Page 7 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Seven

Dress shopping. Shoe shopping. Hat shopping. Gloves, chemises, handkerchiefs, drawers, reticules…the list of items required by a young lady making her come out at the height of the London Season appeared to be endless.

And the eye-watering expense of it all! Bess couldn’t help but be aware that the money the duke had laid out for Lucy’s stockings alone would feed a family in Little Kissington for months. Ridiculous.

Bess stuffed down her disapproval; it wasn’t her place to care what the duke spent on fripperies. It was no more than he owed his sisters, anyway, after having declined to care for them as the previous duke had assumed he would.

Their first week at Ashbourn House was an exercise in boxing up frustrating emotions and stowing them away.

At every turn, Lucy complained and resisted; the duke insisted. Over and over, Bess counseled Lucy in patience, reminding her that the duke was finally behaving as he ought toward her. Reminding her that this was Lucy’s chance to enter the Society she’d been born to.

Lucy did try, bless her. As the days went on, she seemed to give up on her frustrations, submitting to her lessons and fittings with a dull resignation that Bess disliked. She understood it, though. The process of readying a young lady for her debut was an inordinately boring one.

Trying to set an example, Bess did her best to hide her own feelings of boredom. They fit nicely in a box beside the inconvenient attraction she could not believe she still felt toward the duke.

There must be something wrong with her, Bess feared. Why did she find Ashbourn so infernally fascinating?

She would never forget that first day they’d arrived at Ashbourn House, bedraggled and exhausted and hardly able to comprehend what was happening because it had all happened so quickly.

Ashbourn had introduced them to Mrs. Drummond, a head housekeeper with an impressively stoic manner, and then the dratted man had disappeared off to wherever dukes spent their time, and he didn’t reappear until Mr. Goring, the elderly butler, announced dinner.

Lucy had been in a towering rage over the change in their circumstances, steaming like a kettle about to whistle as the footmen brought out course after course. Though normally she would have been extremely interested in the food, which was fancier and richer and Frencher than anything Bess had ever seen, she couldn’t enjoy it while trying to keep the peace between the two half-siblings.

She hadn’t done a very good job. Instead, she’d managed to stir up some obviously very painful memories for the duke.

Not that he had admitted to having any feelings at all, but Bess’s heart felt tender and sore in her chest even now, merely imagining the young boy, his entire world upended by the loss of his mother and his father’s hasty marriage.

She wondered what Henrietta remembered of that time. It was hard to imagine the woman Bess knew sending a small boy away from the only home he’d ever known, to be surrounded by a lot of monstrous little bullies who’d no doubt thought they’d found a perfect victim in a much younger child with a scandal already attached to his name.

Somehow, Bess doubted that he’d made it easy for them. But at what cost?

But whatever goodwill he’d inadvertently elicited with his revelations about his childhood, he’d immediately lit on fire when he managed to bring it all back around to being Henrietta’s fault for not being nobly born.

Bess couldn’t fathom how a man so self-assured, so arrogant , could care what anyone else thought of him or his family.

You don’t want to understand , a silky voice whispered in her head. Because then you’d have to admit to yourself that you wish he could see you as more than the sum of your low rank and nonexistent connections.

That would never happen. Bess needed to acknowledge the tiny seed of this desire now, and prune it back vigorously.

The Duke of Ashbourn could never, ever know who she was and where she came from, Bess reminded herself. He couldn’t think her highborn, since in a panic, she’d claimed to be a distant relation of Henrietta’s—but he seemed to assume she was of decent enough stock to serve as a chaperone to his sister.

If he discovered the truth, Bess would be out on her ear and then where would Lucy be? She’d have to finish the Season with no one but her status-obsessed brother to help her.

Bess couldn’t allow that to happen. She would keep her secret, and all would be well.

After all, Bess and Lucy did not spend much time with Ashbourn, all told—yet his presence loomed over their every waking moment.

And, if Bess was honest, some of her sleeping moments as well.

She’d had one absolute corker of a dream after another, in her luxurious carved mahogany canopy bed draped in the softest linen imaginable.

The duke directed their every activity, each designed to get Lucy ready for her first ball of the season, where she would be judged by the strictest lionesses of the Ton on every aspect of her face, form, style, comportment, grace, elocution, and bearing.

As promised, the duke had engaged a veritable army of instructors to come to Ashbourn House and tutor Lucy in whatever ladylike arts she had missed in her somewhat casual upbringing.

A dancing instructor and a singing instructor, a pianoforte teacher and a gentleman whose only purpose appeared to be taking tea with Lucy and speaking to her in French. There was even a no-nonsense lady’s maid who took the arranging of Lucy’s wavy dark hair as seriously as the surgeon had taken the gunshot wound of Charles Truitt, the young sailor Lucy had begun visiting during his convalescence.

Ashbourn appeared once at the outset of each type of lesson, presumably to impress upon the instructors that they were to treat his half-sister with all due deference , as he had done with Mrs. Lister, the dressmaker.

Beyond that, he made himself scarce. They didn’t encounter him at any further mealtimes—he took breakfast at an ungodly early hour, before even Bess, who was used to rising with the sun and keeping country hours, could manage to pry herself free of her bed.

And then he spent all day doing who knew what ducal things. After that night when he’d talked so briefly, yet heartbreakingly, about his childhood, he seemed to dine out every single evening, thus escaping Lucy’s needling about her mother and her litany of complaints about the day’s lessons. Perhaps one could not blame him, though there were times Bess was tempted to wring his neck, and Lucy’s too, if they would not make at least a token effort toward getting to know each other.

Truly, the duke kept very odd hours, in Bess’s opinion. She’d even heard him come in once at a quarter past four in the morning.

She’d jerked awake, gasping and overheated from one of the dreams that had plagued her ever since that strange not-kiss in the carriage, and she’d been unable to fall back asleep right away.

Lying there, in her tumble of goose-down-stuffed pillows staring up at the lilac silk damask draperies festooned around the four posts of the bed, she’d listened to the grandfather clock ticking ponderously in the hallway.

Bess felt her eyes closing and did her best to relax into the mattress while forcefully shoving aside any stray memories of that carriage moment so that she might not dream about it yet again, and wake yet again, sweaty and tangled in the sheets with her night rail up around her thighs.

She’d almost managed it when a heavy tread upon the staircase shocked her fully awake.

Heart pounding, she had debated for all of three seconds before leaping from the bed and padding on bare feet across the soft rug that covered her floor. At the door to her bedroom, she’d held her breath and cracked it open the merest sliver—just enough to see a dark shape loom out of the shadows at the top of the stairs.

Bess shrank back against the wall, every hair on her body standing on end, but curiosity propelled her forward once more. She put her eye to the crack of the door and peered out.

It was the duke. Ashbourn made his solitary way down the hall, massive shoulders hunched and head hanging heavy.

He wore much simpler clothes than usual—plain black trousers tucked into scuffed leather boots, and a dark greatcoat that made him look even bigger than he already did. He walked slowly, with a hitch in his step like a lamed stallion, and almost directly opposite her rooms, he faltered.

Only for a moment. He caught himself against the opposite wall with one large hand and hung there for the space of a heartbeat in silence.

His massive chest heaved once, drawing in a labored breath. Bess almost pushed open her door and went out to see what was the matter.

But then he straightened and walked on, and she realized she was in her nightdress, and he was a duke and didn’t need medical care from some random woman staying in his house. No doubt his personal physician had already been called.

Bess went back to bed and managed to fall asleep once more, and if she dreamed, she didn’t remember it.

Dr. Perry must have attended him, because the next morning she rose early enough to see Ashbourn departing through the front door of the townhouse as she descended the stairs, and he was walking normally. She never did hear where he’d been or what he’d been doing or how he got injured.

But the image of him leaning against the wall, head down and brown hair tousled messily, stayed with her.

He had seemed so alone, was the thing she kept thinking about. As he’d said he preferred—thought she could not fathom it.

Bess wasn’t alone. She had friends and a community she loved and cared for, and who loved and cared for her in return. But she recognized the aloneness in Ashbourn in that moment because she had felt it herself after her family and Davy were taken by the fever. When she’d gone to live on her aunt’s farm, and given up her dreams of a different sort of life.

And perhaps the memory of that inclined her to soften toward Ashbourn, just a bit.

Until now.

A delivery had arrived from Mrs. Lister’s shop, just as Ashbourn had decreed, one week to the minute from that day in her shop. Stacks of white boxes littered Lucy’s bedchamber, containing gown after gown in pale, pastel hues, carefully folded and wrapped in tissue paper.

“What would we call this color?” Lucy asked, holding up a carriage dress of a purple hue so light, Bess couldn’t imagine wearing it anywhere near a horse or carriage without getting a stain upon it that would take days of soaking in a strong vinegar solution to remove.

“It reminds me of the way my toes looked that time Beeswax trod on my foot and I limped for a week, Bess. Do you remember?”

“We are in dire straits when the thought of being stepped on by a draught horse brings a touch of wistful nostalgia to your tone,” Bess commented drily. “And Mrs. Lister called the shade ‘lavender,’ though it’s nothing like what an actual lavender plant looks like.”

“Of course not,” Lucy sighed. “That would be too much like a real color. All these gowns are more like suggestions of colors. I’m starving, is it nearly time for tea?”

“You haven’t gone through all the packages yet,” Bess pointed out. “Look, there’s another pile just here.”

“What are those?” Lucy wondered. “Did we order more than I tried on at the fitting on Wednesday?”

“Open them and see,” Bess suggested, curious.

Lucy tore into the boxes, one after another, and pulled out half a dozen gowns in vibrant, bold hues that made her gasp in delight. “Are these for me?”

“I don’t think they can be,” Bess said apologetically. “The duke was quite firm on the topic of what colors are appropriate for the wardrobe of a debutante. These must have been sent here by mistake.”

“No,” Lucy said, holding one of the boxes and turning it so that the address showed where it was written on the outside. “See? Bess—it’s addressed to you.”

Disbelief and bewilderment knocked Bess back a step. “That’s impossible.”

“Look at this,” Lucy said, shaking out a walking dress with a wine-red bodice and striped skirts. A charming straw bonnet trimmed with a satin bow in the same burgundy color tumbled to the floor.

“Too short for me, more’s the pity, but it would be perfect on you, Bess.”

Lucy thrust the dress at her, and Bess took it automatically. The feel of the fine muslin beneath her fingers was silkier than a dusting of flour across the top of her wooden bread board.

“It's beautiful,” she said blankly. “They’re all beautiful.”

But where did they come from?

“Did you…order yourself some dresses?” Lucy asked tentatively.

“I could never afford even one of these dresses,” Bess choked out. “Let alone half a dozen. Before this trip when we made over that old dress of Gemma’s, the last new dress I had was two years ago. I'm handy with a needle and I can keep my clothes serviceable for years at a stretch. I don’t need new frocks. Not like a lady would.”

“Of course, that makes sense.” Lucy ran a finger along a row of scalloped lace trimming the hem of a cobalt blue walking dress.

Bess’s mind was awhirl. She sank down upon the mattress, no longer certain her legs would hold her.

“But Bess, if you didn’t order these gowns, who did? Gemma, or maybe Hal?” Lucy suggested.

Bess, who had known Hal Deveril since he was merely the despised younger son of the Duke of Havilocke, shook her head. “I love Hal dearly, but he would never think of doing something like this. Nor should he! It’s not his responsibility to clothe me…” Bess trailed off.

“Then do you think...it must have been my brother who ordered them?”

Of course, she must be right. But Bess could hardly credit it. Deeply discomfited, she began bundling the dresses back in their boxes. “There was no need. I’m perfectly fine as I am.”

“Oh, let him pay for some dresses, what does it matter?” Lucy said. “Perhaps he’s finally feeling guilty for how mean he’s been up until now.”

“Well, he can exorcise his guilt some other way,” Bess declared, shoving the lid back on the last box.

“You’re not going to accept them?”

Embarrassment scorched Bess’s cheeks. That he’d judged her wardrobe, her appearance, and found it so lacking that he’d felt the need to do this. Holding her head high, she marched to the door. “I will certainly not accept them. And I’m going to tell him so, at once.”

* * *

Nathaniel sighed deeply and contemplated the crystal decanter on the bar cart in the corner of his study. It was entirely too early in the day to indulge—but at the moment, a stiff brandy was sounding less like an indulgence and more like a medical necessity.

Another day, another recalcitrant lord who had to be brought to heel.

Nathaniel shoved his padded leather chair back from the imposing mahogany desk his father had never used.

No sooner had he brought round Marsden than Lord Romby began to raise objections. Maddening. Nathaniel would suspect the other members of the House of Lords of making a concerted effort to block him, but he’d met them.

If they could form a coalition to do anything more complicated than a quadrille, Nathaniel would be amazed.

Now Nathaniel would have to attend the Devensham ball this evening to run Rumby to ground in the card room. What a waste of time.

But this bill was worth the effort, Nathaniel reminded himself. Matters had been left in the hands of men like his father for far too long. Men who cared more for their own comfort, convenience, and enjoyment than anything else.

Nathaniel had his flaws, but he had at least broken himself of the habit of expecting any comfort or enjoyment out of life.

And perhaps the evening could be made to do double duty. The Devenshams were good Ton, above reproach—Lady Devensham, in particular, was known to be a stickler for propriety who curated her guest lists with a very sharp paring knife. Especially this year when she had a daughter of her own to marry off.

For the chance to introduce her daughter to an eligible duke, Lady Devensham would gladly add Lucy to her guest list.

She would do very well as hostess for Lucy’s first ball of the Season. And where Lady Devensham led, other hostesses would soon follow. Perhaps even a voucher for Almack’s.

Into these contemplations, the door of his study banged open like a rifle shot. Nathaniel looked up to see Bess Pickford in full sail. She entered the room all but crackling with barely suppressed emotion of some kind or other. Nathaniel laced his fingers over his waistcoat and savored a secret curl of anticipation.

“My lord,” she said loudly, forgetting for once to call him Your Grace in that faintly mocking way she had. “I cannot think what you are about, but you must know I cannot—I will not —accept it.”

Here was enjoyment, unlooked for and unexpected, but highly pleasurable nonetheless. Nathaniel did not smile. “To what are you referring, madame?”

She bristled. “I am referring, sir, to the entire new wardrobe you have had delivered from Mrs. Lister that is sitting upstairs in Lucy’s bedroom.”

“You were present when we ordered Lucy’s new wardrobe,” he pointed out. Why did he like watching her cheeks heat and her eyes glitter with high emotion? Nathaniel did not understand himself.

“Not the clothes for Lucy,” she replied through gritted teeth. “I refer to the other gowns. The ones for…”

She faltered, as though suddenly uncertain that she had understood the correct recipient of the second set of dresses. Nathaniel didn’t enjoy that as much.

“Ah, yes,” he said briskly, sitting tall and taking up his quill once more. His heart was pounding strangely. “The gowns I ordered for you. What of them?”

She began to pace back and forth, as though the force of her feelings would not allow her to remain stationary. “I may not be a grand lady of the Ton, but even I know it is entirely inappropriate for a single gentleman to buy clothes—to buy anything!—for an unmarried woman who is not a relative.”

“Or part of his household,” Nathaniel said, pulling a letter at random from the stack of correspondence and pretending to peruse it.

She stopped pacing and stared at him. “What?”

“I provide the livery for my servants, including the maids and cooks and so on. My household. You are also a part of my household. As such, I purchased a few pieces of clothing to aid you as you conduct your duties as Lucy’s chaperone. There is nothing inappropriate in that.”

“That dress up there is no maid’s uniform,” she said, hands coming up to rest on her hips. The move framed the neat curve of her waist. “And even if it were...I am not your housekeeper or, or a scullery maid, Your Grace.”

That Your Grace again. It was a title he’d lived in anticipation of all his life, yet somehow when she said it, the words grated against his ears like a curse. “I am not implying that you work in my kitchens like some common drudge. But as long as you perform the duties of a companion to my half-sister, you are in fact a part of my household.”

For some reason, this seemed to upset her. The pretty color drained from her cheeks, leaving them white as chalk. “Oh, thank you for clarifying that you do not consider me such a lowly menial as a common drudge in a kitchen. But I will beg you to remember that I do not work for you in any capacity. You do not give me orders, and you do not pay me wages, and you do not buy me dresses!”

By God, she was the most provoking woman alive. The way she was breathing made the lace fichu tucked into the square neckline of her high-waisted dress stretch and strain. It made a man wonder what it would take to dislodge the fichu entirely.

Nathaniel clenched his jaw and determinedly kept his gaze above her pugnacious little chin.

He would hold onto the reins of his temper. He would control himself.

“Why can you not accept the gowns? Is it your husband who would not approve?”

Damn, where did that question come from?

She appeared as taken aback as Nathaniel felt. “No! I mean, I’m sure no husband would approve, but I don’t have a—that is to say, I’m not married.”

A widow, then. Was that…a relief? Surely not. Perhaps relief at finally having the question that had nagged at him answered.

But then there was the rising need to know more about the marriage. Was it a marriage of convenience? Had she loved her late husband?

Did she love him still?

It shouldn’t matter, but it did. These questions would drive him mad if he allowed them to continue. He needed this conversation to be over.

“The gowns are bought and paid for,” he said firmly. “Pick one for tonight and be done with it.”

“I will not—wait, what is happening tonight?”

“A ball, at the Devenshams’. Lucy will attend, and you will accompany her.”

She frowned. “I don’t recall Lucy receiving an invitation.”

Nathaniel gripped the reins of his temper a little more tightly. “We were invited.”

“Oh, yes?” she said sharply. “All of us? So the invitation was addressed to His Grace, the Duke of Ashbourn, Lady Lucy Lively, and Some Unknown Nobody From Wiltshire?”

“Lady Devensham will welcome whomever I choose to bring with me. I choose to bring you, therefore you will attend. That is the deal we made when I agreed to your plan.”

“I don’t recall making any specific deal,” she hedged, crossing her arms over her chest. “Other than that I would be here to help Lucy. Which I have done and will continue to do.”

Was she constitutionally incapable of not arguing with every single damned thing he said? “Tonight, you will help her at Lady Devensham ball. And you will wear a gown I bought you.”

The thought of it swamped him with a dark, illicit thrill of possession. She would wear something he chose, something he provided. It would mark her as his…

“I won’t!”

The reins of his temper snapped.

“You will!” he roared, standing up from his chair to brace both hands on the desk. “Because I wish it. And you will accept those clothes for the same reason you gave me as to why I should open my home to Lucy. Because the way you are perceived by the world reflects upon me. I will not have you accompany Lucy to Almack’s or a private ball at Lady Devensham’s home, or a reception at St. James’s Palace, in a drab, outmoded, ill-fitting gown that makes you look like nothing more than a poor relation!”

His words echoed in the large chamber, only drowned out by the way his heartbeat pounded in his ears. He could not believe he had raised his voice.

She looked down at her ugly gray dress as though seeing it for the first time, and Nathaniel cursed himself with silent viciousness.

“I...meant no insult,” he said, gruff and halting, like the brutish clod he was.

But to his surprise, she looked back up and met his stare with a rueful laugh.

“A poor relation! But that is essentially what I am. Why should I not look the part?”

When she laughed the whole room—Nathaniel’s whole life—lit up for a brief, warm moment as precious as a candle in the dark.

He wanted to tell her that her beauty outshone the unlovely gown. He wanted to tell her she deserved a dress as graceful as she was.

That she deserved everything.

The words crowded in his throat, scratching and clawing to get out, but he couldn’t let them loose.

She wasn't for him. No pretty words or foolish gifts could make it so.

He’d wasted his time, and hers, with this stupidity. Nathaniel sat back down, taking up the letter he'd chosen and staring at it.

“Wear the gowns or don’t,” he said. “It makes no difference to me.”

She made an inarticulate sound of displeasure, a sort of sigh crossed with a huff that veered into a groan. For some bloody humiliating reason, Nathaniel felt himself grow hard.

That sound was just so terrifically unladylike—not because it was rude, exactly, but more that it felt so…real. Intimate, almost, a glimpse beneath the serene mask she showed most of the time.

A sudden vision crowded into his mind, of himself rounding the wide desk and seizing her to take that full, pouting bottom lip into his mouth and bite it. He would push his fingers into the smooth coils of her hair, pulling out pins and letting it tumble about her shoulders, which he’d bare by yanking that damned lace kerchief out of her bodice and pulling her dress apart.

He’d have her against the desk, her bare back on the smooth polished wood and dear God, he had to stop this, stop thinking about this.

He was losing his mind. She needed to leave.

He fought the urge to adjust himself in his trousers. “I will take that strange utterance as a yes. The carriage will be brought round at eight o’clock sharp. Good day, madame.”

“This is what Lucy needs,” she muttered, almost as if she was speaking to herself. “We must do this. And I suppose he’s right about the clothes, so, fine. We will be ready at eight. Attired appropriately.”

It struck him like a blow as she turned to leave, the sheer magnitude of what this woman was willing to put herself through on behalf of his female relations.

She clearly dreaded the thought of this ball tonight and would rather have stayed home and not felt herself beholden to Nathaniel in any way for the dresses he’d foolishly thought she would like.

“You hate this. All of it.” The words escaped him before he could think better of them, but he had to know. “So why do you stay? Why did you agree to leave your home and your life behind in the first place?”

She stopped at the door and looked over her shoulder at him. The smooth curve of her cheek, the purity of her profile, made him ache. “Lucy needs my help,” she replied, as if it was just that simple.

For once, Nathaniel didn’t know what his face was doing, but it made her turn fully back to him. She leaned against the study door and regarded him gravely.

“When I was sixteen, a fever swept the village where I lived,” she said, the words slow and painful. “It carried off the old and the young, rich and poor alike. And it took most of my family. After that?—”

“You were alone.” Nathaniel didn’t recognize the guttural rasp of his own voice.

She nodded. “You know what that is like, I expect.”

“We are not talking about me.”

“Aren’t we? At any rate, I was luckier than most. I had friends, a community, support. My aunt took me in, and she did her best by me, I believe. But I didn’t feel as though I truly belonged until…well, until I came to know Henrietta and the girls. They have a way about them, of pulling one close and making one feel like a part of something. A part of them. They’re my family. I would do anything for them.”

She spoke so plainly. Straightforward and blunt, like a left hook to the chin. Nathaniel closed his eyes for a dizzy moment as he took the hit. Then she went in for the knockout.

“I expect you know something about that too.” Gentle, her voice was, though her eyes were blade-sharp on his face when he blinked his open. “Although I think along the way you’ve confused protecting your family name with protecting the actual people in your family. Something to think about, perhaps.”

Nathaniel was aware of the heavy beat of his heart as he regarded her. The light from the window slanted down over the burnished gold of her hair, turning her creamy complexion as warm as honey. But it was nothing to the light in her eyes, the light that shone from inside her, calling to him.

It was a call he couldn’t answer. Else he risked dragging her down into the dark with him.

Angels had no place in the dark.

He turned his gaze back to his work, dismissing her from his sight if not from his mind. “I do not require your advice on how to conduct my family’s affairs. All I require is that you attend the ball tonight looking presentable. Good day.”

She drew a breath as though to say something else, and Nathaniel couldn’t help but hold his own breath in, ears straining for her reply.

But he didn’t look up, and she didn't speak. Instead, he heard the soft pad of her slippered feet as she left the study and closed the heavy door softly behind her. The click of the latch echoed in the silence like the bars of a prison gate locking him in.

Alone. In the dark.

Where he belonged.