Page 14 of Don’t Let Your Dukes Grow Up To Be Scoundrels (Dukes in Disguise #1)

Shooting pains streaked through Gemma’s hips and lower back every time she moved. If she didn’t get off this hard floor soon, she was going to scream.

Patience , she reminded herself with a clenched jaw and fine mist of perspiration breaking out at her hairline. This is all worth it .

Hard to remember that fact when Hal abandoned her to her fate, but she didn’t have time to wonder where he’d gone—the moment Hal left, Sir Gilbert’s eyes popped open.

Giving her what he what he seemed to think was a seductive smile, he said, “Ah, alone at last, my sweet one. I’m sure you couldn’t tell, but I was merely feigning sleep! Yes! So that your interfering manservant would leave.”

“How clever of you,” Gemma murmured, trying once again to get her knees under her so she could at least sit up.

“Mmm, my dear, you’re so delightfully wriggly,” Sir Gilbert said with relish. He dropped the bell he’d been tormenting them with for three days so that he could roll over on the mattress and grasp Gemma’s other hand. His fingers were long and thin, his palms clammy. She fought back a shudder.

“Wouldn’t you like some water?” she improvised, finally managing to get to a kneeling position. Her entire right leg had fallen asleep and now tingled sharply as the blood rushed back into it. “I could get up and pour you some.”

“No, no! Stay right there, you are a picture. A vision. A Muse! I feel a poem coming on…”

With that, he was off, an unstoppable wave of the worst rhyming verse she’d ever heard pouring from him in a melodramatic undertone that she thought was meant to convey a towering passion, but instead blurred into a low, droning sound in her ears that nearly rendered her unconscious. If she hadn’t been kneeling on a hard wood floor, she probably would have fallen asleep.

As it was, Hal’s return nearly startled her into toppling over.

He reacted instantly, his long legs eating up the distance between them so he could reach her in time to catch her by the shoulders and tug her to her feet. Her cramped legs protested instantly and a tiny mew of pain escaped her clamped jaw.

“Sweet muse, where are you going?” the baronet cried.

She saw Hal’s gaze narrow on the long, white fingers still clinging to her right hand, and Gemma felt the imprint of those cold digits as if they were grasping her heart and squeezing without mercy.

She heaved in a breath, her legs still trembling and weak, her muscles sore and screaming, and abruptly she couldn’t bear Sir Gilbert’s touch for even an instant longer.

With a move as instinctive as shaking off a spider that has dropped from the ceiling, Gemma wrenched free of Sir Gilbert. The way she jerked swayed her even closer to Hal, who was still steadying her by the shoulders, and it was entirely impossible to avoid melting slightly into the warm strength of his large frame.

She knew it was impossible, because she tried not to. She really tried.

Meanwhile, Sir Gilbert’s eyes had narrowed, a sulky cast darkening his pale features. “I say, what the devil is going on? Unhand my muse, sirrah!”

Testing her legs to see if they would hold her, Gemma thought that they would. She stepped away from both men, feeling her breath come a little easier for the first time all day.

She knew she probably ought to get right back down on her knees to placate Sir Gilbert before he threw another of the tantrums that had sent Bess into a tizzy that morning, but Gemma found to her dismay that she absolutely could not bring herself to do it.

There was an awkward pause while both men watched Gemma to see what she would do, and she stood like a statue and did…nothing.

Into the tense silence, Hal’s deep, smooth voice dropped like stones into a pond. “I came as soon as I could, Sir Gilbert. I only hope it isn’t too late.”

The baronet struggled amidst the bedclothes until he was sitting up, scowling and red in the face. “Too late? Too late for what?”

“Too late to avoid…infection,” Hal intoned dramatically, and Gemma stared at him in dawning horror.

“Infection?” The baronet clutched his throat, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. “Oh, I say. Good gad. An infection?”

As if on cue, a loud groaning sounded from the hallway. Lucy, having a very good time, Gemma assumed, making noises as though she were being disemboweled with a teaspoon.

“Yes,” Hal confirmed even as Gemma began to shake her head. “The young lady who brought your pillows and that last bowl of porridge—I trust you haven’t eaten any of it?! Ah, very good. But still, the illness does seem to be very catching. The cook, downstairs, is also in some distress. Nausea, they said, was the first symptom. Followed by terrible pains of the midsection and innards, as you can hear—but first, at the onset—just a touch of nausea.”

Hal paused, head cocked to one side as he considered the increasing perspiration and wide eyes of his target. Almost gently, he inquired, “And how are you feeling, Sir Gilbert?”

Gemma knew what he was going to say even before he gave a slight, coughing moan and clutched at his stomach. “Oh no! Nausea, you say? I…I do believe I am starting to experience some slight tinge of…oh yes, there it is again! Oh, I don’t feel at all well. Dash it, I wish I’d never stopped here.”

“I can certainly understand that,” Hal agreed, “After all, we have no doctor in Little Kissington. The nearest is several miles away, and is often out on call helping the locals and farmers, and as I’ve said, a bit the worse for drink.”

“Oh,” Sir Gilbert bleated piteously, his head lolling to one side. “Oh, what shall I do?”

Everything was happening so quickly, Gemma could hardly believe it, much less contrive a way to stop it. But here she managed to interject, “Sir Gilbert, please don’t trouble yourself, I’m sure this ‘illness’ is nothing more than a passing ague, or perhaps a touch of food poisoning! Not contagious at all! If you would just lie back and rest…”

But he was already too far gone, the spectre of illness wrapped around him like a net. “No, no! I cannot stay here! In this house of ill health! But where can I go?”

“They say,” Hal mused, eyes innocently on the ceiling, “that Bath has some of the finest physicians in the world. Not to mention the very healthful waters there.”

“Yes!” Sir Gilbert seized upon the idea at once, a fish snapping at the perfect lure. “Bath! I was on my way there, you know, to take the waters. Where is my manservant? I must get packed at once!”

Gemma wrung her hands together. “There’s no need for that! I’m certain this is all a misunderstanding?—”

“Are you implying I don’t know my own symptoms, Lady Gemma?” Sir Gilbert drew himself up to his full height in offended hauteur; the effect was somewhat marred by his still being tangled in the sheets covering his floor mattress.

Hal cleared his throat. “As it happens, I took the liberty of alerting your manservant and coachman already. Higgins is waiting in the hallway to help your lordship dress, and the coach and horses should be harnessed and ready for you in the courtyard.”

Gemma stared, her heart pounding. She could feel this opportunity slipping through her fingers faster than water from a leaky bucket, but as Hal ushered her from the room and welcomed in Higgins, the baronet’s valet, shutting the door behind them, she stood in the hallway…and started to laugh.

There may have been a tinge of hysteria to it, since Lucy rushed up to her, crying, “Oh good grief, didn’t it work? Are you all right?”

Laughter caught in her throat and almost turned into a sob, but she choked it down. As ever, there was no use crying. There would be more opportunities. There had to be.

What if this was your only chance?

Ignoring the hysterical voice in her head, Gemma gave her sister a narrow look. “I’m quite alright, and Sir Gilbert is leaving. Thanks in part to your amateur theatrics.”

Completely unrepentant, Lucy threw an arm around Gemma’s shoulders. “You’re welcome! Good gracious, what a crank. Poor Bess may never recover from the insult to her cooking. At least now Sir Gilbert will be someone else’s problem. The poor sods in Bath won’t know what hit them.”

Gemma knew she should check Lucy’s language, at the very least, if not give her a proper dressing down for the part she’d played in the charade that led to Sir Gilbert’s departure. But she simply didn’t have the energy.

Pressing her fingers to her throbbing temples, Gemma blew out a sigh. “Lucy, I know you were only trying to help, and I understand why you felt it was right to step in.”

“Because Sir Gilbert is atrocious,” Lucy stated, unequivocally. “And even if you could bring yourself to marry him, I couldn’t possibly bear to put up with him for even one more day, so honestly, Gem, he had to go.”

“Yes, I said I understood,” Gemma repeated, trying not to laugh. “But Lucy, from now on, no interfering! No matter how atrocious you deem my prospects to be. I know what I’m doing.”

Giving her an arch look, Lucy asked, “Are you going to tell that to Hal, as well? Because it was all his idea.”

Her headache throbbed to life once more. “Oh, I’m well aware of that,” she muttered just as the door to the best room in the house opened and Sir Gilbert all but fell out of it in his rush to escape whatever plague he was now convinced he might have.

“Ah, my sweet Muse,” he panted hurriedly as he jogged toward the stairs, “I must take my leave of you, but the memory of your beauty, your grace, your—ack!”

He’d caught sight of Lucy, who instantly fell into a dramatic swoon, the back of her hand to her forehead and her lips parted on a guttural moan. She minced sideways until she could fall conveniently into Hal’s waiting arms.

Gemma said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” but Sir Gilbert was already gone, his heeled shoes pounding a rapid tattoo down the stairs, with the long-suffering Higgins following behind bearing his luggage.

The entire party was loaded into the carriage and the coachman was whipping the horses out of the courtyard in a cloud of dust before Lucy could even make it down to the door to bid them good riddance.

There goes your future , the insidious voice whispered, and what a lovely one it would’ve been, too . The relief she didn’t wish to feel had Gemma rounding on the man who’d cost her that future with anger burning in her belly.

“I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” she hissed, her throat constricting with rage. “I had him, Hal! I had a baronet, a gentleman with a title and a fortune, ready to propose at any moment, and you ruined it! How could you?”

He had the audacity to look surprised and offended by her accusation. “How could I? How could you , Gemma? How could you pretend for an instant that you could shackle yourself to a man like that.”

“You mean a man with enough money to care for my mother in her dotage? And give my sister the London debut she deserves?” Gemma inquired acidly. “Hideous prospect indeed. I ought to be thanking you for my narrow escape.”

“You should, in fact.” Hal stepped closer, the force of his personality and the raw, intense vigor that poured from him seeming to fill the entire hallway. “Admit it, Gemma. You’re relieved. Sir Gilbert was not the man for you.”

“Oh?” She hated how breathless she sounded, but couldn’t do a thing to change it. “And who is the man for me?”

His chest heaved once, as though with some great emotion, but the dim light of the corridor concealed all but the roughest planes and angles of his handsome face…and the glittering heat of his gaze. A bold recklessness took hold of Gemma, and she closed the distance between them until they stood toe to toe.

Poking a finger into that broad chest was like poking a brick wall. “I told Lucy this, and now I’m telling you. No more interfering, Hal. You can’t sabotage every chance I have at securing a brilliant match for myself. You must promise to leave me alone.”

One of Hal’s large hands came up and captured her smaller hand against his chest. He held her there, his eyes on hers. “Is that truly what you want?” he rasped. “To be left alone?”

Say yes , her mind screamed, just say yes and everything will be so much simpler! But her body was softening, melting, as she breathed in his familiar pine forest scent and soaked up the heat of his muscular body.

“What I want,” she murmured, her gaze dropping to his lips. “What I want…”

Hal did not wait to be asked. He kissed her, and it was nothing like an apology.

It was audacious, and fierce, and tender, and wild. It was a claiming kiss. Gemma speared her hands into his hair to hold him close and kissed him back with every ounce of the frustrated anger, reluctant relief, and pent-up passion inside her.

She moaned when he pressed her up against the wall, and shrieked when that wall turned out to be the door to the finest room at the inn and it opened behind her, depositing them both on the mattress still lying on the floor.

Breath knocked from her lungs, Gemma gaped up at Hal, who blinked owlishly down at the mattress beneath them and then said, “I take back everything I said about Sir Gilbert. The man is clearly is a genius. In the future, I expect everyone will be putting their mattresses on the floor.”

Gemma hauled in enough air to laugh, feeling as though her lungs were compressed by a too-tight corset. “Oh yes, terribly convenient!”

“Very,” he murmured, bending that wicked head to nip at the hinge of Gemma’s jaw. The silky bristles of his beard brushed over her sensitized skin, making her shiver.

She’d missed him. She could admit it to herself, if not to him. But the realization brought with it the memory of the last time they’d been together, and the harsh words that had been spoken.

“What did you mean?” she asked him, unconsciously tilting her head back to give him better access to her throat. “When you said I was just like all the rest of them. All the rest of whom?”

He stiffened against her, his whole body going rigid for a moment before he lifted his head to stare down into her eyes. “All the rest of the aristocratic world, I suppose. Although really, I was talking about…the family that owns these lands, the Montrose family.”

When she gazed at him searchingly, he settled at her side, the length of their bodies pressed together in a way that was comforting rather than stimulating, but just as satisfying.

“Your impressions of the last duke were correct,” Hal told her. “He was not a good man. He came by it honestly, though, descending from a long line of not very good men.”

“Perhaps the current duke, your friend, will be better,” Gemma said optimistically. “You never did say where he’s gone off to.”

“He’s abroad,” Hal answered shortly. “Indefinitely.”

Gemma sighed. It seemed a shame not to get a crack at seducing the resident duke into marrying her. But then she frowned. “I still don’t understand why that was such an insult, to compare me to a duke’s family. You clearly did not mean it as a compliment.”

“No.” Hal tipped his forehead down to rest it against her temple, and the moment of closeness and shared warmth and breath melted Gemma’s bones into the mattress. “I shouldn’t have said it; it was unfair to you.”

“What did you mean by it, though?”

He laughed a little, shaking the mattress. “You are relentless.”

“When I want something? Yes.”

“Well, that is one way you are different from the Montroses. Not one of them had the fortitude to pursue a goal loftier than to attend a ball every evening of their pointless, silly lives.”

Taken aback by the genuine venom in his tone, Gemma sat up a bit, using her elbows to prop herself upright. “Goodness. You truly did not respect them, did you?”

Hal struggled with that for a moment, but finally shrugged. “I suppose not. We certainly didn’t have much in common. They did nothing but throw parties, spend money that should’ve gone to improving the lives of the their dependents, and sleep the day away idly.”

Gemma shifted uncomfortably. “If I’m honest, that description does not sound entirely unlike me. Or at least, it sounds like the life I used to lead, in London.”

“Perhaps, although I have seen a different side of you emerge since you started fixing up Five Mile House,” Hal pointed out. His voice grew rough. “And I cannot believe you would ever display the callousness of the Montrose family, who regularly came face to face with the poverty, deprivations and suffering they caused by neglecting their duty to their tenants, and ignored it all. Worse; they laughed about it. Even within their own family, when confronted with the misery they caused…well. They were truly heartless. You, Gemma—I know you have a heart.”

That heart had started thumping, hard enough to shake Gemma’s ribcage. She worked to keep her mind clear.

“You’ve given yourself away,” she said softly, studying the lines of his face. “No mere friend of the younger son would feel so strongly about the family’s wrongdoings. No, I have divined the truth.”

Hal turned to steel against her, cold and unyielding and defensive. “What truth?”

“You didn’t meet the Duke of Havilocke at university. You knew him from a much younger age.”

He went impossibly stiffer at her side. It was like lying in bed with a statue.

A little bewildered by his reaction, Gemma nevertheless triumphantly delivered her coup de grace. “You grew up in the village here, didn’t you? It’s your home, your family’s home.”

Abruptly relaxing, Hal huffed out a laugh that almost sounded giddy. Looming over her, he held himself up with one hand and used the other to brush her curls away from her face. “You have discovered my secret. I was, in fact, born here.”

“I know your mother is gone. Does the rest of your family still live here?”

He sobered, his forehead creasing. “All of my family is dead. I am the only one left. But even before that, they were not what you could consider loving. For all intents and purposes, they abandoned me when I was young. If it wasn’t for the kindness and generosity of the people here in Little Kissington, I would have been very alone. The Pickfords practically raised me alongside their own brood.”

“I see,” Gemma said around the lump in her throat. No wonder he and Bess were so close, they’d grown up like brother and sister. And Gemma saw, too, why Hal was so protective of this place and these people. They had taken him in when his own family, the people who should have cared for him, left him alone. Of course he loved and defended this community, which had shown him the only care he’d ever known.

Her heart ached for the little motherless boy he had been.

“I see, too,” Hal said quietly. “It may shock you to know that I spent some portion of the last few days thinking, and I’ve realized something. Your reasons for carrying on with this scheme run deeper than all three of you missing a life of luxury and entertainments in London. Don’t they?”

The question pierced straight through Gemma. “I have several reasons, each compelling in its own way.”

“Your mother.” Hal sighed, the side of his thumb absently tracing her jaw. “Your father didn’t leave her anything to live on, and the new duke won’t take care of her. So you must.”

Gemma nodded. “And Lucy—she’s eighteen. She should have come out this year, if the family weren’t in mourning. So next year…but a London Season costs more than money. The dragon ladies of Almack’s, the matrons who decide the fate of every young girl who appears before them for approval…let’s just say they are unlikely to give the nod to a girl whose parents made the most scandalous match of the decade. Much less one who has been cast out by her half-brother, the current duke.”

Hal studied her. “Gemma. You made your debut, with those same parents and their match, only fresher in the minds of the society gossips.”

A ghostly memory of her own debut gripped Gemma, giving her a sudden desire to pull the baronet’s sheets over her head. “Yes. That’s how I know they won’t accept Lucy as she is. Because it happened to me. I was a scandal before I ever walked into my first ballroom, merely because my father had the bad taste to fall in love with a servant girl.”

“Ah,” Hal said, as though some things were coming clear in his mind.

“Well,” Gemma amended roughly, grief swelling up to mingle with the remembered confusion and shame, “the falling in love part would’ve been accepted, I suppose—it was the bit where he married her that upset the Ton. And then they had the audacity to be blissfully, ostentatiously happy in that marriage.”

“Your father was a duke. And a wealthy one, at that. You cannot tell me he was entirely shunned by polite society, no matter who he married.”

“Oh, no. He was invited everywhere—but my mother was not. And Father refused to enter any home where Mama was not welcomed.”

“He forced Society to bend to his will, and they held a grudge. Which they took out on you.”

Gemma smiled faintly. “You understand a lot about how the Ton works, for a laborer from a country village.”

Hal looked angry, his muscles very tense and solid against her. “Why didn’t your father protect you?”

“How? By giving up my mother and marrying someone suitable instead?” Gemma pressed her lips together to stop them trembling. “Father did the best he could for me. He taught me to be myself and find my own happiness, as he did. It’s not his fault that I wasn’t terribly good at it.”

“What happened when you debuted, Gemma?” Hal’s voice was deep and compelling.

Words lodged in her throat, a tight knot of unhappiness she wanted to expel but had to swallow instead. “It was a long time ago. I’ve all but forgotten it.”

“Gemma.”

“They hated me,” she burst out, surprising herself. “Before they even met me, they had already decided who I was. Who I must be. Ill-bred, bad blood, no better than she should be. Tainted. Tarnished. Not good enough to dance with, certainly not good enough to marry, only good enough for?—”

She broke off, turning her head to the side and squeezing her eyes closed to shut out the memories. But Hal cupped her cheek and gently forced her to look at him. “Good enough for what?”

Humiliated heat prickled her scalp, flushing all the way down to her chest, but Gemma met his gaze defiantly. If there was moisture beading at the corners of her eyes, she ignored it. “For a laugh. A joke. A prank. I got lots of those from the titled young men of ‘good’ families. I wasn’t overlooked or ignored—I was a laughingstock. I told you about the satirists’ obsession with my family? Well, they certainly had a wonderful time when I came along.”

Hal growled deep in his chest, the sound spurring her on.

“Do you know what else I got?” she said, a little wildly. “Propositions. Leers. Winks. Gropes. They all assumed that with a lowborn mother, I must be a girl of low morals, ready and available for a romp. And this blasted figure didn’t help—no matter what I wore, no matter how virginal and demure the gown, no one ever saw me as innocent. It didn’t take too many suggestive comments or insinuating whispers or cruel jests before I wasn’t that innocent girl anymore. They wanted me to be bad. So I was bad. I took their low expectations, and I made a mockery of them by outdoing the worst anyone had ever said of me. I was the one laughing, then.”

To her horror, her voice broke at the last. Hal dropped his forehead to rest against hers. The closeness unraveled Gemma’s tightly held composure, and she took a shuddering breath.

His deep voice vibrated through her chest where they were pressed together, making her feel enveloped by him, warm and safe and cocooned against the world.

“Beautiful Gemma. You aren’t tarnished. Not by anything you’ve done, or anything that was done to you. I don’t believe anything could take away your shine. I see it every time I look at you.”

She clutched Hal by the shoulders, her fingers digging into the rough cloth of his shirt and clutching it in fistfuls. They stayed that way for a long, trembling moment, sharing each other’s breath and absorbing the heat of each other’s bodies.

The sound of a door slamming downstairs brought Gemma to her senses. “Let me up!” she whispered, squirming out from under Hal’s bulk and trying to restore some sort of order to her gown and coiffure.

Hal rolled to his side and propped his head up on one hand to watch her. “No one is coming. You should lie back down here with me. To rest. You must be weary after the morning’s…trials.”

All of Gemma’s annoyance and pique came rushing back.

“As if you even care how I feel,” she sniffed, poking a curl back into place with a harried jab. “One little disagreement, and you disappear for days? I had to learn how to pull a pint!”

“Perhaps I’m being dense—it’s probably my lack of title and breeding,” Hal said, turning onto his back and crossing his arms behind his head, “but I don’t think I understand what you want. First I’m to promise to leave you alone; now, you seem to be saying that when I did leave you alone, you resented it. Well, which is it? Should I stay, or should I go?”

“You should listen more attentively,” Gemma said with chilly emphasis. “I have yet to hear you promise not to interfere again. Well, Hal? Will you give me your promise?”

A strange expression twisted his lips. If Gemma didn’t know better, she would have called it something like pain.

As it was, she had no time to dwell on it because Hal had the audacity to say, “That’s the problem, Gemma. I cannot promise you a damned thing.”

She sucked in a provoked breath just as Lucy’s signature elephant tread sounded on the stairs. Knowing they were about to be interrupted, Gemma threw up her hands. “Fine. Fine! You want to play saboteur? Go ahead. It won’t make any difference. My plan will succeed, with or without your help.”

Stepping around the mattress, she left him lying on the floor with that odd look on his face, and told herself that was the last time she kissed Hal Deveril.