"I'm not," he said simply, drawing her knuckles to his lips, and they tingled under his fleeting caress. "If she cannot accept you as my wife, she has no place here."
Warmth swept her at that devotion, along with a stinging regret. For she'd never wanted to come between him and his family or his dreams. But she'd also always proven selfish where Crispin was concerned--she loved him and wanted him in her life.
Nearly three hours later, the last of a long line of guests had been received and announced until the once cavernous space was filled to overflowing with satin-clad ladies and elegantly attired gentlemen.
Around the ballroom, wistful ladies covetously eyed Crispin, women of all ages but born to Crispin's station who'd gladly trade her for the role of duchess.
None had given her the cut direct.
At best, she'd been received warmly by some guests.
At worst, bald curiosity had been her other greeting.
For all intents and purposes, the evening should be... nay, could be considered a success.
And yet...
A frisson rolled along her spine. The unshakable unease had dogged her the moment she'd descended the stairs to find Crispin waiting, replaced only by a brief calm.
Her fingers tightened reflexively upon the crystal flute, and she took a sip of the warm brew.
"You never asked how I found you," Crispin murmured at her side.
The melodic baritone rose above the din of the orchestra's lively reel. Blinking slowly, Elizabeth glanced up.
"I figured if you'd truly wished to find me, a runner could have easily managed the task."
He chuckled. "Is that what you think?" Crispin teased a finger down her jaw. "You underestimate your ability to hide and my ability to find you, madam."
They held each other's eyes over her glass.
"I hired runners and private detectives. You were gone without a trace, Elizabeth Ferguson." His expression darkened. "And you would have remained so had it not been for a chance meeting between myself and a young woman." Crispin glanced to the front of the ballroom.
Puzzling her brow, Elizabeth followed his stare to the striking couple who wound their way down the stairs and through a throng of guests. Peers and servants melted aside in an indication of the couple's wealth and power.
Elizabeth squinted, focusing not on the tall, powerful gentleman in full command of the ballroom, but rather, the woman at his side. There was something so very familiar. Something...
She gasped, dimly registering Crispin's rescue of her champagne flute as the late-to-arrive guests stopped before them.
"Elizabeth, may I present Their Graces, the Duke and Duchess of Hampstead."
She pressed a hand to her mouth, and with a loss of proper salutations and deference for the distinguished guest that would have given Mrs. Belden a fit of the vapors, Elizabeth fixed on the woman at his side.
"Rowena?" she asked, a question in her own voice as she touched a hand to her breast. She quickly found her footing and dropped a belated curtsy. "Your Grace," she greeted the chestnut-haired nobleman at her husband's side.
Lord Hampstead flashed a crooked grin and gave a wave of his hand. "My wife has that effect on people."
"Elizabeth," Rowena greeted with the composure of a woman born to her station and not one who just one year ago had toiled alongside Elizabeth at Mrs. Belden's Finishing School. Rowena looped her arm through Elizabeth's and then hesitated, casting a glance over at her husband. "Will you gentlemen be all right without us for a bit?" she asked, the teasing in her tone contradicted by the worry in her gaze.
The Duke of Hampstead bowed his head.
As both gentlemen fell into easy discourse, Rowena led Elizabeth off, steering them past nosy guests straining for a glimpse of them.
Rowena steered them to the farthest corner of the room. The floor-length arched windows at her back overlooked the London streets, the pillar a barrier that offered some privacy.
All earlier hint of her smile faded. "I am so sorry," Rowena whispered, gathering Elizabeth's hands in her own. "We all have our secrets, and I inadvertently revealed yours to..." The other woman glanced back over her shoulder, peeking around the column in the direction of Crispin and Hampstead. "Your husband." Her voice faded to a barely there whisper that Elizabeth strained to detect above the noise of the room.
"It is fine," she assured. Four days earlier, she would have had a very different response to the other woman's worry. "How...?"
"I accompanied my husband's ward on a lecture at the Royal Museum given by His Grace. He spoke at length on the domestication of a butterfly." Rowena wrung her hands together. "Many scoffed at the idea of such a feat." She held Rowena's eyes. "But I'd seen it done once before."
A memory trickled in.
"No!" Elizabeth cried. Rushing through the gardens, she put herself in front of a circle of students. "Do not crush it. The butterfly is quite resilient. He or she can live even outside of their natural habitat...
"Me."
"You," Rowena confirmed. "You'd rescued that injured monarch from Mrs. Belden's gardens and kept the creature in your rooms, under a glass." The other woman had known that. "After the lecture, when introductions were performed, I mentioned your efforts... and His Grace asked for your name."
Her heart sped up.
That was what had brought them back together--a matter of chance, and fate. An exchange between two members of the peerage that had come not in a ballroom, but at a lecture hall, when the unlikeliest of presenters, a duke, should be approached by a duchess.
Rowena wetted her lips. "You are... certain you are safe? You wish to be here of your own volition?"
In other words, had Crispin forced her cooperation? "Crispin is never one who'd force any person to do something they do not wish," she said quietly for the other woman's benefit. Even as he'd sought her cooperation, he'd not threatened her future to bring about her agreement.
Rowena smiled wistfully. "You love him."
Elizabeth's gaze went across the ballroom to where Crispin stood conversing with the Duke of Hampstead. "I do." She always had.
As if he felt her eyes on him, Crispin looked up. From over the heads of the twirling dance partners, he winked.
She grinned, a giddy lightness suffusing her breast and making her look away. As she returned her attention to the lone friend she'd made at Mrs. Belden's, a pair at the entrance of the ballroom snagged her notice from the corner of her eye.
All moments of seeming perfection ultimately ended.
Oh, blast.
"The mother?" Rowena murmured.
Elizabeth started, realizing she'd spoken aloud. "You know something of it?" she asked, her stomach churning.
"I know a lot of it," the other woman confessed. "In my case, 'the father.' He... sent me away." Rowena hugged her arms about her middle.
"Isn't that the way of it?" Elizabeth murmured. There were expectations for vaunted heirs, and never did the world allow for an interloper.
The dowager duchess swept down the staircase with the regality of a queen gracing the company of her lesser subjects. For the first time, Elizabeth allowed herself to consider the gentleman at the dowager duchess' side.
"Oh, my God." It slipped out a strangled prayer. There could be no mistaking the Terry crimson curls, the spectacles, and pale skin. Just as there could be no doubting that the gentleman's presence on this particular night, of all the nights before it, signified only one thing.
The duchess and her guest reached Crispin and said something.
A moment later, he was following the pair back up the stairs and disappearing from the ballroom.
Unwittingly, she reached out and found purchase in Rowena's fingers.
"Elizabeth?" her friend urged, squeezing Elizabeth's suddenly moist hand. "What is it?" The query came as if down a long, empty corridor.
"It is my uncle," she managed, her voice faint. The absentee guardian, returned from the grave and on the arm of Crispin's mother, could on
ly ever mean one thing, and that would never be good.
With Rowena calling after her, Elizabeth started quickly across the room, this moment feeling very much like another night nearly ten years ago.
Chapter 15
His mother was smiling.
And history had shown that nothing good could ever come from that smile. Particularly when it was issued on the heels of a directive, and in the midst of a ball, while Crispin had been in discourse with a fellow duke, no less.
Unease tripping along his spine, he motioned the pair to enter his offices.
"I trust whatever it is that demands my presence is of vital importance," he drawled, a warning layered in steel.
The dowager duchess' lips formed a tight moue of displeasure. "You should be more pleased to see your dear mother, Crispin," she decreed as he closed the door behind them.
"I don't have time for your games this evening, Mother," he bit out, sparing a warning glance for the somehow familiar gentleman at his mother's side.
"No games, Crispin," she countered, pressing an affronted hand to her chest. "You know games are beneath my dignity."
"Indeed." Such had been the lesson learned firsthand as a boy when asking her to join him for a game of spillikins. He might as well have asked for the king's head in a basket, as scandalized as she'd been. Folding his arms at his chest, he nudged his chin up. "Given that, say whatever it is that could not be said amidst polite company, but was also too vital to wait until the end of the evening's ball," he instructed. Striding past the still silent stranger, Crispin found a place at his desk.
His mother's lips curved up into the closed rendition of a smile that she'd managed in the whole of his life knowing her. Strained. Uncomfortable. And better suited for one with gas. "I've solved our problem."
Crispin perched his hip on the edge of his desk. "I wasn't aware we had a problem."
She wrinkled her nose. "Very well, I've solved your problem."
Too proud to suffer so much as a wrinkle in her silk skirts, the dowager duchess would never dare to admit a weakness in front of a stranger, as she now did.
Crispin narrowed his gaze on the painfully thin, lanky gentleman. With his shock of red hair and pale cheeks, he was of indiscriminate years. The stranger swallowed audibly and looked between mother and son. "I... might I suggest introductions are in order?" he said, struggling a bit with his intricately knotted cravat.
"Introductions are a splendid idea," his mother exclaimed with a buoyant clap of her hands. "May I present Mr. Dalright Terry."
Terry.
Crispin sat upright.
"You recognize the name." It wasn't a question spoken by his mother.
An uncharacteristic joy glimmered in her eyes that only increased the ominous foreboding. Crispin alternated a stare between the two members of this unlikely pairing. "What is the meaning of this?" he demanded on a seething whisper.
"That is no way to greet a gentleman who is, by order of marriage, family."
Mr. Terry stood up all the straighter, puffing his chest out.
"It is when said gentleman should have proven absent for more than ten years," Crispin snapped, deflating the other man's inflated pride.
His mother moved in a whir of skirts. "Tsk, tsk, Crispin. As a scholar, I expect you of all people would understand that Mr. Terry is an avid explorer who's contributed greatly to..." Her lightly wrinkled brow furrowed as she stared expectantly over at her guest.
Elizabeth's uncle coughed into his hand. "The binomial naming system for animal and plant species."
The dowager duchess turned her nose up. "Er... yes... well... I trust you see the importance of... that."
No, he didn't. Not when the other man's exploration and studies had superseded his niece's well-being. "You had an obligation," Crispin clipped out.
Mr. Terry bristled. "I was traveling."
"Your niece was an orphan."
The gent wisely took a step back.
Crispin's mother placed herself between them. "Do cease this instant, Crispin. You are not a bully." Nay, he'd been the one bullied. As such, he'd never beaten, bloodied, or mocked a single soul. But this, this man, who'd abandoned Elizabeth and hadn't bothered to show his damned face when she'd found herself grief-stricken and alone in the world, reemerged more than a decade later.
"Get out."
"Crispin!" his mother exclaimed. "I expect more from you than that."
A growl worked its way up his chest. "Very well," he said in measured tones that challenged the thin grasp of his control. "Get out, before I have you thrown out on your arse."
Except, Elizabeth's uncle proved far braver than he'd credited, or than his nervous Adam's apple bobbing up and down made him out to be. "I-I cannot do that." He glanced over at Crispin's mother in the quickest of exchanges that, had he blinked, Crispin would have missed. But he saw it.
The warning bells roared in his ears. "And why is that, Mr. Terry?"
"Because I do not approve of the union."
"Pfft," Crispin scoffed. "Your time for approving or disapproving was ten years ago." He started quickly across the room and reached for the door handle.
"You misunderstand," Elizabeth's uncle said quickly. "As her guardian, my approval was necessary."
Crispin abruptly stopped, and he stared, his eyes locked on the paneled oak door.
"Valid unions between wards who haven't yet reached their majority require the approval of a guardian." Terry's words were delivered as if he'd been hand-fed them in a stage production.
And in this... he had.
His heart knocking against his rib cage, Crispin turned around. "What are you saying?" He winged a brow up, fighting to retain calm. "And I would advise you to proceed very carefully, Mr. Terry," he suggested, lending an icy frost to the warning.
Mr. Terry faltered, but then he looked at the dowager duchess. She gave a slight nod.
Elizabeth's uncle spoke on a rush. "I am saying that Lillibet--"
"Elizabeth," Crispin corrected. His wife had always despised the moniker assigned to her by her family.
"--could not have legally wed without my consent. As such, the union is... the union can be challenged and an annulment granted."
The silence between the three of them lengthened. The clock ticked. The faint rumble of carriages sounded in the streets below.
Crispin's mother preened. "I have managed what your father could not." Her nostrils flared. "What your father wouldn't. You made him feel such guilt over your actions that he could not bring himself to end it." She gave a flounce of her ringlets. "Well, I've managed what your father did not."
"And what is that?" he asked impatiently, tired of her ramblings and Elizabeth's uncle's presence.
"Why, I've secured peace between our family and the Langleys."
"That is an impossible feat," he muttered. The Langleys had burned with their hatred of the Ferguson's since Crispin's marriage, and Lady Dorinda's subsequent one shortly thereafter to a cad who'd drank, whored his money away, and then found himself shot dead by an irate husband across a dueling field at dawn. Familiar guilt sat like a pit in his gut.
"An impossible feat for some." His mother swatted his arm. "But not for your mother."
"And how have you managed that?" he asked tiredly.
The place between her brows puckered. "You are usually far more clever than this. Your marriage is invalid, Crispin. Don't you see? You are free." She beamed. "Free to right a past wrong...and finally marry Lady Dorinda."
*
Long ago, Elizabeth had learned the perils of listening at keyholes.
More than ten years earlier, she'd had her heart broken for it.
Now, she had it broken all over again.
"You are free. Free to marry Lady Dorinda..."
Elizabeth gripped the edges of the door, curling her fingers so tight into the wood that she left crescent marks upon it. And she focused on breathing.
Quiet, even breaths that wouldn't reveal her place outsi
de, while mother and son, and now Elizabeth's errant guardian, discussed Crispin's future--without Elizabeth in it.
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut.
He loves me.
He always has.
He'd missed Elizabeth when she'd gone.
But their marriage had also broken a familial alliance between him and his parents' godchild. A ducal daughter. Groomed to be a ducal bride. And that relationship had been severed with Crispin's marriage to Elizabeth.
And now, what his mother and Elizabeth's guardian presented made something that had once been impossible possible.
Elizabeth forced her eyes open, and perhaps she was a glutton for her own self-misery. She strained her ears, searching for any hint of reply, or sound, or discourse from the trio behind the panel.
There was something so very much worse in Crispin's silence.
Say something, she silently pleaded. Tell her that your love for me is far greater than any obligation you have to the Huntington line.
When still no reply was forthcoming, Elizabeth reached for the handle, intending to let herself in and this time force her presence upon the room, an interloper in a discussion they'd not have her be a part of. As she hadn't done in the past.
To what end? To influence... whatever Crispin would, or would not, say?
She lowered her arm back to her middle and hugged herself to keep from throwing the door open.
She'd not have him. Not that way. Elizabeth wanted him, but she would not insert herself into the midst of the offer with which his mother had presented him.
Freedom.
She scrabbled with her lower lip.
How she wished she could be selfish enough.
Elizabeth had turned to go when Crispin's low baritone shattered the quiet and froze her in her tracks.
"Get out."
Her heart stalled.
"Crispin?"
"You enter my household on the evening I'm presenting my wife before Polite Society and threaten me with the dissolution of our marriage."
Elizabeth's heart resumed beating, pounding a frantic beat against her rib cage. She pressed a hand to her chest, certain the arguing pair in that room could hear it. That she'd reveal her presence on the fringe as she listened in.
"You yourself said it was a mistake, Crispin," the dowager duchess exclaimed, exasperation rich in that reminder. "You indicated that if you could do things differently to preserve the connection with Lady Dorinda, you would." There was a pause. "And now you can."