Page 19 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Nineteen

What would it matter if your family was cruel to you?

How to answer that question on the lips of a man whose parents had both left him, in different ways, before he was old enough to understand anything but that he was alone. And yet, that man still cared more for his family name than for his own happiness.

“It never fails to shock me, somehow, when families are cruel to one another,” Bess said. “You should be able to rely on your family.”

“I never thought I could. But recently, as it happens, I’ve been spending more time with a family member from whom I’ve long been estranged, and…it hasn’t been the punishment I would have assumed.”

“A ringing endorsement.” Bess couldn’t help but be amused. He and Lucy were so alike, at times.

“She is not what I thought,” he said gruffly. “Against all odds and my own stubborn wishes, I like her. And I realized I should not have been blaming her, punishing her, for wrongs that were committed long before she was even born.”

Wrongs like his father daring to marry so far beneath himself, she thought with a pang. But still, her heart lifted at his admission that he had grown fond of Lucy.

“It makes me very glad to hear that. And yet you still find it bewildering, that I should expect a family to care for one another?”

He shrugged and looked away, and Bess felt her heart clench at how solitary he looked.

“When I was a girl,” she said slowly, “my family was taken by illness. All of them at once, in one fell swoop of a tragedy that touched every corner of our little village.”

She’d told him bits of this before—both as herself and as masked Elizabeth. She would need to take care.

Spying a chipped marble bench further up the path, Bess walked over and sat down, spreading out her skirts like the petals of one of the vibrant pink rose campion flowers that were in the process of overrunning every corner. She was in no great hurry to step inside the crowded, rollicking party. It was lovely in this forgotten garden in the moonlight.

Nathaniel followed. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“It was hard,” Bess acknowledged. “But it was a long time ago now.”

“Time doesn’t always make as big a difference as we may hope.”

She dipped her head in agreement. “It’s been a fair few years. The memories are faded, but sweet.”

“Tell me.” He moderated his abrupt demand. “If you wish.”

Bess closed her eyes and let herself remember. “The smell of bread baking in my mother’s kitchen. The flash of my father’s tired smile when he came in for dinner. My grandmother’s finely embroidered flowers, the prettiest to ever grace a handkerchief that was only to be carried for church.”

Grief, her lifelong companion, squeezed at her chest, achingly familiar. “My little sister, Kitty, was a bright, joyous giggle. And the baby, Martin…the softness of a rounded cheek, warm and milky.”

He sat beside her on the bench, his solid thigh a line of reassuring warmth along her own. “Was this the same illness that took the boy you loved? Your first lover?”

Bess nodded. “David Cooper. My Davy. We had such dreams, the two of us, of coming to London and making our way; I’ll always be sorry he didn’t get the chance to try for them. That we didn’t get the chance. And I’ll always feel a responsibility to live my life well, for him. For all of them, that didn’t get to grow up or grow old.”

“That’s why you came to The Nemesis, the first time.”

It wasn’t a question. His voice was sure. But Bess nodded anyway. “I want to live , not merely exist. And it ought to be my life—not a life hemmed in by expectations and lived by another’s leave, at someone else’s whim.”

Bess stopped, startled by the vehemence of her own words. She thought of her conversation with Lucy earlier that day, and vowed silently to sit her down for a long talk about the future, and what Lucy owed to herself as she contemplated what hers might be.

Nathaniel offered her his gloved hand, palm up, and patiently waited for her to take hold of it. So she did, and let herself feel the comfort of it all the way to her bones.

“It was hard to lose my family,” she said, pulling herself back around to the point. “But the hardest part came afterward, when I had to learn how to live without them. Quite literally—everything I thought my life was going to be changed in an instant when I lost them and had to leave my home.”

“You…weren’t able to stay in your home?”

“We didn’t own our home.” She gripped his hand a little tighter, more sharply aware of the gulf between them than she had been in a long time. “My father was a tenant farmer, you see. Working someone else’s land. And when he died, I couldn’t keep it up by myself. I was lucky to have an aunt willing to take me in.”

Beside her, Nathaniel was very still. Bess couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She stared straight ahead at a patch of cheerful poppies and tried not to think about the gulf between a duke and a farmer’s daughter.

To someone who hadn’t lived it, there might not seem much difference between the social standing of a tenant farmer and a cook at an inn. But a tenant farmer was always at the mercy of his landlord, beholden to the whims of a distant, uncaring landowner who might or might not take any interest in the welfare of those who depended on him. The previous Dukes of Havilocke had mainly been interested in how to exploit their tenants to pad their own bank accounts.

But a cook, in her own kitchen? She was independent. The mistress of her own fate, even if it wasn’t the fate she’d dreamed of as a young girl.

Not that a duke would have anything to do with a cook either, in the normal way of things. Particularly this duke, whose worst childhood memories were all bound up in the scandal of his father marrying a servant.

But nothing about this situation was normal. And Bess was not ashamed of who she was. She never had been, and she did not intend to begin now.

“I’m sorry if you feel I misled you,” she said plainly. “I know generally how to carry myself and speak as a lady; I had lessons when I was very young, on a neighboring estate. I was friends with one of the boys and it was thought I might be a calming influence on his troublemaking ways. And of course, I read quite a lot. But I never actually claimed to be a lady.”

“I don’t care about that,” he said, dismissing Bess’s entire background with an arrogant tilt to his chin. “I want to know what happened with your aunt.”

A little stunned, Bess blinked at him. Well. Perhaps it made sense. After all, why would he care about the birth and breeding of the woman he tumbled in the back room of a tavern? He didn’t know it was the same woman to whom he’d entrusted the care of his sister.

“My aunt is a good woman. No nonsense. My uncle had passed on years before and my aunt kept up the farm all on her own, with her children’s help.”

“And with your help.”

“She needed me. Then a few years ago, one of her daughters married a well-off shopkeeper and invited her to come live with them. I think they would’ve had me, too, but it seemed a lot to ask of a man I’d only ever met at his wedding, to take me in.”

He frowned. “But that left you with no place to go. Again.”

“Again, I was lucky. A friend of mine needed help, and I found work and purpose and a way to support myself.” She took a deep breath. “I’m a cook, you see. I serve food for a living. In a country pub.”

* * *

Everything became clear in an instant.

A cook. Who knew his sisters well.

Even with the sparse details she offered, Nathaniel could put the pieces together.

Bess must work at Five Mile House in Little Kissington, the inn Nathaniel’s father had gifted to his new wife, Henrietta, upon their marriage, as a romantic gesture signifying they would never be more than five miles apart from each other for the rest of their lives.

It was the only property Nathaniel had allowed his stepmother to retain possession of once he came into the title. And it was there that he’d made his last, ill-fated attempt to bring his sisters to heel.

He’d stood in the taproom of that ramshackle village pub to tell Gemma what a disgrace she was…and all along, Bess had been there, in the kitchen, just out of sight.

Nathaniel could hardly believe it. Sitting here beside her now, so attuned to every breath she took, every beat of her heart—he couldn’t credit it.

Surely, he would have sensed her if she’d been that near to him. Even before they’d ever met.

But he hadn’t. He’d missed her. And now here they were, embroiled in this ludicrous situation with no way out that he could see, because he knew damned well she never would have told him any of that if she had any inkling of who he was.

He had to say something. She was waiting.

Tensely, he noted, taking in her rigid posture and the way her upper body leaned slightly away from him. As though she was worried about his reaction.

Nathaniel was forced to admit to himself that there was a time when he would have been appalled. When his only thought would have been concern for his family’s name and the damage it would do it to be involved with a woman of Bess’s class.

But it was impossible to sit with Bess, to speak with her, to know her—and to think of her as being lesser than himself.

She was all. She was everything. Nathaniel had never known a deeper truth.

Bess’s origins mattered not one whit to her worth as a person. Knowing her had changed everything Nathaniel thought he knew about the world, about what was important.

She was what mattered.

Thinking about everything she’d said, Nathaniel studied her. “Your aunt needed you, so you gave up your dreams and stayed on the farm. And when she left, a friend needed you, so you went to work in a kitchen.”

“I love what I do. I love the people, I love to cook. It’s hard work sometimes, but it feels good to know I’m nourishing people—not only their bellies, but their spirits too. Good food can do that, I think. It’s good, honest work.”

“I would never imply otherwise. My only point is that up until now, you have been living the exact opposite of the life you said you wanted: hemmed in by expectations and lived at someone else’s whim.”

“I’ll never become accustomed to the way you listen to me,” Bess said, her voice a little thick with some emotion. “You have a point. Though I love my job, I fell into it a bit as a favor to a friend. But it’s a good life. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to think about—to want—something more. Something just for me. A little adventure.”

It rose up in him again, the desire to promise her whatever she wanted that was in his power to give. But perhaps he was already giving her everything she needed from him.

A little adventure. That was all this was to her, he knew. All he was. A brief interlude in her happy life of fulfilling work, adoring community, and loyal family and friends.

Oblivious to his inner struggle, Bess turned to him, eyes wide behind her mask and a smile that shone like the sun coming up. “You really don’t mind that I’m nothing more than a farmer’s daughter turned cook. I thought it might change how you look at me...but it hasn’t.”

“I want nothing more than your happiness.” Disliking the hoarse rasp of his own voice, Nathaniel cleared his throat. “Therefore, it follows that if being a cook makes you happy, then it’s a good thing.”

Nathaniel told himself he ought to be glad to know that when she left him and returned to her real life, she would be going home to something that sustained her and fed her soul.

He was glad about it, even if the thought tore at him like the talons of a great bird raking at his flesh.

Nothing lasted forever. No one stayed. Happiness was for other people. Pain was the only thing Nathaniel had ever been able to count on as a constant—but he didn’t want that for Bess.

“Well. This has already been quite a surprising evening,” Bess remarked, with a new lightness about her. “Shall we venture inside and see what the rest of the night holds?”

Nathaniel stood and offered her his arm. Her fingers settled lightly upon his wrist, making him shudder. It was the longest they’d spent in each other’s company without falling into bed, he mused. At least, with the masks on. His body was trained to expect certain things, his hunger stoked by her nearness in a way that would have driven him mad a few weeks ago.

Now, having experienced both the wonders of her body and the intimacies of conversations like the one they’d just had, Nathaniel was better able to weather the need that pulsed unceasing in his veins. It provided a dark, sensual backdrop to the experience of walking her down the garden path through the cascading tumble of flowers and weeds, and into the strange, derelict beauty of Wycombe House.

The Midsummer Masquerade was at its full-throated, frenetic peak. Masked revelers in lurid, revealing costumes thronged the ballroom floor.

No sedate candelabras or chandeliers lit the space—instead, more torches had been brought in and placed in iron-bracketed medieval sconces about the room to smoke and cast their hellish glow upon the capering demon horde.

There, a black-robed doctor in a plague mask whirled by with a nun in his arms, though her skimpy habit would certainly not have found favor with any Mother Superior. Here, a large man in a wolf pelt with a full mask made from a snarling wolf’s head bent the lithe figure of a harlequin in diamond-patterned tights back over his brawny arm. In the corner near the masked musicians, a trio of ladies draped in Grecian-style robes—the Fates perhaps?—danced a slow, sinuous seduction with one another, ignoring every effort of the men around them to join in.

Beside him, Bess clutched her cloak more closely about her shoulders for a moment before setting her jaw with determination and unclasping it. No servant leapt forward to take it from her, so she cast it on a pile of similar outer garments cluttering a chair by the door.

The entire rest of the outlandish gathering fell away from Nathaniel as he took her in. Her brilliant pink gown was a color he’d wanted to see her in since the moment he’d fingered the fabric at the dressmaker’s.

As vivid as a sunrise, the gown bore no relation to the insipid pastel pink sported by debutantes—nor did the cut of it. Nathaniel’s gaze traveled the length of the gown from the full, swirling skirts to the nipped-in waist and the low, straight neckline that bared her smooth shoulders and the tops of her breasts.

She was probably the most demurely dressed of any woman at the masquerade. Yet Nathaniel could not take his eyes off her.

Bowing low, his gaze never leaving hers, Nathaniel held out his hand. “May I have this dance?”

Her cheeks were an even prettier pink than the dress when she put her hand in his and let him lead her out onto the wild, heaving dance floor.

The music had the beat of a waltz, though no one around them was paying any particular mind to the music. Eyeing a couple next to them comprised of a bespectacled faun and a laughing Titania, arms wound around each other and bodies barely swaying with less than an inch of daylight between them, Nathaniel let his hand settle at her waist and pull Bess closer than he ever would at Almack’s.

Close enough to hear the swift intake of her breath. Close enough to count her eyelashes through the mask when her eyes fluttered. Close enough to catch her scent, vanilla and almonds, among the riot of smells and sights and sensations clamoring around them.

Bess never looked down, never stumbled or faltered, as confident and sure in his hold as if they’d waltzed together many times before. Nathaniel lost himself in the pleasure of holding her in his arms, the rub of their bodies together as other dancers brushed past, pushing them even closer together.

They waltzed, and watched each other, and occasionally challenged each other to guess at the meaning behind a particularly esoteric costume.

He made her laugh, once or twice, a satisfaction akin to winning a hard fight or browbeating a political opponent welling in his chest.

She smiled, and Nathaniel let himself smile back.

It was a magical night. What could it hurt?