Page 24 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Twenty-Four

In one sentence, she had rewritten everything he’d always assumed about their encounters.

She’d known it was Nathaniel she kissed, and touched, and spoke to so gently. Every caress, every snippet of her past, every time she opened herself up and gave herself so generously—it had all been meant for Nathaniel.

He could hardly comprehend what that meant.

Before he could tell her it was the same for him, that he’d known her at once and wanted her longer than that, Bess said, “But you already know how I feel. You overheard what I said to Lord Phillip at the masked ball. Didn’t you?”

Ashbourn? I would do anything he asks of me and ask for nothing in return. I will never be your mistress. But I will be whatever Ashbourn wants, for as long as he will have me.

The words were picked out in lines of fire in his mind, blazing in the darkness. He would never forget them, as long as he lived.

How he wished to believe them.

“I heard,” he acknowledged, squeezing his ball of dough a little too hard. “I thought perhaps—you meant to put him off, and you knew I would protect you. I wouldn’t hold you to anything you said to that blackguard.”

She took a deep breath and lifted her chin, meeting his gaze with a courage Nathaniel wasn’t sure he could match. “I told you I never lied to you. I never lied about you to anyone else, either.”

Bess had always been the brave one, of the two of them.

“Well. Perhaps I lied a bit to myself,” she amended softly, looking down at her motionless hands. The way she said it—a little wry, mocking. Unsurprised. Accepting. It made Nathaniel want to hit something.

“You didn’t,” Nathaniel said hoarsely. “Bess. Don’t sound like that. Don’t look like that.”

Something was rising in him, a realization that felt less like the discovery of something new than like an acknowledgment of a fundamental truth.

Nathaniel loved Bess.

It was love, this feeling that made him want to see every expression that crossed her face, to hear every word she cared to speak.

Love made it so that he could only truly sleep, restful and at peace, when she was in his arms. He wanted to wake up to her smile every morning, and hear her brisk, pragmatic opinions about everything he was doing, and eat the food she made with her own hands, and lay the entire world at her feet as tribute.

He wanted to give her all of himself, and he thought he might finally be able to believe it was a gift she would cherish.

All this time, he’d thought he wasn’t capable of it—that the need for love, the ability to feel it, had been stamped out of him early and never recovered.

But all along, it had been here, waiting for him. In this little inn.

And it had almost slipped through his fingers.

It might, yet.

Heedless of the flour covering his hands, Nathaniel reached across the table to seize Bess by the arms and drag her up and onto the table. She squeaked and flailed a bit, her skirts dragging in the flour that dusted the surface, puffing up in little clouds all around them.

When he had her close enough, kneeling above him shocked and wide-eyed on the edge of her kitchen table, Nathaniel wrapped his arms around her hips and buried his face in her apron-covered stomach.

After a brief moment, he felt her hands come up to cradle the back of his head. He was surrounded by her, enveloped. He never wanted to let go.

“Don’t tell me the adventure is over, Bess. It doesn’t have to end. Come back to London with me.”

“I…I can’t.” She sounded winded, but her embrace tightened. “My whole life is here, it’s time I return to it. I think I must.”

“You said.” Nathaniel butted the top of his head into her rib cage and struggled not to dig his fingers into her waist. “You said, whatever I wanted. For as long as I wanted.”

“I did say that.” Her voice was taut, shivery and thick with emotion.

“Bess.” He lifted his head and stared up into her beautiful whiskey-brown eyes, swimming with unshed tears, and said, “What if I want forever?”

Her face flickered through a series of expressions too fast for Nathaniel to pin down and study. He waited to see where she landed, his heart feeling as if it would burst from his chest.

“You’re sure,” she said, wary, her gaze searching his face. For what, he didn’t know, but he opened himself up to her as much as he could. “You want…me. Bess Pickford, the coaching inn cook. The farmer’s daughter.”

“You. Bess Pickford, the loyal friend. Caring chaperone. Intelligent, well-read, self-taught pragmatist. My bold, scandalous lover.” He grabbed her hand and kissed the palm, flour and all. “My queen. I want all of you.”

Whatever she sought in his face, she must have found it, for a smile began to dawn, first in her eyes and then brightening her entire visage so that she beamed down at him like a glorious sunrise.

“Then all of me is yours. Oh, Nathaniel!”

Fireworks exploded beneath his skin, stars cascading behind his eyes as he dragged her down and kissed her. She laughed into his mouth, gorgeous and open and happy and his , and Nathaniel could not believe he got to have this.

“I’ll go to the archbishop for a special license,” Nathaniel said between kisses. “We can be married here, if you like, or in London. Or Vienna, Rome, wherever you wish, so long as you are mine.”

He finished pressing a series of hot kisses into her collarbone and went back to her lips, but she stopped him with a hand on his chest.

Nathaniel froze, gazing up at her shocked face. Bess had gone white, so white that the streaks of flour on her cheeks had disappeared.

“Nathaniel,” she croaked. “What are you talking about?”

“Our wedding,” he said stupidly. “You agreed—you said yes. You said you would be mine.”

She drew back, her eyes huge and wounded. “I said yes to becoming your mistress. I thought that’s what you were asking.”

Nathaniel felt it. Slipping through his fingers, like trying to grab hold of sunlight. “No. I don’t want a mistress. I want to marry you. Bess.”

He hated the desperation in his own voice. The naked need. But he couldn’t do anything about it, because now she was pulling back from him, sidling away to swing her legs over the edge of the table and drop down to the floor. Putting space between them where before there’d been only hope, possibility.

Delusion.

She steadied herself against the table and met his gaze, though tears had begun to track through the flour on her cheeks. So brave, his Bess.

“I’m sorry, Nathaniel. But I can’t marry you.”

So. Not his Bess, after all.

* * *

Bess watched the light go out of his eyes, turning them from a vibrant green blue like the ocean she’d never seen but only read about, back to their usual colorless opacity.

She hated herself for doing that to him.

She could almost hate him, for making her.

“You won’t marry me.” Nathaniel’s voice was blank. All the life had drained out of him in an instant until he stood before her, looking and sounding like the Duke of Ashbourn she’d first met weeks ago on the banks of the Thames.

The contrast only made it more clear to Bess just how far he had come, how far they had come together—and how devastating it was to be cut off from him even though he stood not two feet away.

“I can’t,” Bess said, beseeching. “You must see that it’s impossible. A duke cannot marry a servant girl!”

“I’d hardly be the first.”

Bess threw her hands in the air. “That only proves my point! When your father married Henrietta, there were consequences they didn’t foresee and couldn’t defend against. You yourself suffered the worst of them, punished for their audacity in marrying outside their spheres, but Henrietta and the girls have not fared much better now that he is gone. It wasn’t only you who cut them off, you know—it was everyone they knew in London, all their supposed friends, so ready to throw them to the wolves the instant they lost their fortune. Which, in my view, means they were never truly accepted at all.”

“I would not leave you with nothing. I would protect you,” he argued, but in that stiff, unreadable way he used to speak—distant and cold. Bess couldn’t help but wonder if that was an indication of Nathaniel rethinking his impetuous proposal.

The thought pierced her heart, but she shoved the pain aside. It was good. He needed to see reason.

And if he wouldn’t, well. He wasn’t the only one who felt protective. She would save him from this madness, even if she couldn’t save herself.

She swiped at her damp cheeks, her mind echoing with Lord Phillip’s sneering words to her at the masked ball, taunting her with the possibility of Ashbourn losing his mind over her enough to marry her.

That was what people would think. That was what they would say about a union such as theirs. That Nathaniel was out of his senses to be marrying her.

Bess didn’t give a fig what they said about her—but she couldn’t bear the thought of them tearing Nathaniel down, tearing down everything he’d done and was trying to do to help others. Marrying her would be the ruin of him and all his goals. It would fly in the face of the society he’d insisted he needed to accomplish his aims. She could not allow that to happen.

Perhaps Nathaniel was out of his senses, in a way. And oh, that shouldn’t fill her with so much complicated, swelling, violent tenderness—the notion that Nathaniel was so overcome by his feelings for her that he had forgotten the most basic tenets of his world and his place in society.

Of course it was intoxicating to be the focus of such passion.

Bess was not immune—but she could not allow it to ruin both their lives, either. One of them had to keep their head.

“I wish that we lived in a world where we were free to marry anyone we want,” she said with difficulty. “But we must face reality, at last. Think of everything you’ve fought for. The bill you are trying to pass in Parliament, to help the women and children who need the Foundling Hospital. Your mother’s life’s work…”

He gazed at her. “I never had the chance to know my mother as an adult. But knowing what I do of her—knowing what she believed—I think she would have been the first to say that it’s up to us to make the sort of world we wish to live in.”

The words sank into Bess’s chest like a carving knife into a roast. How could she say that his mother was wrong? When Bess even believed the same, that progress was only possible if people had the will and the courage to change the way things had always been done.

But Bess was afraid. For him, more than for herself.

“If you marry me, we’ll be ostracized. You’ll be in the exact same position your father put your family in—the position you have dedicated your entire life to climbing out of!”

“My father never truly cared to regain his place in society. Thinking back, I believe he was far happier living at the fringes of the Polite World. I would do things differently.”

“Meaning what? You can’t force them to accept me!”

His jaw hardened obstinately. “I don’t care about them. I only care about you.”

“What about your family name? Your legacy?”

“I have come to realize those are not the same thing,” he shocked her by saying. “My family name—my father’s name. That’s not what matters. It’s not my father’s name that I wish to dedicate myself to carrying on. It’s my mother’s legacy, of charity and kindness, a helping hand to those in need. A fierce commitment to love.”

Bess wavered, caught up for a moment in the intensity of his stare, the ferocity of his conviction.

But fear snatched at her heart—fear, and a lifetime of hard lessons about the way the world worked.

“You don’t understand,” she said, closing her eyes. “Perhaps you can’t. You told me once you’d learned to make the world do as you wished—but that is not the world the rest of us must live in. There are rules. We all have our places…”

“Your place is with me. At my side. As my wife.”

Her eyes flew open. She stared at his uncompromising expression.

To Bess, it seemed all but a certainty that if she married him, he would wake up one morning in the ruins of his life and blame her for it.

If all the sweetness of their feelings now was poisoned by the hardships and difficulties faced by such an unequal match? If he ever looked at her with resentment in his eyes? If he ever was…God. Ashamed of her.

It would kill her.

If she married him, she would spend every day in an agony of suspense, waiting for the moment when he began to regret their union.

Bess could not do that to him. Or to herself.

She knew what she had to do.

“I am beyond honored by your proposal,” she said, each word as slow, careful, and sincere as she could make it. Her head ached and her throat burned as though she’d swallowed boiling oil. “Truly. But one day, you’ll see that I was right. The way we feel now, it’s like a storm, a tempest that has overtaken everything else in our lives. I will not lie to you, I am as caught up in it as you, and I want to stay in the eye of the storm for as long as I can. I have never felt anything like it, and I know I never will again. But storms blow over. And when the sun comes out again, you must be free to go back to your life. And so must I.”

He opened his mouth to argue, a fierce light in his colorless eyes, but that light died when Bess took a deep breath and said, “I could not be happy as your wife.”

She meant it to end the agony of this conversation, and it did.

Nathaniel took the words like a blow, bowing his head. He stood for a moment in silence, defeated in a way she’d never seen him. Bess felt sick.

There was something frighteningly vulnerable about the line of the nape of his neck above his collar, even as the way he crossed his arms over his chest emphasized the raw power of his musculature. Muscles he’d honed in violence and aggression, in a bid to release the pent-up feelings he spent most of his life sublimating into fighting for change, for a cause, for a legacy he could be proud of.

God, but she loved him. And she was hurting him.

Unable to bear their distance a moment longer, Bess stepped close enough to put her hands on the taut muscle of his waist. Her right thumb went unerringly, unthinkingly, to the long-healed wound on his lower ribs—the first place she’d touched his bare skin.

She peered up into his face. His eyes were closed, his mouth a thin, hard line. There were dark circles under his eyes, she noticed, and longed to soothe them away with kisses, with care, with her arms around him to make him rest—but she couldn’t give him what he wanted.

Not when everything she knew, everything she’d seen and experienced, told her that marriage between them would be a disaster.

“This doesn’t have to be the end of us. I will still come back with you to London,” she said softly. She could feel his breaths beneath her hands, his ribs expanding with each inhalation. “If you wish it. For as long as you want me. But only as your mistress.”

He breathed out, long and shaky, and opened his eyes to pin her with their diamond sharpness. “I’m not strong enough.”

“What do you mean?” Dread curdled in her stomach. “You survived being sent away from home to a brutal existence without anyone to care for you. You’ve never lost a fight in the ring. You work every day to do what you think is right. You’re the strongest man I know.”

Nathaniel raised his head and lifted one hand to tuck a stray lock of hair behind Bess’s ear. “Not strong enough for this. Bess. I can’t live my life knowing every day, every minute, that someday I will lose you. It would destroy me.”

Tears threatened, surging into the back of her throat, but Bess choked them back. She clutched at him, her fingers white with tension. “Maybe we can’t have forever, but we could have this. Please, Nathaniel.”

But he was shaking his head. “I can’t. Don’t ask it of me.”

“I am asking,” Bess said stubbornly. She shook him, wanting to force him to look at her. “I’m begging. I can’t be the wife you need, but that doesn’t mean we are nothing to each other. Nathaniel, don’t do this. Don’t throw away what we could have, simply because it’s not all that you think you want.”

A light flared in the depths of his eyes, burning like an unholy flame. He clasped her shoulders tightly and drew her to him. His body was a line of solid fire along her front, his voice a rough growl in her ears.

“I never thought you cruel, Bess. Do not offer a starving man a fistful of crumbs. I love you . I love you too much to ever be satisfied with less than all of you.”

He loved her. The words burst in Bess’s mind like the bubbles in a glass of champagne, sweet and sharp and heady…and fleeting.

“I love you, too,” she said, for she would not deny him now. She would give him everything she could, and hope that it would be enough. “The love I feel for you has eclipsed every other love in my life—it’s the sun, blotting out the moon and the stars from the sky.”

The fire in his eyes raged out of control, and with a harsh oath, he bent his head and kissed her ferociously.

Bess surrendered to it utterly, melting into him and giving it all up to him. She poured everything she felt and everything she wished and every hope she’d dashed into the kiss.

He tore his head away, his arms like bands of iron wrapped around her. “If you love me,” he snarled, giving no quarter, “then marry me.”

Bess went limp, all her fight guttering out like a candle burnt to a stub.

He would not bend; she could not bend.

It was over.

She looked up into the harsh, masculine beauty of his face, running her eyes over every beloved angle and plane, before meeting his blazing gaze head on. She knew what she had to say, the words bitter and heavy on her tongue, a mouthful of poison she must either spit out or consume.

Bess forced the words out like a curse, like her dying breath, never taking her eyes off his.

“Love…doesn’t matter.”