Page 38 of A Lady of Means (Roses and Rakes #1)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Devyn,

Come home. Tell me all the ways I’m wrong.

Tell me a joke. Tell me to stop being strong.

Tell me to just give in. Tell me to stop fighting and that I’ve held onto all the wrong things.

Tell me the truth, tell me lies. Just come home and kiss me.

I’ll do nothing but let you hold me until we wake up one day and we are ancient with a whole bunch of grandchildren. Just come home.

M

(message received with no reply)

* * *

The wrong man was holding her, the wrong hands were at the small of her back.

The wrong man was courting her openly in front of the entire ton.

Moria had been batting the thought away for the last 6 weeks since Devyn’s last letter. A different, less jaded woman might have pined, sitting at home, making plans for a beloved soldier’s return. Moria didn’t know how to be such a woman.

The Duke had called on her, they’d been riding in the park whenever the weather allowed, he’d accompanied her to social events.

As it had always been between the two of them, his presence was amiable and gentlemanly.

He never pushed her to define what they were or made any kind of affectionate overtures.

But every time she was seen out with him, more suitors showed up for Olivia, more invitations arrived, more names filled her dance card.

Unjust, given Olivia’s many admirable qualities any suitor should be so lucky to find in a match, but such was the way of the ton.

They all sought favor, a connection to a Duke.

She couldn’t fault them, she was doing the same.

None of her siblings mentioned the connection, in Moria’s hearing at least. She could feel the worried stares and silence from her siblings, but Moria didn’t know how to voice the paralyzing fear of being a woman alone with few options a second time.

She couldn’t win the battle with the voice in her head that told her being seen on the arm of a Duke held all her critics and their knife-like words and stares at bay, for a time at least.

But the thought returned tonight.

George Worthington, seventh Duke of Andover, twirled her in a glittering ballroom hosted by her younger sister, Viscountess Ludlowe.

The room was exceptionally decorated to celebrate the year that Noelle and Pomfrey had been married, filled with candles and flowers and fabric and formalwear designed to impress, to daze.

And Moria was impressed. She was dazed.

But not by the man before her.

He was beautiful in his own way, all long lines and perfect hair and a smile that weakened most of her defenses.

He was a good and honest man, who never pushed her to be more or do more than she wanted.

But she wanted to be pushed, she wanted to be brought outside of herself, to be expected to be more than the part that she played. Devyn had done that for her.

She felt the Duke’s long, lean trousered leg graze her hip for one minute moment in their dance.

His hands found her waist again.

Her arms met his shoulders. They were solid beneath her touch. He was perfectly made. It would be no inconvenience to let this man have her, taking her body with his own in some massive ancestral bed.

“Have I made you blush, my lady?”

Her eyes shot up to his. She cleared her throat. “Your … shoulders…made me blush, your grace.”

She saw the questions on his face that he was too well-bred to say aloud. Another turn of the dance, and he was dancing with Kate again, who gave Moria a saccharine smile that had Moria speculating over her intentions. Moria partnered with Tristan Valentine, then was returned to the Duke.

“Would you like to retire to the balcony for some air?”

A rush of relief surged from her lungs. Air. What a very pleasant invitation indeed.

She looked over her shoulder for Olivia, her usual accomplice in all matters clandestine. But Olivia was conferring with her other siblings, including Fitz, and Miss Kelley, in hushed tones in a dark corner. Moria noted Peregrine speaking and the slump of his shoulders.

What the devil could unite the passel of them all to such a conciliatory huddle in the middle of a ball her sister was supposed to be hosting? She found Lady Althea ahead, playing hostess in her stead.

Lawrence looked in her direction, his eyes did not meet hers, his jaw tensed before looking back to the others. God, they were discussing her. They had to be. They’d never dream of quietly excluding her in public unless she were the topic of discussion.

Kathleen handed her husband a folded piece of paper which he stuffed back into a pocket in his jacket.

Fitz pulled Noelle closer to his side. Olivia took Jasper’s handkerchief.

Peregrine looked at his feet, having no one to console him.

Moria almost mis-stepped dancing, the Duke’s gentle hands led her and her body followed on mostly muscle memory alone.

Lawrence started walking toward her with purposeful strides.

Jasper reached for him, but he kept moving in Moria’s direction.

It had been Lawrence who broke the news to her three years ago, of Marcus’ death.

She’d tried to save him, the three of them had.

She’d fallen asleep clutching Marcus’ hand, when she’d woken—

Moria read the signs in the ballroom before her like a fortune on the palm of a stranger. Or, rather, she read her own fortune. Fear and some dark, familiar grief spread over her.

She shook her head as if she could deny what she already knew.

Lawrence’s gray-green eyes were hooded from the other side of the dance floor.

I’m sorry, his lips mouthed.

“Is anything amiss, Lady Moria?”

Moria looked to the Duke, his eyes serious and tender.

The music came to a halt, and he did not immediately let her go.

He held onto her like a wilted flower with a broken stem that needed support to stay upright.

She both admired and hated the protective embrace at once.

She identified the feeling as something more akin to self-loathing, she hated that she appeared to need it more than she loathed his willingness to give it, or that he was the man to give it.

She followed his eyes to the terrace, and she nodded.

She would not cry, she would not misstep, she would not give the hundreds of pairs of eyes any reason to see anything less than the image she had crafted so artfully over years of hard work.

She hadn’t crumpled in the past, and she would not now.

Not a mere foot soldier, then; more like the goddess of war. That’s what he’d called her.

She could get through this night, if it came close to killing her, and she would pick through the pieces tomorrow.

“Go on, I’ll meet you in a few moments,” the Duke prompted.

She had been about to say the same thing, giving herself time to ask her family just what the hell they were on about; but she couldn’t publicly contradict a duke, in case anyone was listening. It was a strong possibility that many around her were.

This is what you wanted; some voice told her.

To be noticed, yes, but watched?

No.

There was a chance she had played her part just a little too well.

* * *

She waited no more than five minutes on the balcony in abject misery when the Duke joined her. He came to sit next to her on a stone bench, shucking his coat and wrapping it around her.

“Thank you, Your Grace.”

“George,” he corrected, taking her hands in his.

“Are we on first-name terms, then?” she heard the playful words that came from her lips like they'd been spoken by some other woman who didn’t feel her world shattering into rubble around her.

He gave a warm, affectionate little laugh, and her heart was seized with so many emotions at once: hope, tenderness, anguish, self-recrimination, the sheer injustice of it all.

“I would like for us to be. Very much.”

Even as terror gripped her heart, she play-acted.

She contorted her mouth into a little moue, and said, “How much?” leaning closer to him.

“I’ll show you,” he whispered, his hands coming around to cup her face, pulling her lips to his.

She could feel how badly he wanted her in the way his lips cradled hers, the way his tongue made its way carefully into her mouth- possessive, but not greedy.

His hands snaked around the back of her coiffure as he pulled her closer, closer still.

Even as she wrapped her arms around his neck, she fought with herself, a targeted effort to push out all other thoughts but the feel of this man who was with her, here now, kissing her.

He broke the kiss, removing himself from the seat to kneel before her.

He took her hands that had come up to cover her mouth, with his own.

He stayed that way a moment, this golden prince, looking up at her with anticipation, with admiration.

“Moria,” he punctuated her first name. “I think we both know this moment has been coming toward us for a long time. I’ve considered what I would say to you, and replayed it in my head many times, always falling short of what you deserve.

But the point is, I’d like to spend a lifetime with you, finding all the right words, saying all of the things that you deserve to hear, hoping that you’ll return them.

Would you do me the honor of becoming my Duchess? ”

All the tears that Moria had been holding back behind a dam of steel will, expelled themselves.

She wouldn’t have the man that she would die for, who would die for her, but she would not be alone. And she could come to love this man before her.

Couldn’t she?

The tears wouldn’t stop.

“Moria? Have I shocked you?”

In answer, she pulled him to her, dropping the coat she’d been wearing on the ground next to them. She stood and pulled him up to her, unlocking him with her lips, letting his hands wrap her into him. She felt the length of his body against her own. Wool and linen against the silk of her dress.

At some point he’d removed his gloves, and she felt the soft press of his warm hands against the cool of her back.

“Yes,” she said, against his smiling lips. “I’ll marry you, George.”

He laughed his satisfaction. He had locked eyes on her, but in the darkness he couldn’t or wouldn’t see the sadness that was surely there. He was fidgeting in the pocket of his waistcoat for the ring.

Touch as light as a breath, he tugged her glove from her hand and slid the betrothal ring on her finger. To Moria, it felt like a shackle. As final as a death knell.

He curled her fingers into a fist and kissed her hand. He held her ringed hand up to the moonlight, the jewel glowed like a smaller moon glistening atop her hand.

“It’s perfect,” he whispered.

It was perfect. But it wasn’t perfection she had wanted.

It had been, once, a lifetime ago.

Perfection was what everyone else had wanted.

“Should we go tell your family?” He made to re-enter the ballroom, but she stalled.

He held onto her hand, not understanding her hesitation.

How often would he misunderstand me? She wondered.

Devyn had always understood her.

“I will never be anything but yours. Until I draw my dying breath.”

But now, he was gone, and this man remained. Of all the months he’d waited, why did it have to be tonight?

She couldn’t face them inside, not yet at least. “Can we simply…enjoy this moment? The two of us?”

He closed the short paces between them. Her arms came around him, looking up at him to find reasons to cling to him, things that she could hold onto and choose to love.

He misread it for true affection. He placed a kiss to her temple.

His lips moved to her cheeks, then to her jaw, and finally to her ear.

“I’m sorry. I should have proposed to you ages ago. I made a bold claim on the floor of parliament, years of frustration spurring me on in the moment. And then I got caught up in winning, in seeing a cause through to the end. But I never should have made you wait for me.”

That wasn’t the part she objected to. It comforted her to know that there was more to him than the cool veneer she so often witnessed, a man who could get heated over injustices and work to wrong them.

He’d courted other women, bedded them, even, likely, somehow it didn’t sting. Moria had done more waiting in her lifetime than this man realized.

She’d waited for Marcus.

She’d waited for Devyn.

She hadn’t been waiting on this man, but she merely touched his face in answer. The skin beneath her fingers felt foreign.

This man wasn’t a villain, and neither was Devyn. Damn Devyn for dying, but surely she was the villain here. Becoming a duchess, that had been the aim of a grieving girl who wanted a pedestal high enough she couldn’t be brought down ever again. She was someone else now, wasn’t she?

The man kissing her was doing a thorough job of showing her affection, and it too felt wrong. The word rattled around inside her skull.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But Moria had become comfortable with dissonance inside her head. Had it felt right, she would have felt more confusion. Instead, she stared down those words, and kissed the duke back, even as self-loathing crawled into her skin.

Her hands were in his hair, then, pulling his lips home to meet hers.

And his hands…they were everywhere. Both were consumed by raw need, to find some different but altogether similar comfort and absolution in the other.

A throat cleared behind them.

“Good god, how revolting,” Valentine spoke.

The Duke pulled back, his head dropping onto Moria’s shoulder.

“Valentine, you’re most welcome to return to the ballroom,” he turned to the other man, “If you do not like what you see.”

“I came to…escort the lady back inside.”

“As I’ve just proposed to the lady and she has accepted, you will do no such thing.”

“Your Grace, you’ve finally done it? Huzzah!” Tristan offered, but when Moria met his eyes, she let him see the disappointment for a moment.

Tristan gathered her in a hug. “I never doubted you for a moment,” he said against her cheek. A tear collided with Moria’s cheek, and she knew. She’d been right.

“Will you let go of my betrothed, please?” The Duke said, laughter in his voice.

“Sorry,” Tristan said, squeezing her shoulder one last time before pulling away. “The emotions of the night got the better of me.”

Moria swallowed. She felt so cold. A shiver traveled down her spine. The Duke draped an arm around her. They weren’t the right arms, they weren’t long enough or sturdy enough and she doubted he bore a bear, the image of a militia battalion, on his left forearm, or a sparrow inked on his hand.

He wouldn’t. Those arms belonged to a dead man.

She shivered again.

“Christ, let’s get you inside, dear. We should find your family and tell them the good news.”

When she re-entered the ball wearing the Duke’s jacket and his ring, she was at the center of a single beam of light when all she wanted was to cower in the darkness spreading inside of her.