"I think he wanted us to know him, at the very least. Can't you almost feel him here? His personality shines through. He was a romantic and had a sense of humor. Gibson says he had an IQ of 160."
Riggins raised an eyebrow. "Damn. We knew he was smart."
"I know!" I nodded. "He knew what he was doing to us and forcing us into. That we could easily hate him.
"I used to think he didn't care about our opinion of him. That he was some toughened old bastard who didn't give a damn what we, or anyone, thought of him. The only legacy he cared about was the dukedom and his public reputation. Now I'm not so sure."
I hesitated, not wanting to sound silly. "I think he wants us to like him. And this is his attempt. He wants us to read his private papers. Find his journals. See how well he ran the estate. How much he loved his duchesses. Get how loyal he was. Feel for him for the tragedies he endured. And respect and love him for all of it."
I extended my arm, indicating the room. "The man who occupied this study isn't the Dead Duke we know. Nor is he the infallible man the staff talks about with so much respect and fondness. Are they wrong? Or are we?"
Riggins turned to me. "We all present different faces to different people. The face he gave us wasn't his most flattering." He took a deep breath. "Are you falling for this?" He indicated the room.
"I don't think this is faked or staged." I almost held back my opinion. "I'm willing to be open-minded and accept, like most of us, he had many facets. That he wasn't either all good or all bad. He was, however, exceptionally goal oriented. He wanted what he wanted and spared nothing to get it. We can agree on that."
Riggins' expression had been hard. It softened as he pulled me close. "Damn. I had no idea I married a woman who looked for the best in everyone."
"Would that have been a deal breaker?"
"Not if I would have known how hot the sex between us would be."
"One-track mind."
"One-track mind? It's our honeymoon. If I don't have sex on the brain now, we're in trouble."
I laughed and pulled away from him. I plopped into the Dead Duke's desk chair, spinning around, surveying his dukedom through the window, and looking over his office. "I like this room."
"Good thing. We're going to be spending a lot of time here in the next weeks." He came up behind me and massaged my neck. "You know he's still manipulating us?"
I nodded, suddenly willing to let him. If he was the man of my first impressions, then we were in trouble. But if he'd been the man the staff knew…
Riggins bent down and lifted the hair off my neck, kissing me near my ear. "Where do we begin, duchess?"
Chapter 8
Haley
And so our search began for Sid's cure and the things that could bring this wonderful dream marriage to an end. I was working at cross-purposes. I didn't want to lose Riggins. Ever. And he…
He was passionate. And romantic. He made love to me everywhere. Sometimes he joked that he wanted to make love to me in every room in the castle.
I'd laughed. "There are over two hundred of them!"
"So? What are you saying?" He got that sexy glint in his eyes. There was nothing stopping him.
Two hundred rooms. Even at twice a day. One hundred days of Haley—was that going to be my epitaph? Anne Boleyn got a thousand days and I only got a tenth of that?
I had to savor every one.
Riggins had promised me two weeks away from the world for our honeymoon. Two weeks at Witham House.
Our days fell into a happy pattern—breakfast in bed, make love, comb the Dead Duke's study for clues, meetings about the estate, rambling over the property and exploring the castle and gardens, dinner, teatime, tea, tea, more tea, always tea, pore over the library, fall into bed and make love again. Repeat the next day.
We worked on our British English, laughing over the differences.
"Death to all articles!" Riggins said to me. "No one here goes to the hospital. They go to hospital. They go on holiday. Not on a vacation."
I laughed. "Exactly. And yet they take the M-5. We just jump on I-5, no the. And speaking of differences, I need to go into the village and see the chemist about refilling my one of my prescriptions. Will you come with me? We could have a fun day poking around the shops and town."
He raised an eyebrow. "Can't you send Gibson? We'll be a curiosity."
"You need to get out and meet our neighbors, my darling duke. We can't hole up in this castle forever. In fact, we should have an old-fashioned open house and invite the village people in to meet us."
The village was just behind the castle wall to the rear behind the stables. The land outside the castle walls on the other three sides was all part of the estate for thousands of acres.
He mulled my suggestion over. "Plan something for summer." He paused. "Just be flexible."
What did that mean? Be ready to cancel it if he found a way out?
And so we spent a pleasant afternoon together tooling around the village. We were a curiosity. That was true. But we managed to have the paparazzi snap our picture only about a hundred times or so by actually posing for them, and then enjoyed ourselves in relative peace.
My happiness would have been complete if only Riggins had professed his love. I thought he loved me. He acted like a man in love. Or maybe I was only being optimistic and naïve. Sometimes the words seemed to hover on the edge of his lips. Then he'd bite them back.
I'd have been ecstatic if I didn't have to hide my growing love for him. Or if the gap in our differences of opinion about the Dead Duke and the estate weren't widening daily. Where Riggins saw only work and money flying out the window, I saw a life's calling. A mission to preserve history, including family history, and an institution that may have been dying but was so quintessentially English that it seemed worth preserving.
Where he still saw a manipulating old man, I saw a more detailed picture of the Dead Duke emerge. The more I saw, the more I liked him.
The two weeks of our honeymoon flew by. And we'd barely made love in a dozen rooms. No one ever walked in on us. So I assumed Riggins paid the staff off to stay away at appointed times. We also still had thousands of acres to explore, including the hedge maze and poison garden.
Riggins had been trying to convince me to go home with him. I wanted to. Badly. But I was convinced Sid and our interests were better served by me staying. Although she'd rebounded after our weekend at Wareswood, the brief return of her symptoms had scared me. I hadn't finished my work here. I wouldn't be finished until I found what I'd come for.
"I thought coming back to Seattle with me was the plan all along?" Riggins said.
"It was. But we're no closer to finding a cure for Sid or a way to foil the Dead Duke's hold on us than we were when we arrived. If I stay, and don't have you distracting me, I can devote all day to looking through the Dead Duke's paperwork."
"I distract you?" He grinned sexily.
"You know you do." I kissed him. "Come back for our one-month anniversary."
"I don't know if I can wait that long. I'll miss you." His voice broke with emotion.
I believed him. "I'll miss you, too."
It was settled. I'd stay.
The day before Riggins was scheduled to fly out, we slept late.
"You just got adjusted to castle time and now you're going to be off schedule in Seattle, poor baby," I teased.
"Those are the breaks," he said. "I'm used to traveling and being jetlagged."
"So? How are we spending the last day of our honeymoon?" I cuddled up next to him.
"I have something special planned. Dress for walking. I thought we'd take in more of the estate."
Which was how I found myself walking hand in hand with him outside the castle wall, past the maze, down the road, and into the gardens. The grounds had been landscaped by good old Capability Brown. He'd been a busy man in his day. It seemed like he'd designed the grounds of every estate in England.
The weather had cooperated. It was nearly March
, but surprisingly clear and warm.
"Where are we going?" I asked Riggins.
"The poison garden."
I stared at him. "Why?"
"Because it's exciting and mysterious."
"And crazy." I shook my head. "Did dukes have food tasters like kings did? Whether they did or didn't, is it just me, or is it crazy to grow poisons right on the grounds? That's like spitting in temptation's eyes, isn't it? Here, heir of mine, poison your duke and take all. Pick your poison—fast-acting or slow. Obvious or subtle."
Riggins laughed as he stopped in front a locked wrought iron gate. The poison garden was clearly labeled, complete with a skull and crossbones sign hanging ominously on the gate like a Halloween decoration.
"Riggins, all this talk of poison just made me think of something. If you die now, with no heirs, the title dies out and goes extinct, but what happens to the castle and real estate? Who inherits it? Me, perhaps?" I batted my eyes at him. But my question was serious.
"I don't think it's in my best interests to answer that." He grinned.
"Well, if it's not me, my motivation for becoming a world-class poisoner dwindles to zero." I put on a bright face. "Does that mean it is me?"
"I talked to Thorne. If I die without an heir, I can leave the estate to anyone I like."
"And you like me a lot, right?" I batted my eyes again.
He shook his head. "You and the stable cats."
I pouted jokingly. "I really rank." I bumped him with my shoulder. "If you'd been nicer, I might have literally picked your garden-variety poison. Now you'll just have to suffer duchess' choice."
"You're a cruel woman."
"Seriously. Who inherits?"
"I haven't decided what to do with it."
"Oh."
"Hey." He took my chin and tipped my face to his. "Let's not kill the mood."
"No. Definitely not." But I felt unsettled.
"You and Sid will be taken care of, no matter what. Okay?"
I nodded and put on a smile for his benefit. I didn't want to ruin our last hours together. But the mood had been dampened.
He kissed me and pulled a set of keys out of his pocket as he read a posted set of rules for the garden, "No touching; no tasting; no smelling."
"No funning. What are we? Babies? Hands in pockets, children." I laughed. "But seriously—who would use the taste test in a poison garden?
"'Here, darling, just try a bite of this Death Cap mushroom. It's delicious. Don't worry. A mere half will kill you. But if you only taste it…'" I shook my head. "You shouldn't even touch those crazy mushrooms."
Riggins unlocked the gate and took my hand, pulling me in, and locking the gate behind us. "The garden's not at its most spectacular in late winter/early spring. But Bird, the gamekeeper, still recommended seeing it.
"We'll come back in summer. I just couldn't resist seeing something so sinister sounding. Since you wouldn't go into the Ghost Tower with me—"
"Well, who would?"
He gave me a suggestive look. "It's got many of the two hundred rooms—"
"No." I shook my head. "I'm not making love in front of a voyeuristic ghost. If you want company in there, you'll have to call your ghost-busting friend Lazer."
Riggins rolled his eyes. "Chicken."
I shrugged. "I'm here in the poison garden, aren't I?" I shuddered with fake fear. "It feels dangerous just being here."
"Wait." I stopped in front of a large bush along the gravel path. "Is that a common rhododendron? We have a ton of those in our garden at home. They're, like, ubiquitous back home. Almost as bad as blackberry bushes. Rhodies are about as deadly as kittens."
"Eat enough of one and it could kill you." He laughed.
"Eat enough of anything and it could kill you. Drink enough water and you could die. But you have to be trying to kill yourself in a completely silly way." I took his arm again. "How deep into the garden are we going?"
"Very deep." His voice was full of innuendo.
"Then I'd better take a very deep breath."
"Why?" He looked genuinely puzzled.
"Rule number three—no smelling." I squeezed his arm. "Way to make a girl breathless, Duke."
He grinned and playfully squeezed me. "You can breathe, just don't smell."
"Stop it!" I laughed and fended him off. "I'm not taking any chances in this dangerous garden. You're going to kill me. You're going to kill us both."
He caught me and kissed me again. "Come on. There's a spot in the garden I want to show you."
The garden was beautifully laid out and arranged. Even in this drab time of year it had spots of color and was peaceful and pretty. We poked along the paths, reading the little signs with plant names. There was foxglove, also known as digitalis, which was used in heart medicine and could be lethal. Opium poppies, which weren't in bloom, obviously, and were illegal in the States. Black cohosh. And all manner of different plants. Including clover, which popped up uninvited. I imagined the gardeners were constantly fighting it.
Riggins seemed eager as he pulled me along the path.
"Is that stinging nettle?" I pointed to a plant along the path. I'd had an unfortunate incident with one at the house. It was growing in one of our planters and I reached in with bare hands to pull it out before I realized what it was. It was aptly named, for sure. "We have that at home, too. Maybe I should have brought gardening gloves. Where are we going?" I laughed as we broke nearly into a run. "What's the rush?"
"I want to show you something."
We came to a spot in the garden full of spring blooms, flowering trees, and flowering early spring bushes bursting with yellows, whites, pinks, and reds.
"Oh." I stopped short, breathless from being with him. "It's like a fairy garden. It's beautiful." I bit my lip to keep from laughing. "But highly deadly, I assume." I raised an eyebrow.
"Naturally. Extremely dangerous if you get off the path." He took me by the shoulders and turned me around. "Look that way. What do you see?"
"The castle!"
It sat proud and tall on the hill above us, looking like something out of a fairytale.
Riggins pulled me close. "When I was seventeen I saw this porno flick about the lord of a castle who had sex with a beautiful maid in the garden."
"Riggins!" I said, pretending to be scandalized as he looked at me lustily. "I'm no maid."
"That you're not." He grinned and ignored me, his breath hot on my hair as he whispered, "Once I became duke and saw this place, I couldn't get the fantasy out of my head. You and me making love in my garden beneath the nose of my castle." He lifted my hair off my neck and nuzzled into me, sucking my neck roughly as if he wanted to brand me.
"You want to act out a porno—"
"I want to have sex with you in the great outdoors." He slid his hands beneath my jacket and T-shirt until they were hot and possessive against my skin. He held me as if he'd never let me go.
I shivered, but it wasn't from cold. And pressed my hands against his chest, feeling his heart beat through his layers of clothes and coat. In that moment, it was mine and beat for me, if only temporarily. And I was damn well going to enjoy it.
I lifted my face to his. He kissed me urgently while I pressed tight against him, feeling his dick hard in his jeans, letting him slide a knee between my legs and rub against me until my panties were wet. And I was aching with desire, too.
"What if someone sees?" My voice went hoarse with desire. But it was less a protest than begging him to act.
"What if they do?" His breath was coming fast. He unzipped my jeans and slid his fingers into my panties and then into me. "You're already ready for me, duchess."
I was. I ached for him as I slid his zipper down and reached into his jeans for him. He was hard. Long. Pulsing.
He unzipped my coat and sucked my nipples through my T-shirt until I groaned with pleasure. "Stop teasing me."
"I thought you'd never ask." He picked me up and laid me on my back in the damp grass. I scrambled to
get his dick out of his jeans as he pulled my jeans down over my hips.
Mine, I thought. For now he's my duke, my man, my husband.
Overhead the trees were a thick canopy of pink blossoms and blue sky peeking through. The tip of him was wet and slick. As a gentle breeze kicked up, pink petals drifted down on us, and Riggins speared into me, grinding my bare butt and back into the tender grass dotted with dandelions.
With my jeans around my knees, I couldn't lock my legs around him like we liked. Couldn't rock myself against him and squeeze him to me. I had to arch up instead, ceding control to him as he drove into me, holding me tight around the waist to keep me from sliding with each thrust. The breeze carried the gentle scent of the flowers as well as petals.
There we were. Two animals rutting in the orchard of flowering trees. With each powerful thrust, he was more and more mine. Let me be the one to fulfill his teenage fantasy. Let me be the duchess he'd always remember, especially in spring when the trees bloomed.
I held him tight. I could feel the tension build in his arms and back while he pushed me closer and closer to the edge of pleasure. I was waiting for him, trying to match him.
And then I couldn't hold on any longer. I cried out, letting the breeze carry his name and the expression of my pleasure with it.
He grunted and held me tight. I held him as he caught up to me, shuddered, and came.
"Wow." He rested his sweaty forehead against mine. "I l—"
My heart stopped with his words. I felt like I needed a dose of that digitalis. I held my breath, waiting for more. Waiting for the words I was desperate to hear.
"I'll leave tomorrow a happy man." His head was still pressed against mine.
I couldn't see his eyes. He'd caught himself and changed what he was going to say. If only I could have seen his expression.
"Wow is right." I stared up past him at the trees overhead as another shower of petals rained down on us. "And exceptionally dangerous. I think those might be flowering cherries. Everyone knows cherry pits contain cyanide. Cyanide is lethal."
My heart felt brittle, fragile with hope, and desperate for words I might never hear.