Duchess By Night

Page 29

“Do what?”
“Your daughter should never be in this tower. Ever. It’s one thing if you want to put your own life at risk—” and mine, she added silently “—but your daughter should not come within a hundred feet of this building.”
He looked at her with a scowl. “Villiers tells me that you spent your life so far under the wing of your mother. I don’t mean to be rude, Cope, but if you want to be a goer, you’ll have to stop parroting your mother.” He imitated her voice. “It’s too cold. It’s too dangerous.”
“Do you think it makes you more dashing to put a child in danger? How interesting that you don’t force the servants to risk their lives in your creation. I really should make notes. To wit: manhood, achieved by risking nurslings but not underlings.”
“You are an ass,” he bit out.
Harriet felt a thrill. No man had ever called her an ass. No doubt Benjamin thought she was an ass, but he would never say such a thing to a lady.
“You too,” she said cordially. He seemed shocked at the broad smile she gave him. “Don’t ever allow your daughter in this tower, or near it, again. You love her too much. Why risk a broken heart?”
She caught his eye just long enough to make sure her words sank in and then stepped back out into the frosty air.
“One final point,” she said. “That room is kitted up like a brothel. While it’s enterprising of you to recreate that charming atmosphere on your own grounds, why on earth would you introduce your child to it?”
A look of pure rage crossed his face. “It’s not a brothel.”
“Did you pick those hangings yourself?”
“No, I—” He bit the words off.
“Let me guess,” she said, enjoying herself enormously. “You asked for help from a London firm whose last employment was in a courtesan’s boudoir.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Well?”
“Miss Bessie LaMott arranged for the hangings,” he said through gritted teeth. “I certainly didn’t think of it as a brothel.”
“I expect Bessie just reproduced the environment she knew best,” Harriet said kindly.
He strode over to his horse and said, “You’ll have to ride behind me.”
Harriet took a look at his lean, muscled body and felt a qualm that had nothing to do with being a man, and everything to do with being a woman. “I can walk. I feel much warmer, just from being out of the wind for a bit.”
“Nonsense. Eugenia will be waiting to watch our fencing lesson.” From his tone, he couldn’t wait to face her with a sword in his hand. Strange swung into his saddle and then looked at her. “I suppose you can’t get up without assistance.”
He didn’t seem to want to touch her, which was a little hurtful. But Harriet was starting to shiver all over, so she just shook her head.
He stuck out his hand. She went over to him, put her hand in his, and then looked up. “What next?”
He was staring down at their hands. Her hand was engulfed in his, of course. “What next?” she repeated. “Should you take your foot out of the stirrup so I can get up?”
“For Christ’s sake,” he said.
He gave a great heave. She flew through the air and landed just behind his saddle with a muffled shriek. The horse’s rump sloped backward, so she edged forward until she was actually sitting on the raised end of his saddle. It caused her to be plastered against his back, but at least there she had a chance of staying on the horse.
“Let go of my shoulders!” he said irritably.
“I clutched them in an effort to stop myself flying into the next county,” she managed.
“You scream like a woman,” he said, obviously disgusted.
She had the impulse to pinch him hard, but she controlled it. The horse didn’t even seem to notice her weight. He was prancing, eager to return to the stables. “You left your horse standing in the cold after a run,” she said pointedly.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” he said, his voice rueful. “Horses, servants, children. I’m afraid that I get excited by this sort of thing.”
“Towers?”
“The engineering that goes into them. The calculations. The other day I figured out how we could put a false floor in the ballroom.”
Harriet let a moment go by before she asked the obvious. “And the false floor would be good for?”
“For a banquet table,” he said. “It would have been interesting, but I’m afraid that Eugenia has your hard-headed approach. I threw the calculations away.”
He was terrifyingly likeable when he was rueful and in love with his crazed engineering feats.
“Do you have to sit so close to me?” he asked, with an edge in his voice that made her forget that she ever liked him.
“How exactly do you think that I’m supposed to sit behind you, on the saddle, without being close?”
“Try moving backwards,” he said, very unfriendly. “There’s a nice space of the horse’s rear to sit on.”
“I can’t do it,” Harriet said, enjoying herself. So he didn’t like her because she was too effeminate? Rank prejudice. Why, her mother’s curate, Mr. Periwinkle, was remarkably effeminate. He smelled like a flower and believed that life was always better with a cup of tea. Lord Strange probably wouldn’t want to shake his hand.
She snuggled closer. It was good for him to feel uncomfortable. In fact, she would be grinning except her face was too frozen to move. It would be good for Lord Strange if he had to get to know someone—a man—who was a little different than he was.
The man was set in his ways. Obsessed with manliness. Mr. Periwinkle enjoyed arranging dried flowers. And he gave lovely sermons about the lilies of the field. Everyone adored him.
The horse started climbing the hill toward the front of the house. “You don’t mind if I put my arms around you, do you?” she shouted against the wind.
“What?”
So she just put her arms around his waist.
His body stiffened.
Her grin died a moment later. Strange’s body was large and fierce and male, in a way that played fiddlesticks with her pleasure in Mr. Periwinkle’s company.
She could feel coiled muscle and steel, even through his greatcoat. It was dangerous to have her hands on him. It felt like nothing she’d experienced before. It felt heady, warm, crazed. It made her think about the bawdy songs in Kitty’s book, the ones that talked about a woman folding a man in her arms and kissing him over and over.
It must be the influence of Strange’s degenerate household, with Kitty and Nell and all the rest of them pursuing their desires without the slightest concern for consequences, or reputation, or society. If she weren’t a duchess…
If she were just Mr. Cope, young Harry who had no last responsibilities and no history, she would throw away caution.
She would…
The horse stopped in the courtyard and Strange was off the horse so fast that she slid forward onto the saddle, into the space left by his warm body. He looked up at her, his eyebrow cocked disdainfully.
She looked back at him steadily until the scorn faded in his eyes.
“Do you still wish to fence?” she asked.