Page 23 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Twenty-Three

More tears. Nathaniel was in torment.

But the relief of knowing his youngest sister was safe and well and sleeping across the hall outweighed everything else.

Well. Everything except the absolute imperative of taking Bess into his arms and holding her close while she cried out the overwhelming emotions of the past hours into the front of his white shirt. He tried not to mind the knowing look in Henrietta’s eyes as she observed their embrace.

When the storm of Bess’s tears had passed, after much fluttering from Henrietta and ringing for tea, and remembering that there was no servant here to bring her tea in the middle of the night, they did in fact all troop across the hall together to roust Lucy out of bed and shout at her.

Or at least, that was what Nathaniel wished to do. There were a lot of feelings he’d like to release, and if he couldn’t knock down a bareknuckle boxer at his fight club, he could at least do some very loud talking.

But then, Lucy popped up in bed, startled to be suddenly surrounded by her mother chattering away, Bess still sniffling, and Nathaniel glowering down at her, and promptly burst into tears herself.

At which point, Bess threw her arms around Lucy and began to sob on her shoulder, and Henrietta sat on the bed to embrace them both.

When the dowager duchess began to look distinctly red about the eyes and nose as well, Nathaniel had had enough.

He took himself downstairs to the taproom and rooted around behind the bar until he came up with a half-hidden bottle of French cognac and a clean glass.

Leaning against the smooth, polished wood of the bar, he sloshed a healthy amount of brandy into the glass and took a sip. The liquid was silky on his tongue, full and round with the flavors of caramelized peaches and cinnamon. Nathaniel rested his elbow on the bar and tilted the glass to study the contents.

The brandy looked dark in the dim light of the public taproom, but he knew it was the exact color of Bess’s pretty brown eyes, shot through with amber and gold, warm and sweet.

A light footstep on the stairs made him turn, hope sparking in his chest. But it wasn’t his beautiful, brave, caring Bess who appeared in the doorway.

It was Henrietta, Dowager Duchess of Ashbourn.

“My dear Nathaniel,” she trilled, gliding toward him, white hands outstretched as though to gather him in for a cuddle, the way she’d done when she worked in his mother’s household as his nursemaid.

Without thinking, he took a step back, and her hands fluttered to her sides at once. A shadow of disappointment flitted across her still-lovely face, but she only nodded in a resigned sort of way that made the blue ribbons decorating her lace cap dance.

Pulling himself together, Nathaniel took refuge in the strict propriety of his upbringing. He offered her a perfectly correct bow and said, “Your Grace.”

She regarded him thoughtfully from a few paces away. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink? I quite like cognac. Nothing better, when one’s nerves are feeling frazzled.”

Nathaniel found another glass that looked clean enough and poured out a finger of brandy. “Do your nerves trouble you now?” he asked politely.

“Oh, the whole place has been in an uproar all day,” she said cheerfully, taking her glass of brandy to a nearby table and setting it down.

Nathaniel stepped quickly to pull out her chair for her, which she accepted gracefully as her due. She sat and arranged her night rail and wrapper prettily, then widened her eyes and tipped her beribboned, lacy bonnet in the direction of the chair on the other side of the table. “Won’t you join me, Nathaniel, dear?”

Unable to see any polite way to refuse, Nathaniel sat. It was probably the least he could do, after everything that had happened.

Before he could launch into a formal apology for the dereliction of his duty in caring for Lucy, Henrietta leaned forward confidingly and said, “You know, I’d been hoping we might have a chance for a little talk, just you and me.”

Nathaniel regarded her as impassively as he was able. He could only imagine the things she’d wanted to say to him after her husband died and Nathaniel dispossessed his father’s second family of their home and all their belongings.

Gemma had certainly not held back; she’d torn a strip off him last May. Likely he owed his stepmother the same opportunity to vent her spleen.

But Henrietta didn’t look angry. She was in the process of taking a delicate sip of her brandy, shuddering all over in a cascade of quivering lace, then taking another, deeper sip.

Nathaniel couldn’t wait any longer. “Before you say whatever it is you need to say, I’d like to offer my sincerest apologies for Lucy’s recent ordeal. And I want you to know, I plan to do everything in my power to ensure that not a breath of scandal touches her because of it.”

“Oh, bless you, but I could hardly hold you to a higher standard than myself—and Lucy has been running rings around me for years and years. My impossible girl.”

She looked unbearably fond as she said it. For some reason, it made the backs of Nathaniel’s eyes burn.

He managed to keep himself from commenting that if Henrietta had taken the trouble of correcting Lucy’s behavior long ago, they would never have been in this mess.

Possibly true, but hardly helpful in the present moment.

“Lucy is young,” he said instead. “No doubt this experience will have taught her much.”

Henrietta took another sip of brandy that could not quite hide the smile tugging at her lips. “Mmm. No doubt. But that is not what I wished to speak with you about.”

Nathaniel clenched his back teeth but did not allow himself to look away from her. “You wish to tell me what you think of my decision to deprive your daughters of their portions and dowries, and yourself of a life of comfortable ease…in the dower house at the country estate, perhaps. If it helps, I am very sensible of the damage I have done to your family with my…strict interpretation of the terms of Father’s will.”

The damage he’d done in a fit of vengeful pique, would perhaps be more accurate. Nathaniel found he could not quite unbend himself far enough to say it to this woman he had hated for so long, and so uselessly.

“I have only begun to make amends,” he continued, “but I will continue my efforts. I can only hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me someday.”

He downed the rest of his brandy in one go, letting it burn a line straight through him. Christ. Everything was certainly simpler before he’d met Bess and let her talk him into launching Lucy’s Season. Before he’d gotten to know his youngest sister in all her wry, biting humor and bright openness.

Before he’d had to confront what he’d done to her, and to her family—and the way his actions continued to play out in their lives.

For surely, if he had not removed all financial aid from his stepmother and half-sisters, if they’d never been forced to leave London and take refuge in this backwater village, Lucy would never have kicked over the traces and run away like this.

As he’d told Bess, there was no one but Nathaniel to blame for this mess.

But Henrietta was shaking her head, sorrow turning her eyes watery again. “Dear Nathaniel. We are your family, as well. And quite a lot of good has come from our sojourn here at Five Mile House. Gemma is married for love—to a duke!—and settled nearby, and I have made wonderful friends here, I must say. I rediscovered my love of painting! And of course, there’s dear Bess. We never should have met her if we’d stayed in London.”

The truth of that rocked through Nathaniel.

It came to him that life was so unutterably precarious; the most essential, important things in every life turned on the thinnest edge of chance.

Change one decision, one choice, one outcome—and he might never have met Elizabeth Pickford at all.

Shaken to the bone, Nathaniel barely registered the rest of Henrietta’s recitation of how glad she was that they’d been forced out of their home with not a penny to their names. He didn’t know how he could have forgotten the relentless sunshine of her disposition, but somehow, he had.

“You are very kind, madame,” he murmured. “Kinder than I deserve, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, my dear, dear boy.” A tear slipped unheeded down her barely lined cheek. “I have not always been kind enough to you.”

He stiffened, his fingers tightening on his empty glass. “Not at all.”

“No, please. I beg you, dear Nathaniel, please let me say this. I have been uneasy in my mind over you for many years now, and I would not wish to waste this chance of telling you, face to face?—”

She paused, gulping a little. Nathaniel’s thighs flexed. He nearly stood and left the room, but as if she sensed his desire to flee, Henrietta reached out a soft hand and took a surprisingly firm grip on his arm.

“I’m sorry for how it was, at Ashbourn House,” she said painfully. Her eyes burned into his. “After your mother died.”

Nathaniel pulled his arm away, but he didn’t leave the table. Indeed, he felt rooted to the spot. “That is far in the past, Your Grace.”

“Perhaps. Yet I feel the shame and remorse of it as keenly now as I did then,” she said quietly. “Your father and I, we should not have sent you away. I have always been sorry for it—sorry that I did not try harder to change your father’s mind. Oh, it was such a difficult time, everyone being so dreadfully unkind about our whirlwind romance, and you so terribly unhappy.”

Nathaniel sat stock still. He felt as though he observed the scene from a distance.

His jaw was so tight, it hurt to speak. “I was eight years old. My mother had just died. I confess, I don’t remember how I behaved. Sullen and disagreeable, I’m sure.”

Henrietta’s lips firmed, though her eyes remained soft and wet. “You were a child. And you were in pain. I allowed myself to be convinced that you would be happier away from us, at school, where there was nothing to remind you of your loss. But I felt then, and I know now as a parent myself, I should never have allowed you to be sent away from us. It was very wrong, and I have regretted it ever since.”

A yawning chasm had opened up where Nathaniel’s chest should be. He glanced down at it, almost surprised to find the smooth, unblemished expanse of his white shirt and black waistcoat and evening jacket. “I suppose my father insisted.”

It came to him, suddenly, that Henrietta could not have been much older than Lucy was now, when she married his father and became a duchess and a stepmother all at once.

“I loved your father dearly,” she said. “But I was not blind to his flaws. He did not know what to do with you, with your grief, and it was so early in our marriage; I didn’t yet understand how best to speak to him, to help him find the right course. But, Nathaniel, he did love you. I hope you know that.”

He laughed. He couldn’t help it, though he wished he could call it back as soon as it escaped him, broken and jagged at the edges, sharp enough to slash his throat and leave it aching. “No. He didn’t. But it doesn’t matter.”

“Nathaniel—”

He shook his head. “My father disliked me. I was never able to deceive myself on that score. By contrast, my mother loved me, though she did not show it in a way others might recognize—but I always knew. That didn’t matter either. When it came down to it, my father, who had no love for me, was unable to cut me out of his life entirely. And my mother, who loved me, left me. Love doesn’t matter.”

“Oh dear,” she said, wringing her hands in distress. “I fear I’ve only made things worse. That’s not at all what I meant to say!”

“Have no fear, madame. Henrietta.” Nathaniel said her name and watched her face clear of unhappiness.

He stood and bowed to her, the angle judged perfectly to convey his respect for what she was trying to do. “You said it perfectly. I do appreciate your perspective. It was a difficult situation, as you say, but it was all so long ago. Let us leave the past where it belongs.”

Henrietta had loomed so large in his childhood—first as his main source of physical affection, generous with her hugs and cuddles as his parents were not. And then, as the person he’d blamed for usurping his mother’s rightful place—a convenient repository for all his anger at his father. For all his anger and betrayal at everything that had happened.

But he could see, looking at her still-pretty face and her large, extraordinarily blue and expressive eyes, the shadow of the very young woman she’d been when she’d married his father.

His father. Who had been a duke, and her employer, and the only living parent of the boy in question.

It was folly to imagine she ought to have been able to go against his father in anything, much less in the matter of how to dispose of his son and heir.

Nathaniel could forgive her, he found, now that he saw there was really nothing to forgive. He felt lighter, as though he’d set down a heavy burden he hadn’t realized he was carrying.

Now he had only to be ashamed of his own actions, his petty reprisals and unworthy revenge.

But it was not too late to change course. He’d made a start with Lucy, and he would do better by her. He would try again with Gemma, in all sincerity and humility this time. And he would see about refurbishing the dower house to offer to Henrietta.

Perhaps she would not wish to leave the home she’d made here at this quaint little inn, but she would at least have the option. Because as Bess had pointed out, it was always better to have a choice.

Thinking through all his new plans, Nathaniel turned to take his leave of Henrietta and spied Bess hovering in the doorway.

She looked drained and overwrought, her eyes dark in her pale face and her lashes still clumped and spiky with tears.

Instantly, he wanted to go to her and dry her eyes, hold her, give her whatever comfort she would take from him—but as she came hesitantly into the taproom, she would not even look at him. Nathaniel frowned.

“Lucy’s asleep again,” Bess told Henrietta. “I couldn’t get much out of her that was sensible; all she would say is that the highwayman brought her home.”

“Yes! Perhaps he is not so much a villain as he has been painted! I could not believe a man so very bad as the Gentle Rogue is supposed to be would have concerned himself with delivering a wayward young girl to her mother. Although perhaps Five Mile House was not very far out of his way. Oh dear, I hope he does not intend to stay long in the neighborhood, robbing and pillaging.”

“I suppose we must wait until tomorrow to hear the whole story,” Bess said. “For tonight, it’s enough to know that she’s safe and unharmed—no thanks to my negligence and selfishness.”

“Dear Bess, no!” Henrietta stood at once and enveloped Bess in an embrace that looked distinctly motherly, to Nathaniel’s untrained eye. He felt even more warmly toward his stepmother than he had a moment ago.

“Henrietta, I’m sorry,” Bess kept trying to say, but Henrietta was having none of it.

“Pishposh, dear girl, you mustn’t! Lucy is more than a handful for anyone, and the good Lord only knows that she has her own mind. Once she has made it up, the devil himself couldn’t dissuade her. Well, perhaps the devil himself, in the person of a certain highwayman, but that is a story for tomorrow! For now, I can see that you are dead on your feet and I confess I am longing for my own bed, so why don’t we all retire? Nathaniel, dear, I’m sure you would be more comfortable in one of the newly refurbished rooms at Kissington Manor, though it’s a bit of a drive and then you’d have to wake the household?—”

“I am perfectly content at Five Mile House,” Nathaniel interrupted smoothly, still watching Bess. She was all but swaying where she stood, and he had to clench his hands into fists to keep from sweeping her into his arms and carrying her to bed to stand watch over her rest for the next ten to twelve hours. Barring that, he would at least like to know she was only just down the hall from him. “If there is a room for me, I will stay here.”

“Capital. Good night, Bess, we will see you in the morning and I’ll make Lucy tell the whole story again, leaving nothing out, and we can all decide what’s best to be done next, for I’m sure I don’t know. Come, Nathaniel, dear! I’ll show you your room.”

Henrietta bustled him upstairs, leaving Bess to make her way to her own chamber, wherever that might be. He spared a moment to think, wistfully, how nice it would be if Bess came and found him in the night, since he had no idea where her rooms were.

But neither of them had slept more than a few hours in the last day and a half. After all the excitement and upheaval, they needed rest more than anything else.

No matter how good it would have felt to fall into the deepest sleep of his life with her arms around him.

Maybe if he’d fallen asleep that way, a nightmare—of a cold, formless void, empty and echoing and solitary—wouldn’t have awakened him in the hushed darkness just before the dawn, sending him stumbling into his clothes and out of the comfortable, nicely appointed room and down the stairs to find Bess.

* * *

Bess was back where she belonged. In her kitchen at Five Mile House, up to her elbows in sticky bread dough. Lucy was upstairs, safe and sound. The world had righted itself.

So why did she feel as though her she was squeezing and pounding her own heart with every vigorous knead of bread dough?

Love doesn’t matter.

Grimly, she pounded down the dough, and with it, the memory of Nathaniel’s deep voice dismissing the importance of love in his life.

It did no good to remind herself that it changed nothing. She’d tried that for an hour this morning, tossing and turning on her cold, narrow bed that used to feel so comfortable and cozy. Until finally, she’d surrendered to the urge to get up and start doing something useful.

It changed nothing, but it had still hurt to hear it.

A lock of hair flopped into Bess’s face and she blew at it, annoyed. Her hands were already tired and sore, out of practice for the work being asked of them. But at the same time, there was the satisfaction of seeing and feeling the dough come together, grow smooth and springy under her fingers.

In a couple more hours, after rising and proving and baking and cooling, this would be bread that would be sliced and buttered and fed to her smiling, happy, safe family and friends.

What more could anyone want than that? Wanting anything more would just be…greedy. Selfish.

Pointless.

The familiar creak of a footstep upon the second-to-last stair made Bess smile, despite everything. Turning a warm smile on whichever of her friends had woken up early and come to her kitchen searching for sustenance, Bess was surprised to see Nathaniel fill the doorway with the breadth of his shoulders.

The smile dropped off her face. She went back to kneading. “Good morning, Your Grace.”

She was sharply aware of his every movement as he prowled closer, his raw presence rolling through the kitchen in a strange dissonance between Bess’s real life and her fantasies.

In a hundred years, she never would have expected to be standing here with him.

“Your Grace,” he said, a soft rumble of thunder. “I must have done something wrong. You only ever call me by my honorific when you’re displeased with me.”

“That’s not true,” Bess said, swiping the back of her wrist over her damp forehead in irritation. “I call you ‘Your Grace’ because that’s what you are. A duke. And this is what I am.”

She lifted both hands free of the dough, scraps of the mixture clinging to her stickily, and swept her arms out to encompass the homely little kitchen, so much smaller and plainer than the grand kitchens at Ashbourn House.

Not that she would have been a suitable match for a duke if she worked in the finest kitchen in all the land. And it did neither of them any good to pretend otherwise.

So Bess lifted her chin defiantly and faced him down, daring him to…she hardly knew what. To look at her, finally, and see her as she truly was. No masks, no fancy dresses, no more secrets or half-truths or fantasies.

She waited and watched, using everything she’d learned about how to read this unreadable man.

Perhaps it was perverse, but she wanted to see the moment his attraction turned to revulsion, the moment he realized how far beneath him she was.

Maybe that would be enough to convince her poor fool of a heart to stop yearning and pining for what it could never have.

But instead of curling his lip and turning on his heel, Nathaniel leaned a hip against the tall worktable and crossed his arms. He was only in his shirtsleeves, she realized, cuffs turned back to expose the sinewy muscles of his forearms.

“You are what you have always been,” he said simply, as if it was just that easy.

It enraged her. “Yes. This is what I have always been. A simple woman, with a simple life.”

A woman he never would have touched if he’d known who she was. He must have been so shocked at the masked ball when he overheard her conversation with Lord Phillip and realized the truth of her identity.

He studied her, a half-smile twisting his lips on one side. “Is that what you want? A simple life. Now that you’ve had your London adventure and come home again. Are you content?”

“Yes,” she bit out. “Ecstatic. Can’t you tell?”

There was a pause. He watched her in silence for several long moments while Bess pounded and kneaded and worked the dough, and felt the yawning gulf between them open back up like a rift in the earth. Deep and impassable.

There had been no distance between them at The Nemesis. In that room, in that strange, liminal space between his brutal fights and their passionate lovemaking, they had been as intimate as it was possible for two people to be.

Stripped of the trappings of names and social standing, they had been nothing more than two human beings searching for closeness. And they’d found it together. Briefly.

That closeness felt like it belonged to another lifetime now.

“That looks like hard work,” he said, frowning. “Can I help?”

Bess snorted, then raised her brows at his stubborn expression. “Oh, you aren’t jesting. You want to help me knead bread? I don’t—it’s messy. Your hands…”

He held out the hands in question, broad palms and long, blunt fingers, thick, scarred knuckles. Those hands that had delivered hit after devastating hit in the ring—and then coaxed such pleasure from her body. Bess shivered.

Almost as though echoing her thoughts, he gave a wry smile. “These hands have done much worse than knead bread. Show me what to do.”

She wanted to argue that it was beneath his dignity, surely, but the words stuck in her throat.

There was nothing lowly about baking bread. Baking was art and craft and a bit of alchemy and almost entirely a labor of love. She wouldn’t be the one to belittle that labor.

Taking a bit of flour, Bess scrubbed her hands together to remove as much of the sticky, clingy dough as she could. Then she went round the table to where he leaned, all long-legged casual grace and power, and scattered another handful of flour across the clean surface on his side.

Taking another ball of dough from the small row she had waiting to be kneaded and set to rise in the warmest corner of the kitchen, Bess tossed it down in front of Nathaniel before going back to her side of the table.

“Go ahead,” she told him when he took a step back and stared down at the lumpy mass blankly. “It won’t bite you. Just do what I do.”

She went back to her own work, falling into the rhythmic pattern of the movements with a little exhalation of tension. But she kept a weather eye on her helper, and after a few minutes, took pity on him.

“Not like that. You’ll wear yourself out before you’ve got one loaf done. All it takes is this, just a simple push and press and turn, push and press and turn. No, let me show you.”

“Now I see why your hands are so strong,” he commented, flexing his fingers before plunging them back into the dough.

Rounding the table once more, Bess stood beside him and reached to place her hands over his. He stilled beneath her touch, and Bess tried not to notice the heat of him, the leashed strength and vitality of his big, rangy body overwhelming her little kitchen.

“Use the heel of your hands, first one, then the other. Yes, now take the far edge of the dough and stretch it out, then fold it over on itself toward you. Then turn it a bit, and do it again. And again. And again. Like that.”

His big, capable hands caught the rhythm of it, finally, relaxing under her palms until she realized she was still gently cupping the backs of his hands and riding the movement with him. They were even breathing together, in and out, such an unbearably sweet, painful echo of the intimacy she’d mourned earlier that Bess had to force herself to pull away.

“Good,” she croaked, retreating quickly to her side of the table. “Keep going until the dough feels smooth, almost bouncy.”

They worked together in an almost companionable silence for a minute or two. Long enough to lull Bess into a fall sense of safety, so that she startled badly when Nathaniel suddenly said, “When did you first know? That the man you saw at The Nemesis was…me.”

“When did I know?” Her heart was beating so loudly, she thought he must be able to hear it across the table. “From the very first night. The moment I saw you come into the ring, with that cut across your ribs and the strip of my own bloodied petticoat in your pocket.”

His head came up. He stared at her as though she’d lobbed the ball of dough directly at his head. “From the very first night.”

A dry, hitching laugh escaped Bess. “Nathaniel. I always knew it was you.”