Unmasking the Duke, page 12
Kitty passed it over, and the princess laughed. “Lady Meg’s book! Isn’t it wonderful? I laughed all the way through.”
“Lady Meg’s?” How could she know such a thing? It wasn’t inscribed. “What makes you say so?”
“Oh, a little bird told me who the author was, and in fact, once you know her, it’s quite clear she wrote it. Were you really in the dark or just defending your cousin’s privacy?”
Kitty could feel herself blushing with awkwardness. She had no idea how to answer, so it was well the others joined them at that moment.
However, the princess was not inclined to let the matter drop. Holding up the book, she said, “I’ve given away your secret, Lady Meg. Your cousin is quite shocked to hear you wrote this.”
A frown flickered on Meg’s brow and vanished into a smile. “I suspect she’s more surprised than shocked. Cousin Kitty has only recently come to live with us. But you shouldn’t waste time on it, Kitty. It’s not remotely improving!”
“Does she need improving?” inquired the princess guilelessly. The duke’s gaze fell on her, his expression unreadable, and she smiled. “I feel we are all entitled to a little fun.”
“Just so,” he said in apparent agreement.
The pleasant informality of previous evenings seemed to have vanished. Sherry was offered by a footman from a silver tray, and afterward, the duke as host, escorted the highest-ranking lady—the princess—into the dining room.
And the conversation veered between the princess’s adventures and the doings of various Winter family members and friends, whom Kitty had never met and sometimes never heard of. Kitty had nothing to contribute and found, in any case, that she didn’t wish to, for she knew suddenly that her voice and her accent were still wrong for this society, and even the foreign princess had spotted it. Why else would she have said, Does she need improving? in that precise manner?
After dinner, although it was clearly the custom among this rank of society, the gentlemen did not linger over their wine but joined the ladies in the drawing room almost immediately, and the princess suggested a game of whist.
“That would leave one of us out,” the duke protested.
“Let it be me,” Kitty said brightly. “I don’t mind.”
“Don’t you play?” the princess asked.
“Too well,” Johnny answered for her, though he cast her the quickest of winks in acknowledgment of her secret and less than respectable skills. Which somehow didn’t make her happy either. “We’ll take it in turns to sit out.”
“There’s no need,” Kitty assured him. “I shall be happy just reading Cousin Meg’s book.”
She sat in one of the armchairs, the book open on her knee, while the others played, chatted, and laughed. And Kitty realized this was the only evening since the first when she had not felt part of the family. Kindness, she reflected, was very different from acceptance. She knew an urge to go home. Even on ball nights when she was left in the cottage by herself, she had never felt this lonely.
She pulled herself together, keeping an amiable expression on her face while she tried to concentrate. She really wished to go to bed but was afraid they would think she was sulking. So she served the tea in Meg’s place and took cups to everyone at the card table. The duke cast her one of his quick, dazzling smiles, and that sustained her through the rest of the evening.
Only when the party finally decided to break up, she was so relieved, she left without Meg’s novel.
And if she went back from her bedchamber to fetch it, would she run again into the duke?
She closed her eyes in sudden pain. When Jilly had unlaced her gown, she sent the maid away and huddled inside a shawl, looking out of the window at the gardens in the center of the square and the tall, gracious houses surrounding it. She missed the wide-open vistas from Maida Gardens.
Abruptly, she stood and picked up her candle. She would fetch the book because she didn’t think she would sleep. And she had the feeling that even if she did meet the duke tonight, he would barely notice her. On her part, there would be no more…submitting to such treatment either. Whatever her birth, she was not a toy to be picked up and put down whenever his mood or his company changed.
She opened the door and glanced out to see the passage was not yet in darkness. Instead, at the end of the passage, two people stood very close together. One of them, with his back to her, was undoubtedly the duke, his hair gleaming golden in the candlelight.
Elegant female arms were locked around his neck, and the unmistakably accented voice of the princess murmured, “Oh, I have missed you, Johnny.”
“And I, you,” he replied, his head bending toward her.
Kitty whisked herself back inside, being careful to close the door too softly to be heard by the couple further along. She leaned against the door, closing her eyes in misery. She didn’t know why. It was no more than she suspected. She just hadn’t known it would hurt quite so much more to see it confirmed.
Chapter Thirteen
Over the last four years, Johnny had expected uncomplicated delight in any reunion that should occur between him and Aline. Four years ago, her bravery, spirit, and generosity had won a little bit of his heart. That she was a passionate and inventive lover had not hurt either.
He was more than happy to have found her again and to be able to return the help she had once given to Meg, and, indeed, to the whole country. She was a rare and magnificent woman. She was also a highly perceptive one, so he did not care for her odd, mild jibes against Kitty, who seemed, in Aline’s company, to lose all the self-confidence she had been gathering over the last week. In fact, Kitty had begun to shine in his environment as she had always done in her own, and he hated to see her light dimmed.
The exclusion of Kitty from the evening’s card games had been unnecessarily petty and wouldn’t have worked either if Kitty herself had not stated her preference. Perhaps the niece of Bill Renwick feared showing exactly how comfortable she was with the cards. Or maybe she was falling too easily into the role of the poor submissive relation, which wasn’t what he wanted at all, even though it was, in effect, what he was asking her to become. She was, after all, the daughter of Cousin Margaret, who had been the unpaid companion of his grandmother.
As Kitty all but fled up to bed, his feelings began to crystalize. Yes, he was pleased to see Aline, an old friend and lover. But the old, passionate intensity had…gone. He wasn’t sure why, but he suspected it had something to do with kissing Kitty the night before.
Since he was trying not to think of that or any other difficult subject, he barely noticed that Aline was detaining him with reminiscences on the stairs, on the landing, and finally at her bedchamber door, where he had civilly escorted her at her request.
As she slowly released his arm, he smiled and said, “Good night, Aline.”
She smiled back, sultry, inviting, and utterly desirable, working all her old magic with his wayward body, which remembered all too well the pleasures to be found in hers. “It doesn’t have to be.” In one graceful, tempting movement, she wound her arms around his neck. “Oh, I have missed you, Johnny.”
He held her shoulders in a light grip. “And I, you,” he said honestly, bending to kiss her cheek.
As though disappointed, a frown flickered across her face, still so close to his. “There was never anyone quite like you, you know,” she said huskily. “Not even my prince.”
“I can honestly say there was never anyone remotely like you either. It is sad, in a way, that time passes and changes. But I’ll always be glad we had our moments. Good night, Aline.”
Never, in all his erratic—and indeed erotic—fantasies of their reunion, had he envisioned himself voluntarily walking away from her clear invitation. His body wasn’t entirely happy about it either, but he did it anyway.
He was, it seemed, finally learning self-control. The late duke, his father, would have been delighted. In his bedchamber, Johnny raised a last glass of brandy to the man he still thought of as His Grace before tipping the liquid down his throat and allowing his valet to prepare him for bed.
*
For Kitty, the high point of the following day was to be the theatre in the evening. She just hoped she would not have to give up her place for the princess.
A note from her uncle cheered her somewhat. Receiving it from the butler on her way to breakfast, she slipped into the cold morning room to read it alone. Uncle Bill was not a great correspondent, but he did relay the facts, and that he had written at all reassured her of his affection. Apparently, the rebuilding of the fire-damaged part of the hotel had progressed apace, and there had been no further attacks or acts of sabotage. Rob and Dan, he wrote, were missing her, and several of the staff had sent affectionate messages demanding her return.
Foolish tears welled in her eyes, so she wiped them on her sleeve as she stood up and stuffed the letter inside her cuff.
“Not bad news, I hope?”
Johnny stood in the doorway of the morning room, gazing at her. Her heart performed its usual somersault, made all the worse by the fact she didn’t know how to look at him anymore.
She smiled and shook her head. “No, nothing like that. All is well at Maida.”
“And in Grosvenor Square?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is all well with you here?” he asked patiently.
“Of course.” She walked a little blindly toward him, trusting courtesy to force him out of the way and let her past.
He didn’t move. Instead, he stood still, blocking the door and gazing down at her. She felt his searching eyes even though she didn’t look up.
“You miss them.”
She shrugged. “Of course. Will you excuse me? I’m quite looking forward to breakfast, now.”
“I will when you look at me,” he said lightly.
She cast a fleeting glance upward and was caught. By his mesmeric eyes and a sense of longing she had no right to. And pain. But she was not submissive by nature. Refusing to appear overwhelmed, even though she felt exactly that, she tilted her chin and forced amusement, “Why? Are you afraid you’ve left crumbs on your face?”
“No, I wanted to see if there were tears on yours.” Unbearably, he took her hand. “I don’t want you to be unhappy here, Kitty.”
“Then rest easy. Of course, I’m not.” She would have drawn her hand free, but he was examining the skin of her palm and fingers.
“They’ve healed well,” he observed. “Do they pain you still?”
She shook her head. “No, but they itch something terrible.”
A smile glinted in his eyes that she almost answered.
“Nurse will have ointment for that,” he said gravely. “She has ointment for everything.” He stood back, letting her breathe once more and yet filling her with a silly sense of loss. “Breakfast?” He offered his arm, and she took it because it would have been rude not to and because she secretly loved any safe opportunity to touch him.
Inevitably, the princess was discovered in the breakfast room, drinking coffee and eating half a bread roll. Since, by accident or design, she sat in a beam of sunshine, her beauty was dazzling, breath-taking. And Kitty was bombarded with sudden visions of naked bodies entwined in just such golden light.
Shocked at herself, she all but bolted to the sideboard to help herself to breakfast. She wished Meg or Harry would come in because she really, really did not wish to be the gooseberry at this breakfast party.
However, the duke and the princess were clearly sophisticated enough to converse civilly across the table. He even asked her if she had slept well.
“Excellently, thank you,” the princess replied, raising her coffee cup to regard him over the rim. “Did you?”
Surely there was a hint of malice in the question, but the duke only smiled. “Not as badly as I’d feared. What would you ladies like to do today?”
“I have an appointment,” the princess announced. “At the Foreign Office.”
“Then I shall accompany you,” he said at once. “I and two stout footmen. And I’m assuming you wish to be part of our theatre party tonight?”
“Of course,” the princess replied. “I would not miss it for the world.”
*
“You should wear the new Pomona evening gown,” Meg advised as she left the nursery to change for dinner. “It will be just right for the theatre.”
“Will there be room for me?” Kitty asked bluntly. Five was an impossible squash for any group of people in a carriage. For aristocrats in full evening attire, it wasn’t to be thought of. And if anyone stayed behind, she didn’t want it to be Meg, who needed a child-free outing.
“Of course,” Meg said in surprise. “We’ll take two carriages.”
And so it proved. Inevitably, as the unmarried female who needed a chaperone—the Quality’s rules could be ridiculous—Kitty traveled with Meg and Lord Harry, leaving the duke and the princess to travel alone together. But it was not a long journey, the most time-consuming spell for the carriages being the wait to stop close enough to the theatre to disgorge their well-dressed passengers.
The Duke of Dearham, naturally, kept a box all year round that commanded an excellent view of the stage and all the other boxes. Despite her companions mentioning several times that London was thin of company at this time of year, most of the boxes were occupied by richly dressed people, many of whom stared into the Dearham box, though few were acknowledged.
“They’re wondering who you are, Cousin,” Meg murmured, thus reminding her who she was meant to be.
Kitty, who thought it more likely they were ogling the princess, merely smiled distractedly, waiting for the curtain to go up.
“When the interval…” Meg began, then broke off to exclaim, “Good God, Peter, what are you doing here?”
“I was invited by His Grace,” retorted the serious young man who had just entered. He looked vaguely familiar to Kitty.
“Well, either you or Johnny are clearly in trouble with the other,” Harry observed, holding up an amiable hand to shake Peter’s.
“Why?” Peter asked suspiciously, though he gripped the hand with friendly familiarity.
“If Johnny’s reduced to ‘His Grace,’ you’re either buttering him up or far too much on your own dignity,” Meg said.
Peter frowned. “What do you expect me to call him? Fish?”
“Why is he called Fish?” Kitty asked.
“Loose fish,” Meg said, “which is slang for—”
“It relates to his youthful misbehavior,” Harry interrupted. “And his old courtesy title of Lord Fishguard, when the old duke was alive.”
“Of course it does,” Meg said hurriedly. “Peter, have you met our cousin Kitty yet? Miss Kitty Rennie. Kitty, this is my brother, Lord Peter Winter. Oh, and I should present you to Princess Hagerin, Peter, who you probably don’t know either.”
With the flurry of introductions accomplished, Lord Peter sat beside Kitty. “I don’t believe we have met, and yet you do look familiar.”
“It will be the family resemblance,” the duke observed, looking up from his conversation with the princess.
Or the fact that Lord Peter had been with the duke’s party at Maida Gardens.
Kitty did not hear what was said next, for her wandering gaze had settled on the pit of the theatre, from where the ordinary people watched the play. It was where she had sat when Uncle Bill had taken them. She and the boys had waved excitedly across the aisle to Mr. and Mrs. Harris and Vera and…
Toby.
Toby Harris stood at the end of the aisle gazing up at her box. He didn’t wave, but he did grin, as though he knew the exact moment she had seen him. And then he sat down in his seat and faced the stage.
Kitty sat back, unreasonably disconcerted. Toby was quite entitled to come to the theatre, and as her old friend, he was certainly owed acknowledgment. But he had given her no chance. She didn’t know if she was bothered by that oddity or just by the unexpected connection of what she had come to think of as her two separate worlds.
The curtain went up, instantly drawing her attention to the stage. Even that served to link her further to her “real” life, for a clever display of juggling opened the program. She decided she would be happy to hire them at Maida Gardens and then realized that very few people in the boxes were paying them any attention. Everyone was still chattering away, acknowledging friends, and generally behaving as if nothing was happening on the stage. At least the jugglers got a cheer from the pit as they departed, and a few minutes later, the curtain lifted on a farce.
The noise died down a little, though Kitty still had to strain to hear much of the dialogue. Nevertheless, with her gaze glued to the stage, she quickly lost herself in the silly story and laughed happily at the characters’ jokes and antics.
The curtain came down, and Kitty sat back smiling to find everyone in the box was looking at her with varying degrees of amusement.
Heat seeped into her face. “What?”
“Delightfully ingénue,” the princess murmured.
“Just delightful,” the duke said. “I think we all enjoyed it far more, watching it with you.”
“Why?” Kitty muttered to Meg as Lord Peter claimed his brother’s attention. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No, bless you,” Meg said, giving her arm a quick squeeze. “But sadly, it is the fashion to be bored by the entertainments on offer, as if one has seen it all before. But it’s a ridiculous affectation, as you have just shown us. Now brace yourself, Cousin Kitty, for I suspect we are about to be invaded.”
The invasion was by people from other boxes calling to greet the duke and his sister and be introduced to the princess. Some were clearly also curious about Kitty, and she was introduced as His Grace’s cousin, Miss Rennie, to a sea of faces she had no chance of remembering.
In a very short time, the box grew oppressively full and overheated with too many candles and bodies. Kitty, used to the open spaces of the Gardens and the well-aired pavilions, began to feel both dizzy and panicked.
