“It’s very improper,” she added in case that had not been clear. “And I shouldn’t have seen anything… truly. If I had known you were here, I’d have tripped in the other direction. I’d have fallen straight into a bog out of decency.”
His expression had changed subtly, and damn him, he appeared even more handsome right now than before. Heat unfurled from the pits of her stomach, and although she never felt that sensation before, she knew exactly what it was. She was jealous.
“I see,” he said. “So, you think me some kind of… rake, then? Is that it?”
“No! I mean, perhaps! I don’t want to think that, of course, but you must understand, it looked a certain way?—”
“And what way was that, precisely?” he asked a touch too quietly.
Cordelia felt herself flush to the roots of her hair. She had not meant to say any of this. And yet here she was, lurching helplessly through every thought she had promised herself she would keep locked away.
“You were with a woman,” she said finally, “and she was very… attached to you. And you made a promise, and she called you back soon, and then she put her arms around you, which, frankly, anyone would interpret in a certain light and?—”
That was when she stopped because he wasn’t angry anymore. He was staring at her, completely still, with his mouth parted as though she had struck him across the face. Then, after a moment, in a voice half wonder, half disbelief, he voiced himself.
“That’s what you thought I was hiding?”
“What else could you possibly be hiding?” she asked, instantly regretting it. “Is it worse than an affair? Are you—married?”
He gave a short, incredulous laugh, one that sounded almost like it had been startled out of him. “Married? No. No, of course not. Good God.”
“Then what?—”
Laughter broke them apart, and they both glanced in the direction of the house. The woman was leaning to the left side of the doorway, evidently enjoying the show.
“You two are rather amusing, I must say,” she said through the chuckles. “Why don’t you come in, so we can explain?”