“In sickness and in health,” he said, putting his arm around her.
“It was more than most husbands would do,” Merry pointed out. “That was the action of a true friend, and I’m so grateful.”
For some reason, he didn’t seem happy with her thanks. His eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched.
But Merry was confident she could coax him out of a bad mood. After all, she possessed all those new skills he’d taught her.
In the days following their quarrel, Trent had imagined Merry telling him bluntly that she had ceased to love him. In his bleakest moments, he had even imagined her declaring that she meant to return to America on the next boat.
But he had never imagined she would forget that she loved him.
Yet that’s what happened. Her love for him vanished along with her memory of the accident.
No matter how many times he ravished her, the word “love” never passed her lips. She screamed with pleasure, sobbing, panting, hoarse, undone. He turned her into the picture of debauched womanhood, glistening with sweat, her chest still heaving, her lips swollen and glossy from his kisses.
Desire, not love.
A drop of bitter irony found its way into his mind: he hadn’t wanted a wife who loved him, and now he had just that wife: Merry, without the awkward emotions and unspoken expectations.
She had even thanked him for taking care of her, as if he were any acquaintance. As if that was all they were. Friends.
He hated that word.
Yet if the accident robbed him of Merry’s love, she was nevertheless still his. She was in his arms, in his bed, in his house.
The irony was that he knew to the core of his being that possession and friendship weren’t enough anymore. Having been loved by her, he wanted more.
Back in his study but unable to concentrate, he finally decided that the solution was up to him. He had to make her fall in love with him again.
He would woo her, as her father had wooed her mother. As her other fiancés had done, Bertie and Cedric and that other fool.
Kestril as well, now he thought of it.
According to the squire, the young fool had bankrupted himself over an orchid, and fled the country the night after Merry’s fall.
Trent was reasonably certain that most of the county had assured Kestril that it would be better to leave England than to face his wrath.
Instinct told him that the man precipitated the accident somehow. Maybe he tried to kiss Merry. Trent came back to himself to find that his hands were in fists and he was vibrating with rage.
A few days later, when he was absolutely certain that his wife had fully recovered—after she had started swatting him every time he inquired about her head—he woke her early in the morning and made love to her so passionately that she barely stirred when he kissed her nose and left for London.
He had two items of business in London. The first was a brief visit to Rundell & Bridge. He selected a superb diamond ring that was significantly larger than the one Cedric had stolen.
As long as he was there, he picked up an emerald diadem as well, with a matching emerald manteau clasp, a pair of earrings, and an armlet. He hesitated over a pearl necklace that reminded him of Merry’s skin but decided in the end to return with her and let her choose what she’d like herself.
His second errand took a bit longer. But the power of his title—and the ducal purse—eventually triumphed.
He returned to the toll road and managed to arrive at Hawksmede at six o’clock that evening. His butler was shocked. “It’s a full three hours to London, Your Grace,” he kept saying. “The horses must have been running full out.”
“We made good time,” Trent said, handing over his hat and gloves. “I’ve given the gardeners a task that must be seen to immediately, Oswald. I’d be grateful if you’d send a couple of footmen outside to see if they can provide additional help. Where is the duchess?”
“One of the grooms drove her in the pony cart to the village, Your Grace.”
Trent took his hat back.
“I believe she is paying a call to the vicar,” Oswald called, as Trent barreled out the door.
Sure enough, he found Merry chatting with the vicar’s wife amid the crumbs of a tea cake.
Trent’s wholly unexpected appearance in the doorway made the duchess blink. For a thrilling moment, he thought Merry was about to jump up and throw herself into his arms.
But she didn’t. She was charming and friendly, but she had stopped kissing him in public.
When she fell back in love with him, he would demand it. She had to kiss him whenever they met or parted. No exceptions.
Later that evening, after they returned home, dressed for dinner, and met again in the drawing room, he scarcely bade her good evening before he presented her with the emeralds.
“They’re beautiful!” Merry cried. Her eyes lit with pleasure; she examined each piece with delight; she danced over to a glass and put them all on, even the diadem, which she wore throughout dinner.
She thanked him extravagantly, but said nothing about love. Nor did she make any witticisms about an American wearing a crown, which frankly was half the reason he had chosen that set. He thought it would make her laugh.
He couldn’t give her his second gift until it was ready. And he had made up his mind to save the diamond ring until she fell back in love.
Later that evening, they scarcely made it up the stairs before tearing off each other’s clothing. He seduced her with a feverishness that approached madness . . . but she still said nothing about love.
Afterward, he couldn’t sleep. He lay on his back, Merry tucked against him, and alternated between cold sweats at remembering how she’d looked, seemingly lifeless on Montjoy’s lawn, and hot fear at the idea that he’d lost his chance.
The injury to her brain had not diminished her desire for him, but it had erased her love, leaving affection in its place. Not love.
Who could have dreamed those words meant so much?
Not he.
The galling thing was that he knew exactly what it was that he was feeling. After all, he had never stopped loving his mother, even after he was aware of her clear preference for Cedric.
In the morning, Trent waited until after breakfast before he took Merry’s arm and asked if she might accompany him to the gardens.
She looked up at him in surprise. “The gardens? I don’t really have time, Trent. I promised Mrs. Honeydukes that—”
“I want to show you something,” he said stubbornly. Merry still looked as if she might object, so Trent was forced to kiss her until she gave in.
If she wasn’t going to kiss him in public, he would have to kiss her instead.
Outside, Merry forgot about Mrs. Honeydukes and began pointing out all the ways in which the gardens were improving.
It was a damp morning, and she clung to his arm as she picked her way down the decrepit stone walks. Trent made a mental note to get the walks repaved by the following week, no matter how many stonecutters had to be brought out from London. He refused to contemplate her falling ever again.
They walked into the greenhouse.
“What is that?” Merry gasped, staring down into a gaping hole that had replaced two old tables.
Boothby stepped forward. “Morning, Your Graces! That’s a pit,” he said, stating the obvious.
“Yes, but what are your men doing to it?”
“Lining it with tanner’s bark,” he answered.
“For the cultivation of pineapple seedlings,” Trent put in.
Merry turned to him with a gasp. “You didn’t!”
Trent grinned and turned her to face the opposite corner where a shiny black stove with a brass pineapple on its door squatted. “We’ll have to build another forcing house for plants that don’t like as much heat the way pineapples do, but Boothby seems to have it all in hand. I brought along a man from Chelsea Physic Garden who’ll get the seedlings set up as soon as the men finish with the pit.”
>
“Oh, Trent!” Merry cried, laughing and crying at the same time. “This is so wonderful!” She came up on her toes and kissed him. “You make me so very happy. I think I am the luckiest duchess in all of England.”
“And America?”
“That goes without saying,” she said, twinkling at him. “I am the only American duchess.”
Nothing about love.
He watched as Merry ran outside to talk to Boothby about pineapple seedlings. Her silence was a gash in his heart.
It wasn’t possible that a crack on the head could excise someone’s love, was it? As decisively as a surgeon removed a bad tooth?
It took a few minutes before he understood what he had to do. He couldn’t simply hand over the pineapple stove—or the emeralds, for that matter—and expect them to do the work for him.
He had to say the words himself.
Right.
He could do that.
He had felt the cursed sentence welling up in his chest in the last two days, as if it were fighting to be said. He walked outside and got rid of Boothby and his crew with a jerk of his head.
Then he led Merry back into the greenhouse, lifted her onto his favorite table, braced his arms on either side of her so she couldn’t escape, and said, bluntly, “I love you, Merry.”
Her mouth fell open. “You what?”
“I adore you.” He could hear Merry’s voice in his memory, saying the same words. He cupped her face in his hands. “I love you more than I could have imagined possible.”
“Trent, are you saying this because I hurt my head?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him.
“No. I’m saying it because it is true.” He snatched her up, burying his face in her hair. “I love you.” His voice was a husky growl. “I couldn’t stop myself, no matter how much I pretended not to feel the emotion. I pretended not to be making love to you, but I was.”
She pulled away, her eyes searching his. “Before, you preferred another word to describe that.”
“Fu—” He stopped.
The exchange she was talking about took place during their quarrel—the quarrel she had supposedly forgotten. And now he thought about it, she hadn’t gone back to calling him Jack in private, the way she had before they fought.
He stepped back and stared at her.
Shame swept through Merry like a cold wave as she met her husband’s eyes. The words he had just said went straight out of her head. Guilt and shame warred for a place in her heart.
“Merry, is there something you forgot to tell me?” Trent said in a quiet voice. “And I use the word ‘forgot’ quite deliberately.”
She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I did remember our disagreement.”
“Did you always remember it?”
“No, no! All the day of the accident I had been wishing that somehow you would forget what I had said, and we could go back to the way we were. At first, I honestly remembered nothing after our picnic in the flax field. But on the fourth day, I suddenly remembered everything.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you didn’t want to hear about love from me.” She bit her lip but kept her eyes on his. “I never felt anything like this for my other fiancés. I know you don’t believe that, but so it is. So I fibbed—no, I lied to you, but it was with the best of intentions. I only want you to be happy, and you didn’t want to hear about that—about love.”
“I’m not happy.”
“I’m sorry,” Merry whispered, her eyes falling. She started pleating a fold of her dress.
He took a step closer. “You should be.”
Surely she hadn’t ruined everything again?
“I know,” Merry said earnestly. “Trent, if I promise never, ever to—”
“Jack,” he said. “I hate it when you call me Trent.” His mouth met hers; his tongue teased hers, flirting, promising, seducing . . . loving.
By the time he raised his head, she could hardly breathe, let alone speak.
“I love you,” her husband said. Jack said those words. “Please, Merry, will you tell me that you haven’t forgotten to love me?”
She knew that tears shone in her eyes. “Is that what you thought?”
Trent’s smile was rueful, but there was real pain behind it. “Emeralds, the pineapple stove . . . I could think of nothing else to give you. You have all the flowers you could possibly wish for.”
Her duke was looking at her with an expression that seemed to fulfill every promise she had ever longed for.
“Even when I forgot our quarrel, I didn’t forget what I felt for you,” she told him.
Her hands were trapped between their bodies and she didn’t pull away from his kiss until she could feel his heart beating madly against her palms. He buried his face in her hair. “I was afraid the accident might have knocked sense into you.”
“I’ll never stop loving you,” she whispered.
“But then I realized that even if you didn’t feel it any longer, even if you had fallen out of love with me, I would never stop loving you, to the end of my days.”
A tear ran down Merry’s cheek. “Oh, Jack.”
“You just have to understand that I’m very new at this.”
“This?”
“Loving.”
He meant it, Merry could see. He was serious. She felt a deep pang in her heart at the certainty in his eyes.
“You are wrong,” she told him. “If you will forgive me for my bluntness, your mother was a monster. But you loved her anyway.”
His eyes were so dark that she could hardly read them, but with one fierce movement his mouth swooped onto hers again.
“Jack,” Merry whispered sometime later, “you don’t mind that I’m American, do you?”
“Hell no.”
“If I embarrass you by kissing you in public?”
“I am never embarrassed by you. Never. I just don’t want you to fall out of love with me, the way you did Bertie.” He pulled her so close that she could feel the hard contour of his shaft between them.
“I shall always love you,” Merry promised. “You are my one and only.”
A smile crept into his eyes.
“I never loved Bertie, nor Cedric, either. I didn’t even know what that sort of love was until I discovered it with you. I love Bess and Thaddeus, but they are my family. My love for you . . . it’s bigger than a river.” She colored. “That sounds stupid.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Trent kissed her again, almost compulsively, as if he couldn’t stop. “Mine is deeper than a tanner’s pit.”
She choked with laughter.
“Higher than—than a flax plant,” he finished, realizing that his poetic ability was as laughable as he’d always thought it would be.
One more thing was left to be done.
Trent pulled back and sank down on one knee before her, right there in the greenhouse. “Merry Pelford, would you do me the very great honor of becoming my wife?”
His wife appeared to have forgotten how to speak—a simple yes would do. She had a hand clapped over her mouth, and tears were slipping down her cheeks.
So he prompted her. “‘Deeper than a tanner’s pit’ is poetry. I’m on one knee and I have a diamond to give you. Those two things, Miss Pelford, mean that you will fall madly in love with me, and promise to marry me. Luckily for me, I can tie you to my bed if you try to resist me.”
Her hand fell from her mouth. “Are you teasing me?” Merry demanded.
“Yes,” he said instantly.
“In the middle of your marriage proposal?” Her voice rose a little.
“Yes,” he said. And then added, “You make me laugh, Merry. But do you suppose that you could answer me? A brick is cutting into my knee.”
His wife leaned forward, which put her breasts at a delicious distance from his mouth. But he kept his eyes above her chin.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Oh yes, Jack, yes, I will. I will love you, to the top of an aspen, and to the bottom of that p
it, and all the way to London and back. I’m already your wife and I shall never change my mind.”
He stood up and took her left hand in his. Then he slid a diamond on her finger that glittered in the sunlight filtering through the thick panes.
“You are my American duchess,” Trent said gruffly, his finger tracing the shape of her cheek. “You pour milk into tea at the wrong time, but you do everything else the right way. I love the way you speak. And I love what you say. I’ve never met another woman who is as fascinating.”
Merry shut her eyes to listen to what her husband was saying.
To memorize what he was saying.
His hand slid down over her breast with an affectionate pause over her nipple and then continued down the curve of her stomach.
“When you are carrying our first child,” Trent said, his voice dropping to a deeper register, “I will hope she’s a girl, because she will keep her younger brothers in line.”
Merry’s mouth curled into the biggest smile of her life. She opened her eyes.
“I’m not practiced at this, love, but I will give you everything I have. I only hope our children have your laughter and your curiosity and your gift for love.”
Another tear ran down her cheek.
He smelled like wintergreen soap and clean sweat and everything she loved most in the world. He tasted like happiness.
Sometime later, she opened her eyes again and said huskily, “I wouldn’t be your duchess, but for a rented pineapple. Do you suppose that we should send a crate of them to Mrs. Bennett, once we have harvested our first crop?”
A slow grin spread across Trent’s face. “I believe it’s time for bed,” he said conversationally.
“It’s not even time for luncheon,” she protested.
Her husband’s smile hadn’t a trace of that quiet darkness that he usually carried with him.
“That was a ducal order,” he clarified, eyes gleaming.
It was foolhardy to let him know how much she adored that commanding tone, so she just slipped from the table. He grabbed her arms. “All those things I taught you how to do in bed?”
Merry grinned. “I’m getting better, aren’t I?”