How to Tame Your Duke, page 18
He was magnificent.
She stood there openmouthed, eyes agape, not making a sound.
Without warning, Ashland whipped around. “What the . . .” He steadied the leather bag with one hand. “Oh! It’s you, Grimsby. What the devil are you doing up so early?”
Emilie’s limbs turned to jelly.
From behind, he had been magnificent. From the front, he was godlike. His hard face bore its black mask like a badge of honor; his shoulders were broad enough to pull a plow. His chest heaved up and down with male exertion. Not a single wrinkle of extra flesh marred the musculature of chest and abdomen, like an anatomist’s model. A pair of converging grooves pointed suggestively downward under the fastening of his trousers.
“Grimsby? Is something wrong?”
She returned her eyes to his face and gulped. “Nothing, sir! I beg your pardon. I couldn’t sleep. A bit befuddled, I’m afraid. I wasn’t expecting you.”
His eyebrow arched. “Were you wanting a swim?”
Emilie’s brain was a muddled collage of blade-sharp quadriceps and flexing pectorals. Her mouth filled. “Swim?”
Ashland made a motion with his arm. “The pool.”
She glanced in the direction he indicated. A flash of light came from around the corner, as if reflected from water.
“The pool,” she said numbly, “of course.”
Ashland angled his head to the leather bag. “Go on, if you like. I won’t be finished for a while yet.”
Emilie realized she was staring at his lips. A few hours ago, those lips had been kissing her. The tongue inside that mouth had been eating her alive, making her scream with pleasure. That ridged chest, those shoulders, those impossibly trim hips had been driving into her.
This was what lay behind those layers of clothing he wouldn’t remove.
Dear. Heavenly. Father. She was going to faint.
Ashland was frowning. “Grimsby, are you certain you’re all right? You look a little queer.”
A mist was rising before her eyes. She really was going to faint.
“Grimsby, your spectacles,” said Ashland.
“My spectacles?”
“They’ve fogged over. It’s the pool, I’m afraid. We keep it heated during the colder months. Freddie’s damned idea; I prefer it bracing.”
“Oh!” Emilie removed her spectacles, ducking her head as she did so. She wiped away the steam and put them back on her nose. “Of course you do,” she muttered.
Between her legs, she was feeling rather . . . warm. She shifted her weight.
“You’re welcome to pick up a pair of gloves and spar with me, if you like,” Ashland was saying. His eyes swept briefly over her. “You look as though you could use a bit of heft. Strengthen you up.”
“No, no. I don’t, er, spar, as a rule. I am a . . . a man of peace.” She straightened herself. “And stronger than I look.”
Ashland shrugged. “Do as you like, then. As I said, you’ve free use of the place, and swimming’s excellent exercise. Shall stroke off myself shortly.” He turned back to his punching bag, all sinuous power. His trousers fit economically around the hard curve of his buttocks.
His trousers, which he would undoubtedly remove to (dear God!) stroke off in the bathing pool.
Emilie swallowed. “I think . . . perhaps . . . I shall find a book in the library instead.”
* * *
Why does His Grace keep a bathing pool in the lower level of the house?”
Freddie looked up from his plate of steaming morning offal. His face bore a gray green cast, like a lump of clay left to gather algae in a stagnant pond. “Must you do that?”
“Do what, your lordship?”
“Talk.”
“The breakfast table, your lordship, is, or ought to be, the scene of civilized conversation, where members of the household come together with convivial . . .”
Freddie brought his cup to his lips, tilted back his head, and drained it.
“. . . fellowship.” Emilie eyed her charge. “That is tea, isn’t it?”
“Coffee, Mr. Grimsby. Black.”
“Ah yes. Just like your father. Which returns me to the point: Why does the duke maintain a bathing pool?”
The footman moved up noiselessly to refill Freddie’s cup. He stared queasily at the stream of black liquid. “Oh, that. He had it installed soon after he returned from abroad. The doctors recommended sea bathing, but of course he wasn’t going to a public seaside like the rest of humanity, oh no.”
“It isn’t seawater, is it?”
“It is.” Freddie picked up his cup, drank, scalded himself, and set down the cup again with an oath and a clatter. “Shipped in fresh by rail every month. Haven’t you noticed the delivery? Converted fire engine brings it in from the railway station. Confounded fuss.”
“I had no idea. None at all.”
Freddie blew carefully over the top of his cup and tried again. “Of course, I admit it’s rather nice to be able to swim in the convenience of one’s own home. I made them heat it, of course. It’s as good as swimming in the Arctic in wintertime, otherwise.”
“So your father told me.”
Freddie glanced up, amused. “Caught him at it, did you?”
“No. He was at boxing practice.” Emilie selected a third piece of toast from the rack at her right. She was feeling quite remarkably hungry this morning, for some reason.
“Oh yes. He does that, too. A regular John Sullivan, my Pater. Jolly reassuring, should we be waylaid by a gang of prizefighters while trotting across the moors some afternoon. Is that the newspaper?”
“It is.” She pushed it toward him. Freddie’s face was beginning to lose its greenish tinge, under the effects of the coffee. Her own thoughts were reeling. Did Ashland really rise before each dawn and exercise like this? Boxing and swimming and God knew what else? She had been breakfasting in the family dining room for weeks now—a single invitation that had somehow stretched into a habit—and never noticed a sign of recent rigorous exercise in Ashland’s demeanor. For what reason did he do it? Why should a duke, a man who scarcely ever dined in company, let alone left his estate to face the physical dangers of the wide world, keep his body honed in such battle-ready shape? As if he were preparing for some great test. She lifted her own coffee—also black, God help her—and tried to banish the thought of Ashland striking that punching bag, his muscles bunching effortlessly under his glowing skin.
Of Ashland’s body atop hers, connected with hers, heated and powerful, stroking into her with exquisite strength.
Beneath her neat jacket, her plain wool waistcoat and cotton shirt, the linen bandage binding her chest, Emilie’s breasts tingled painfully. She cleared her tightened throat and finished her toast. “Speaking of which, where is His Grace at the moment? He’s never been so late for breakfast.”
Freddie looked up. “Oh, that. Hadn’t you heard? Pater’s gone off.”
Emilie’s knife clattered on her plate. “Gone off?”
Freddie waved his hand. “Off. Gone. Exit, pursued by a stag.”
“A bear.”
“Whatever it is. Absconded to London, at the crack of . . . dawn . . .” He stared at her and frowned.
“London!” Emilie’s forehead stretched upward with astonishment, causing her spectacles to slide down her nose. She pushed them up hastily. “The duke in London! Whatever for?”
“I haven’t the foggiest. I’m quite as perplexed as you.” Freddie cocked his head, still frowning, his eyes fixed on Emilie’s face. “Daresay things have gone along so swimmingly with this new bird of his, he’s decided to try his luck in the capital.”
Emilie’s fingers went cold. “I . . . I daresay.”
“You know . . . the oddest thing . . .” Freddie said slowly.
Emilie stared down at her plate. The yolks of her half-eaten eggs had met a pool of grease from the kippers, and were beginning to congeal. Her enormous appetite had evaporated. “What’s that?” she asked absently.
“No, no,” he said hastily. “A dream. I’m sure of it. Ha-ha. A dream, of course.”
She glanced up. “A dream?”
Freddie was plunging his fork into his breakfast, looking miraculously human, a living testament to the restorative powers of strong black coffee. “Ha-ha. You’ll never credit it. Last night, you see, I dreamt that you’d shaved those whiskers of yours.”
“Ha-ha.” She picked up her cup and hid behind it.
Freddie stuffed his mouth and smiled reminiscently. “Astonishingly vivid dream. I can see your face quite plainly, shorn as a newborn lamb.”
“Newborn lambs aren’t shorn, as a rule.”
“Well, but you looked like a precious little newborn baa-lamb, without your whiskers. All wide-eyed and innocent. Gone, the avenging tutor! Ha-ha.” Freddie threw back another cup of coffee. “I should sketch it out before I forget. Then the next time you’re scolding me, I’ll bring it out to remind myself of your humiliation.”
“I wasn’t humiliated.” Emilie glanced at the footman’s impassive face. “It was only a dream, after all. Your dream.”
“And a dashed fine dream at that. The memory has quite cheered me up.” Freddie used his toast to wipe the rest of his egg, shoved the lot gracelessly in his mouth, swabbed himself with a snowy napkin, and stood up. “I shall await you in the schoolroom, Mr. Grimsby. Don’t be late!” He tucked the newspaper under his arm, clicked his heels together, and swept from the room.
Emilie knew she should rise and follow him, but her limbs wouldn’t move. She stared at her toast, uncomfortably aware of Lionel the footman standing ten feet away, probably annoyed, probably impatient for the damned tutor to lift his bony arse out of his seat and leave the room to the poor sods who did the real work around the Abbey. She’d come to a much deeper understanding of what it meant to be a servant, these past several weeks.
The Duke of Ashland had left for London.
What did it mean? Trying his luck in the capital, as Freddie put it? Now that the ice had been broken. Now that he’d finally lain with another woman. The deed had been done. One sin might as well be a hundred.
Emilie clenched her fists in her lap.
Think logically. Of course Ashland hadn’t gone to London to find more women. It wasn’t in his character at all. Emilie thought of his words last night, his disciplined arms pounding the leather bag downstairs. He was not a wastrel. He was not a rake. This trip to London must be some business affair, some urgent matter.
In any case, it shouldn’t bother her, even if he were after women. She should welcome his straying to other pastures. The sooner this tie between them was snapped off, the better. And since she didn’t seem to have the strength, Ashland might as well do the snapping himself. She would spend this week of his absence constructing a very high, very thick wall between them. By the time he returned, she would be quite indifferent.
Or at least able to greet the sight of his half-naked, gloriously glowing body with perfect composure.
Emilie finished her toast, finished her coffee in a gulp. She rose and nodded to Lionel, who returned—to her surprise—an almost imperceptible nod of his own.
Outside in the hallway, she nearly crashed into Simpson as he strode toward the breakfast room. “Oh! I beg your pardon, Mr. Simpson.”
“Not at all, Mr. Grimsby,” said Simpson, as he might say, Take your arse to Greenland, Grimsby, on a fucking flat-bottomed rowboat.
Emilie was undeterred. “I understand His Grace departed for London this morning. When can his lordship and I expect his return?” She inserted Freddie’s name into it, just to ensure the butler’s attention.
Simpson looked as if he’d been handed a week-old pig’s bladder and asked to make a sausage with it. “His Grace did me the honor of informing me that he would be absent a week.”
“Seven full days?”
“So much I have always understood a week to contain.”
“How perceptive you are, Mr. Simpson. I am in your debt.” Emilie turned and marched down the hall to the staircase—the main staircase, used by the family—and went up three flights to the schoolroom, where the Marquess of Silverton stood in the center of the carpet, blue eyes globular, newspaper fluttering from his hand, staring at her with an expression of utmost shock.
“Good God, Grimsby!” he said. “You’re a bloody princess, aren’t you?”
SIXTEEN
A shocked silence greeted the Duke of Ashland as he paused in the doorway of the dining room at his London club.
He expected nothing less. He hadn’t darkened this particular threshold in well over a decade, not since the eve of his departure with his regiment. A riotous evening, that one. He’d crawled back into his hotel room just as his old friend dawn, the rosy-fingered bitch, had broken the horizon in the east. An hour’s sleep, a bracing bath, a mug of coffee, and he’d been off to Victoria Station to join his regiment massing at Southampton. God, that rattling train. His head still ached in sympathy at the memory.
The mood at the club tonight was something less than riotous, and the stunned faces turned toward him were even less familiar. He remembered the smell, though—that exact blend of roasted meat and smoke, leather and spirits, wafted out to greet him as if he’d been away only a week or two. Eau de club, he supposed. He kept his gaze high, scanning over the tops of their befuddled gentlemanly heads, but he could feel them take him in: his white hair, his black leather half-mask, his ruined jaw protruding beneath. Perhaps even the empty space outside the cuff of his right sleeve, which he kept defiantly at his side, in full view.
At one time—indeed, for the last twelve years—he had dreaded this moment. Tonight, for some reason, he found he didn’t give a damn what everyone saw.
A chair scraped. “By God. Ashland, you old bastard. What brings you to London?”
Ashland adjusted his gaze and found his mouth breaking open in a genuine smile. “Penhallow! I’d no idea the club’s standards had sunk so low in my absence.” He reached out his arm, his right arm, and Lord Roland Penhallow grasped the stump in both hands without the smallest particle of self-consciousness.
“You’ve saved my life, old man,” Penhallow said heartily, a wide grin splitting his own impossibly handsome face. He shrugged one shoulder at the mass of curious manhood assembled behind him. “This sorry lot was boring me to tears. Join us?”
Ashland shot a quick glance at the table from which Penhallow had risen. Nobody he recognized, of course. A young fellow, Penhallow, still at Eton when Ashland had left for India, but as the grandson of the Duke of Olympia he’d traipsed across Ashland’s past a few times. He had even been among the few to visit at Ashland Abbey—my grandsire asked me to pop in on you on my way to Edinburgh and try out this fantastical bathing pool of yours—and Ashland had found himself rather enjoying the lad’s company. He had a way of neither staring at nor ignoring Ashland’s scars, simply carrying on as a matter of course. Rather like young Grimsby. Rather like Emily, too, and his heart cracked anew at the memory of her gentle kiss at the end of his arm.
“Tempting,” Ashland said, “but in fact I was hoping to find your grandfather doddering about. They informed me on Park Lane that he might be found here this evening.”
Penhallow lifted both eyebrows—he had never quite mastered the elegant art of raising just one—and said, “Why, no. Not that I’ve noticed.” He turned back to his table of friends and called out, “Don’t suppose you’ve seen my old grandsire dodder past this evening, Burke?”
At the table, a tall red-haired gentleman set down his wineglass and shrugged. “Not once, I’m afraid.”
“Ah well,” said Penhallow. “Mind you, the chap’s got a distinct habit of turning up when he’s least expected. Do join us, however. You must. Burke’s been trying to convince me to run off to Italy with him for a year of monastic seclusion, and I’m having the devil of a time explaining to him that it simply won’t do.”
Penhallow took him by the arm and led him inexorably forward between the tables. One by one, the occupants turned politely away, returning to their conversations, casting only the discreet glance or two his way. “Gentlemen,” said Penhallow, “I have the honor of presenting to you the legendary Duke of Ashland, who’s finally deigned to honor us rubbishy degenerates here in London with a visit, so you’d better mind your p’s and all that.”
At the words Duke of Ashland, the four men at the table shed their shared air of incurious somnolence and shot to their feet in a simultaneous volley. It was all Your Grace! Didn’t know it was you, and Your Grace! Most honored, sir, and in a moment Ashland was seated with a bottle of best claret flowing freely into his glass.
Which was, he reflected, taking the first swallow, exactly how his last evening at the club had begun.
Except for all the Your Graces. That had begun upon his return.
* * *
I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, Your Grace.” The solicitor fidgeted with his fountain pen, turning it this way and that, rolling it from finger to finger. His face was still the same mottled red it had turned when the Duke of Ashland was first announced into his chambers. “Do you wish to cut off the allowance entirely?”
Ashland stretched out one leg on the expensive Oriental rug and plucked a piece of lint from his trousers. Outside, the brown January fog had laid against his skin with a chill that went to his bones; here, the room was heated to tropical strength, coals sizzling hotly in the fireplace. It reminded him of India, of that suffocating and inescapable warmth, drenching him to the core. “Mr. Baneweather, since we made these arrangements twelve years ago, when Her Grace first left the protection of my roof, I have not seen her, nor made any effort to follow her movements. In return, I have heard nothing, either of her or from her. Having instructed you to inform me if her monthly allowance went uncollected, I have assumed her to be alive and well. At the moment, I simply wish to ascertain her whereabouts and mode of living, with a view to initiating a suit of divorce at the earliest opportunity.”
