Page 25 of His Arranged Duchess (Regency Wedding Crashers #5)

A tentative tap on the door made Lucien raise his eyes from his work.

“Enter.”

He assumed that it was Gray, coming to bring in the eleven o’clock tea tray. Gray insisted upon drinking tea at precisely eleven o’clock every day. Lucien had watched footmen sneak furtively away from their posts to take a sip, while cooks with floury hands drank deeply from delicate China cups.

Instead of Gray, however, Frances peered around the door.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

Lucien leaned back in his seat, eyeing her closely. They hadn’t spoken since last night. He hadn’t joined Frances at breakfast and had convinced himself that it was simply because he had too much work to do.

And perhaps if I keep telling myself that, I shall learn to believe it.

Not likely, however.

“You are not,” he answered. “Come in. Take a seat. Shall I ring for tea?”

Frances inched into the room but did not sit.

“No, thank you. I came to tell you that the repairs and decorating in the ballroom are finished. You should look at it, it’s remarkably beautiful. Oh, and the stair carpets have arrived and will be fitted shortly.”

He nodded. “Thank you for telling me. You are making quite the duchess. Your hard work is appreciated and noticed.”

She smiled grimly. “I’m glad to hear it.”

A moment of awkward silence descended between them. Lucien lifted an eyebrow.

“I sense that there is something else you wish to discuss?”

She breathed in deeply, folding her hands in front of her waist.

“Yes, there is. Are you angry at me, Lucien?”

He flinched. “Angry? I’m not given to such vulgar emotions. I am not angry at you.”

“Are you sure? You seemed particularly angry at me last night, when you accused me of… of having feelings for a man I never wanted to marry.”

Lucien narrowed his eyes. “I wish you could have seen the expression on your own face when you saw that vile man on the platform. You were enraptured at once, horrified and sad and curious at the same time. Tell me, what was I meant to think?”

She clenched her jaw. “I don’t know, but imagining that I am in love with such an odious man, one who had named me in the vilest poem, well…”

“Poem? What poem?”

She blinked at him. “Wait. You hadn’t heard it?”

Lucien bit his lower lip. In truth, he had not been listening at all.

He had heard countless poems recited at parties like these, and that one had not struck him as particularly worth listening to.

With Frances by his side, flushed and glowing and looking as beautiful as she did, who could listen to a poem?

“I have not,” he answered slowly.

She folded her arms tight across her chest, glancing away.

“He recited a poem about me. He did not specifically say that it was about me, but he used my Christian name. It was an insult.”

Lucien closed his eyes. “You are right. I am sorry, Frances. I had not heard the poem, and I assumed… Well, it was a foolish notion. Imagining you to be in love with such a pathetic man as Easton. I should not have said what I said, and I apologise wholeheartedly.”

She seemed to relax a little. “I’m glad to hear that. And you believe, don’t you, that I do not and never have had feelings for a man like Lord Easton ?”

He grinned, tilting his head to one side. “Even if you did, I could not be angry.”

She blinked, frowning. “And why not?”

He got slowly to his feet, placing his fingertips on the desk and leaning forward.

“Because, my dear duchess, you are mine now. It is my name you moan. Me, who you break apart for. So nothing else matters, really.”

Frances's face reddened at once, and she hastily turned away to conceal her expression. It was too late, however, and Lucien had seen the desire in her eyes.

“If you so say,” she managed at last, her voice tight.

“I do have questions, however,” Lucien continued, leaning back.

He had not counted on feeling so… so excited at the sight of her reaction.

Their stolen moments behind the pillar last night had passed, for him, in a haze of lust and frustration, watching her close her eyes, feeling her body press and respond against him.

The expression on her face when her climax reached her had been…

well. Besides, the longer they spent there, the more likely it was that they would be discovered.

Frances lifted her chin, narrowing her eyes at him. “Questions?”

“Yes. If it were not the sight of Lord Easton that made you pale so intensely, I must assume it was the poem.”

There. He’d hit on the right thing. Frances flinched, just a little, before she composed herself.

“I can hardly remember the poem,” she answered coolly.

He gave a wry smile. “Indeed, we only heard the last verse. But it did mention your name, didn’t it?”

Frances sniffed. “It might. It was hardly a great ballad. Little more than a limerick, really. It said something about my lies, and that I should expect a surprise. He planned to embarrass me, I imagine,” she continued curtly. “It was just the shock of hearing my own name.”

She’s still keeping some part of the truth from me , Lucien realized, with something of a shock. There’s a secret here that she wishes to keep hidden. She does not trust me with her secret, but expects to be shown mine.

Slowly, Lucien lowered himself back into his seat.

“If you don’t choose to share your secret with me,” he remarked, “We shall leave the conversation here for now. However, I have planned another romantic excursion for us in two days’ time.”

She tilted her head. “And which of my conditions do you plan to meet then, Your Grace ? How do you plan to impress me further?”

He grinned. “My dear, I think perhaps it’s your turn to impress me. I impressed you quite sufficiently last night, I believe.”

She flushed at that—he’d never met a woman who blushed so intensely and so frequently as Frances, and it was most endearing.

“Very well. Until then, I might as well tell you, I plan to spend a day or two with my mother. I have missed her sorely, and we shall probably pay visits to the Duke and Duchess of Clapton. So, you shan’t see me for a while, but I will be sure to return in time for our excursion. Do I have your permission to go?”

He blinked, briefly taken aback. “You don’t need my permission.”

“Good. Good day to you, husband.”

She bobbed a curtsey—a curtsey, of all things!—and exited the study, closing the door behind her. Lucien was left alone, battling a growing sense of unease. At the root of this unease was a plain and undeniable fact.

I don’t want her to go.

“If this is what marriage is like, I pray to be spared from it,” Benjamin huffed, pouring himself another glass of whiskey. “Your wife isn’t even here, and still you’re mooning about as morosely as ever. Can’t we just have a good time, Lucien?”

Lucien sighed. “I am not mooning over that woman. I am simply preoccupied. There is a difference.”

The two men were sitting in the drawing room, booted feet up before the fire, sipping whiskey and enjoying the silence. Or at least, Lucien had assumed they were enjoying the silence, but perhaps it was not as mutual as he had thought.

“I’d much rather have gone out to a club,” Benjamin muttered. “We’re in London . There are things to do here! To be sure, it isn’t Paris , but still. And I know why you aren’t going.”

“Oh, do enlighten me.”

“It’s that wife of yours. She disapproves, and you can’t stand up to her.”

Lucien levelled a long look at his friend. “Since when have I been unable to stand up to anyone? Besides, Frances does not care if I attend clubs. I simply don’t have the taste for them that I once did.”

Benjamin rolled his eyes, clearly disbelieving, but Lucien was in no mood to argue the subject. He leaned forward, setting down his untouched glass.

“I took her to one of the Brown parties. A poetry reading.”

“Ugh. Dire. Well, I suppose you enjoyed it.”

“I did, except…” Lucien paused, running through the events in his mind.

He had no intention of telling Benjamin about the incident behind the pillars.

Friends should not share everything . However, he did want to talk about something else.

“A gentleman got up to recite a poem,” he continued at last. “It was Lord Easton, the man that Frances was supposed to marry. It was a rather vengeful poem, aimed at her. She reacted badly, turning pale and fixating on him. At first, I thought she had feelings for the man, but of course, that isn’t the case.

After all, I did steal her from him quite easily. ”

“P’raps it was the poem,” Benjamin said, shrugging. “I’d be upset if somebody recited an unkind poem about me, too. What was it about?”

Lucien leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and staring meditatively into the fire.

“I don’t recall much of the poem. It wasn’t very good , to say the least, but it was about a social-climbing young woman who pretends to be something she is not. The ending was rather ambiguous, but there was a distinct hint of menace there. Oh, Frances, expect a surprise . It was unpleasant.”

“What a delightful man,” Benjamin snorted. “I suggest you simply forget about it. It’s only a poem, after all, and not one that’s likely to circulate in polite society.”

He nodded. “You’re right, of course. I am overthinking it.”

“Now,” Benjamin continued, leaning forward eagerly and grinning, “let me tell you a story about the most delightful woman I met only last night. She was a fiery little thing, and you know how much I like that. It started with her coming over to me, bold as brass, and…”

His voice faded into a comfortable background noise.

Sighing, Lucien made himself comfortable in his chair.

He’d never much enjoyed listening to Benjamin’s endless stories of his conquests, but his friend enjoyed telling those tales, so he settled down to listen.

It would be a welcome distraction from his thoughts of Frances, which seemed to follow him around every minute these days.

The house was particularly quiet once Benjamin had gone. The clock read a quarter to two, and yet Lucien was not tired at all. He stared into the fire as it dwindled, and then finally dragged himself out of his chair and up the stairs.

I ought to at least try to sleep, he thought. His head spun, full of the lascivious tale Benjamin had told, wrapped up in memories of Frances’s clear green eyes and the feeling of her fingertips digging into the back of his neck.

Before he knew what he was about, he was standing in front of her door.

What are you doing, fool? Respect her privacy, can’t you?

The door creaked open. The room inside was dark, of course, and cold.

The bed had been tidied, the room set in order, the curtains drawn.

Lucien stepped inside, breathing in deeply.

There was a crisp, clean scent in the room, overlaid with the sultry smell of rosewater, which seemed to cling to Frances’s skin.

He let his hand trail over the silken bedspread.

It’s too large a bed for so small a woman. The poor dear must be lonely.

Biting his lip, Lucien recalled how she’d arched into his touch, how she’d stifled her gasps of pleasure to avoid being overheard. Did it give extra relish, he thought, to know that there were people a mere ten feet away? Some women would balk at that, but not Frances.

Wallflower, indeed.

He circled the bed and paused at something poking out under the pillow. Gingerly, he pulled out a notebook. Flicking through the pages, he found it half-full of close-packed writing.

It’s her story. This is a book. Here is chapter one, and the next, and here a whole passage has been scratched out and rewritten.

The gentlemanly thing to do would be to put the book back where he had found it and wait patiently until he was permitted to read it in its entirety. She had, after all, said that it was not finished.

Well, I don’t often do the gentlemanly thing in any given situation, and I don’t intend to start.

Lucien opened the book to a random page near the beginning and began to read.

Timon was a tall man with dark hair swept back from a high brow.

There was something almost wolfish about his features: a pointed chin, a long nose, and a wide, white smile that made one think of crocodiles.

He was handsome nonetheless, and rendered more handsome still by a pair of large, grey eyes, streaked with gold.

Austere and known to be dangerous, he was not a man anybody would wish to cross.

Or so Eleanor had been told. There was something alluring about the man, something that drew her towards him.

He was undeniably handsome, but Eleanor had encountered handsome men before.

What was it about him? She could not decide.

She was sure, one way or another, she would discover where this magnetism would lead her.

At the beginning of the paragraph, the name ‘Timon’ was circled, and another name scrawled loosely in the margins. Lucien had to read it twice to be sure that his eyes were not deceiving him.

Lucien.

Biting back a smile, he carefully placed the book back.

She is certainly not dreaming about Lord Easton, then. Well, what was it that unsettled her so about him? I shall have to find out. Whatever her secret is, I shall ferret it out. Sooner or later, I’ll know the truth.