Page 11 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Eleven

Bess couldn’t sleep.

She hadn’t been able to catch Charlie alone during their visit to ask about the mysterious tavern, and truth be told, she wasn’t certain she should.

Perhaps she’d gone far enough in this depraved quest. Perhaps she ought to accept the fact that she could survive perfectly well on her own, without ever experiencing passion again, and be done with it.

Frustrated and yearning, Bess threw back her coverlet and dressed swiftly in one of her old, comfortable gowns before stealing downstairs to the kitchens.

They were empty, of course, this late at night. The temperamental French chef, Monsieur Anatole, ran his small empire like a commanding general. So the fire in the hearth was carefully banked, and when Bess passed her hand over the behemoth of a cast iron oven squatting against the far wall, she could feel the heat still emanating from it.

Lucy had requested ginger biscuits, Bess mused, catching up an apron from a peg on the wall and tying it swiftly about her waist. A familiar task was exactly what she wanted to clear the cobwebs from the corners of her mind.

Far more modern and up-to-the-minute than her old-fashioned fireplace range at home, which belched smoke and soot to blacken the walls above it, the kitchens at Ashbourn House were a marvel to Bess. She’d been longing to try them out since she arrived, and now was the perfect opportunity.

After building up the fire in the belly of the oven, Bess found the sacks of flour and sugar fairly quickly. Though the sugar was softer and paler than she was accustomed to, it tasted almost the same. A bit less flavor, perhaps, but she could tell by rubbing it between her fingers that it would beat into the butter with wonderful ease, and so it proved.

The warmth of the repetitive motion spread up her arm to her shoulder, familiar and satisfying, and Bess kept the wooden spoon moving and scraping and blending until the mixture was a fluffy yellow the color of the first spring daffodils back home.

It took a bit of hunting to find the spices, but Monsieur Anatole was a master of organization. When Bess finally discovered the custom-built rack of small glass jars, the contents of each labeled on the outside of the jar in black wax pencil, she clapped her hands in glee.

She would’ve known the powdered ginger by sight, its light beige color and fine texture unmistakable—but if there’d been any doubt, the scent would have given it away at once. The spicy sweetness nearly knocked her back a step when she opened the jar, a waft so potent her nose itched with a sneeze.

She would need to be sparing with it, she decided, spooning out a little of the powder with reverence and mixing it into the flour along with a pinch of salt. It was much stronger than her powdered ginger at home.

Turning back to the worktable, her eye caught on a row of irregular shaped bottles and crocks lined up like little soldiers along the bottom of the spice rack. She knelt to trail her fingers over the unmarked glass, trying to guess what each one contained.

The brown spindles poking up through the dark liquid in the one on the end made her reach for the bottle with confidence. A single sniff of vanilla, dark and heady, told her she’d been correct. With a smile, she tipped a bit into the butter and sugar mixture, then replaced the bottle and accidentally knocked it against the crock beside it.

Her knuckle stuck to some liquid that had dribbled down the side, and when she absently lifted it to her mouth to lick it off, the sharp heat of ginger burst over her tongue. Curious, she pulled the cork from the wide mouth of the crock and dipped her spoon inside.

The spoon came up with a collection of small, diced cubes of translucent amber coated in golden syrup. The fragrance they wafted into the air made her close her eyes for a moment in bliss.

Stem ginger. The finest she’d ever seen.

Bess shuddered to think how much it must have cost. All of these ingredients, really—the white sugar, the powdery soft flour, the spices. She bit her lip.

Not for the first time, Bess’s stomach clenched with the realization of the width of the chasm that existed between her life and the life of the people who belonged in this house.

Ashbourn had so much. He could spare a little to bring some joy to a wounded boy.

Recklessly, defiantly, she scooped out more of the precious cubes and added them to the mixture, along with their syrup. It was the work of a moment to combine the dry ingredients with the wet and shape the biscuit dough into round balls on a flat baking sheet.

Into the oven they went, and Bess fell into a straight-backed wooden chair by the worktable and rested her head upon her folded arms. The cold marble that topped the worktable felt good on her overheated skin.

A clatter at the kitchen door jerked Bess upright, blinking in the candlelight. A dark, hulking form staggered through the doorway, tousled head hanging low and face shadowed.

Gasping, Bess stood up so quickly her chair skidded across the flagstones but before she could scream for help or run away or do anything but draw a deep breath, the man raised his head slowly while clutching at his left side.

It was the duke.

Tonight, Ashbourn’s eyes were dull, the smeared light grey of a London dawn, and they bore into Bess from across the empty cavern of the kitchen for a long, suspended moment before a spasm of pain tightened his aristocratic features and he crashed to the floor like a felled tree.

* * *

Nathaniel knew pain. He knew cold. He knew the aching weariness of dragging himself home from a fight to piece himself back together like a shattered bottle of whiskey, with no help from anyone.

That’s what he knew, it was what he expected, it was the way his life had always been.

So when he felt the feather brush of warm fingertips searching gently across his grimy, sweaty brow, he flinched away from the touch instinctively.

“Shhh,” soothed a soft voice that reached down to the very heart of him and calmed him. The voice of an angel. “You’re hurt. You need help.”

Nathaniel laughed, but somehow it emerged from his throat as a groan. “No one can help me.”

“Duke—Ashbourn…please, you must tell me what has happened.”

The voice sounded more upset now, almost frantic, and it made Nathaniel frown. He shifted slightly, his entire body one huge throbbing bruise, but it was the lightning strike of pain in his left side that made him grit his teeth around another groan.

“There?” The warm touch was back, smoothing down his chest and over his sides, gentle but implacable as the dawn. “You’re bleeding, Ashbourn.”

Ashbourn. It still didn’t sound like his name, though it was the name he’d waited impatiently his entire life to shoulder.

The more fool he, never realizing what a burden it would be to carry the name of the man who had cast him off, banished a grieving boy from the last place he’d known a mother’s love, and did his careless best to destroy his legacy so there would be nothing to inherit but shame.

Shame—and that accursed name.

“Can you not open your eyes?” The voice was closer now, as though the angel was leaning over him. She laid a hand against his cheek.

He breathed in her sweetness, a scent that reminded him of tea cakes in the drawing room when he was a boy, almonds and cream and sugar, overlaid with a dark spice he could not place.

“Ashbourn?”

“Nathaniel,” he rasped, reaching up to grasp at her slender yet sturdy wrist. “My name is Nathaniel.”

“Oh Lord. All right. Nathaniel. Are you awake?”

He slitted his eyes open, since she seemed to want him to. Bad idea. He could tell the room wasn’t bright, yet what light there was struck at the ache in his head and blurred his vision.

But he saw her.

She wavered above him, indistinct, until he managed to blink away the sweat and bring her into focus.

Bess.

The evening came back to him like the hammer blow of George ‘The Builder’ Johnson’s fists. Nathaniel had gone into the fight distracted, unfocused, and the man he fought had done exactly as Nathaniel hoped—Johnson had pummeled him until Nathaniel was forced to live only in his body, in that moment, in the pain and sweat and violence of the fight.

Nathaniel had won in the end. But Johnson made him pay for it in blood.

“I’m all right,” he ground out, clutching his side with one hand and using the other to shakily lever himself up to a sitting position. Everything hurt. “Run along to bed.”

“Oh, certainly, and just leave you here—you’re bleeding! Give me a moment, I will send someone to Dr. Perry.”

“No need. Merely a scratch.” It was. If Nathaniel were to be honest, he was more concerned that the room still swam slightly before his eyes, as though he was underwater. It was taking more effort than he liked to admit keeping his eyes open.

“I saw a scratch like that the last time I watched a pig slaughtered for bacon. You’re dripping all over Monsieur Anatole’s clean floor; he will be beside himself.”

“Can’t have that.” He surprised himself by smiling faintly. “Very well, then. If you would be so kind.”

“You were quick enough to send a boy you’d never seen in your life before to Dr. Perry’s surgery, yet won’t go yourself. I wish you’d be sensible, but if you won’t?—

“I won’t.”

Her pink lips pursed like a rosebud. Annoyed angel. “Well, that’s that, then. Look, you’re far too big for me to lift, despite what the songs say about sturdy country lasses. But perhaps you’d be more comfortable if?—”

Her tart commentary was at odds with the gentleness of her hands as she helped him drag his sorry corpse across the flagstones to lean against the wall. Nathaniel swallowed down the way the change in position made every livid bruise and sore spot on his body flame to life. “Much better. Thank you.”

She eyed him narrowly before jumping to her feet to rummage through the drawers and cabinets of the sideboard in the corner. “Only a duke would be so polite while bleeding to death. Why are there no clean rags in this entire kitchen?”

Nathaniel risked a look at the gash in his side. Shallow but long, it seeped a bit of blood and sent a fiery lash of pain through him with every inhalation, but it was hardly life threatening.

Letting his head fall back against the wall with a wince, he meant to reassure Bess that he was in no real danger but the next moment, he was blinking back to awareness with her practically in his lap, pushing up his torn shirt to get to the cut.

And he couldn’t even enjoy it, because she was in the process of tearing a strip from the hem of her own petticoat and binding it securely about his lower ribs.

With calm competence, she pulled it tight enough to make sweat start at his temples and a harsh curse explode from his lungs. But after she tied it off, his next breath came easier and the pain began to level out to something manageable.

He could think again. Which wasn’t the relief he might have hoped, since Bess’s nearness wrenched him straight back to the distraction he’d gone to The Nemesis to combat.

As though she could tell his head had cleared, Bess sat back and fixed him with a solemn frown. “What happened tonight? How were you hurt?”

He grimaced. The truth was impossible, but he found outright dishonesty abhorrent. He temporized with, “The streets of London at night are no place for inattention. I will be on my guard in future.”

“I was warned about footpads and brigands before coming here but I had no idea they’d be so bold as to attack a gentleman on a public thoroughfare! You’re looking better, I suppose, though I still think we ought to send for Dr. Perry. If he can handle a gunshot wound, I’m sure he’d be equal to the task of binding a knife wound from a cutpurse.”

It hadn’t been a knife, but rather an unlucky blow from The Builder, who’d been wearing a gaudily oversized ring that ought to have been outlawed. If only The Nemesis had any rules about that sort of thing.

But the fact that they didn’t was the very reason Nathaniel liked it.

“You have taken care of it as well as anyone could. Help me to stand,” he said, though he was only half sure his legs would support him. Anything to stop her questions about how he came by his injury.

With effort, he pulled his boots under him and shoved himself up the wall, using the support of her slim shoulder under his arm as little as possible.

He didn’t want to touch her, sweaty and fouled with the dregs of the fight as he was. It would be akin to rubbing dirt on the face of the Mona Lisa. A sin.

But what was one more sin?

When Bess curled a careful arm about his waist and anchored herself more securely under his side, Nathaniel did not resist. He let her lead him the few steps to the wooden chair set against the marble-topped worktable in the center of the kitchen.

Exhausted by the whole ordeal, Nathaniel all but fell into the offered seat. Evidently unprepared for his abrupt collapse, Bess gasped and toppled forward with him, only barely managing to catch herself with both hands against his shoulders.

Instinct had him reaching to steady her, despite the pain in his side—which faded into insignificance against the sensation of her lithe waist under his bare palms. The thin muslin of her dress was no barrier at all. He flexed his hands, almost able to imagine the fine-grained texture of her skin, the bare heat of her.

At his shoulders her hands flexed too, a reflexive mimicry that made him set his jaw against the moan that wanted to escape. He looked up into her face, so close and yet so unbearably far.

She stared down at him as though she’d forgotten where they were, and even perhaps who they were.

In this surreal moment out of time, they were not a duke and a chaperone. They were a man and a woman locked in the primal anticipation of the most intimate sharing possible between two people.

Her gaze dropped to his lips, which parted with his labored breathing. The lingering bloodlust singing through him was rapidly converting to an altogether different sort of lust, no less fierce and consuming.

He would have given everything he had, everything he possessed, for the right to take her lips in a kiss.

But Nathaniel did not have that right.

So he gathered the tattered, frayed remnants of his self-control and called upon the one thing he possessed that he had not inherited from his faithless fool of a father.

His honor.

With care, with respect, he eased her away from his straining body that yearned for nothing more than to pull her closer.

Her eyelashes fluttered briefly, masking the warm brown eyes with their flecks of cognac and cinnamon. “Thank you for your help, Bess. I promise you, I will be all right. Leave me, now.”

While you still can .

She straightened in a flustered rush. “Oh! Of course. You’re very welcome. Obviously, I could never leave anyone bleeding on the floor at my feet?—”

“Not even me.” Nathaniel realized he was smiling again. It felt strange, as though he’d forgotten how.

“Not even you,” she agreed, that deliciously tart note returning to her voice and making him want to lick her like a lemon ice. “But that is entirely enough excitement for me for one evening. I will bid you—oh no!”

Nathaniel quirked a brow as she rushed to the oven and used her own skirts to grab the iron handle of the door. Pulling it open, she reached in and pulled out a tray of…biscuits?

“I didn’t burn them!” To his amusement, she sounded nearly as relieved and pleased about that as she had when she’d pronounced his wound looking better. “Smell that, what do you think?”

She inhaled the scent of the biscuits—it was ginger, he realized suddenly, that dark spice he couldn’t place before—and the look on her face made Nathaniel clench his hands round the hard wooden seat of his chair to stop himself from reaching for her.

But he knew he’d picture that blissful expression of ecstasy on her beautiful features when he lay down in his bed later to pretend to sleep. That night, and every night that followed.

“They’re a little hot—ouch!—but oh.” With a giddy laugh, she plucked a steaming biscuit from the tray and blew on it before taking a bite. “Dear sweet lord in heaven, that is good .”

Mouth dry, breath caught, cock harder than stone in his breeches, Nathaniel watched avidly as Bess ate the entire biscuit and licked her fingers clean. When she opened her eyes after one final purr of satisfaction to find him staring, she flushed.

For a moment, he thought she’d tuck away those fingers and stammer an apology, embarrassed to be caught putting her hand to her mouth like a wayward child.

Instead, her eyelids went heavy without closing completely. She kept her gaze on his as she slowly, slowly withdrew that shiny damp finger from between her lips.

There was a roaring in Nathaniel’s ears. He was on his feet with no knowledge of how he’d risen, and no pain anywhere in his body because the only thing his body could feel was desire. He was a creature of flame and longing and nothing more?—

“You may have one biscuit, if you like. The rest are for Lucy,” Bess said gently, sauntering to the hallway door and tipping her chin up in that regal way she had. A woman grown, who knew her pleasures and refused to be embarrassed by them.

God, he wanted her.

Nathaniel pulled his shoulders straight and thanked the almighty that the trailing hem of his linen shirt was long enough to maintain his dignity.

Then she said, “I will bid you good night then. Nathaniel.”

And she turned her back and walked away, and Nathaniel was alone in the kitchen with nothing but a howling emptiness inside him that left no room for dignity, shame, or honor.

If she hadn’t left, he would not have been able to resist his own urges.

Bleakly, Nathaniel knew he’d be back at The Nemesis tomorrow night. And every night, until he conquered this ungovernable hunger.