Who cared if she was the “ugly duchess,” as long as James looked at her as if she were beautiful beyond words?
She found herself humming that old song as Amélie buttoned her morning gown. And she couldn’t stop smiling at the mirror as her maid wound all her heavy hair in an elaborate arrangement. Before her betrothal, she had thought that she’d crop all her hair off in one of those daring new cuts, but not now. Not now that she knew how much James loved it. In the middle of the night he had lit candles around the bed, and then played with her hair. No. She would never cut her hair.
She looked up and met her maid’s eyes in the mirror.
“I am just so glad to see you happy, my lady,” Amélie said, her French accent lending charm to her sincerity. “We all are. Those bâtards who named you so . . . they should be beaten. But his lordship made it all better. As a husband should.”
Amélie’s smile was purely wicked collusion.
“He did,” Theo said, smiling in return. “He did. The nickname still stings, I have to admit. But being married means that only one person’s opinion matters, doesn’t it?”
“I have never been married,” Amélie said. “But I do think so. Most men are imbéciles, but his lordship, he has always known you were beautiful. He watched you during meals, that is what Mr. Cramble said. And he could not take his eyes off your bosom.”
“That’s what he told me! I cannot believe I never noticed it when Cramble did.”
“You are young in the ways of men and women,” her maid said wisely.
Theo threw her a mock glare. “And are you pretending that you’re old, Amélie? Because we both know you turned eighteen a week after I turned seventeen.”
“Je suis française,” Amélie said with smug exactitude. “Here is the scarf you wanted, my lady.”
“Watch this!” Theo picked up the pair of miniature scissors that Amélie used to trim her fingernails and briskly cut the scarf in two.
Amélie gave a shriek. “Indian silk!”
Theo shook out the half square of heavy silk. “It will make all the difference to this insipid gown.” With one sharp wrench she pulled out the lace fichu tucked into her bodice and replaced it with the scarf. It flashed raspberry red against the almond-colored muslin of her gown.
She turned to the mirror again. “I like it,” Amélie said. She reached out and deftly rearranged the silk. “I will pin it here and here, my lady.”
“It draws attention to my bosom,” Theo said, wondering if James would notice.
“That should hold,” Amélie said, stepping back a moment later. “I can sew it in later.”
“I don’t think I’ll leave the house today,” Theo said. It was one thing to tell herself that James’s opinion was all that mattered. It was another to walk down Bond Street with all those etchings staring her in the face.
“Let the excitement fade,” Amélie said, nodding. “By next week, there will be some other poor soul under attack.”
“Perhaps I’ll see if my husband would like to go to Staffordshire, to Ryburn House.” Suddenly she was quite sure that James would go wherever she went. She could feel a pink flush rising in her cheeks, but she kept her voice steady. “In fact, if you could pack my clothing, Amélie, I believe we will pay a visit to the country, perhaps for as long as a month.”
“You are leaving London for the rest of the season?”
“Do you think I am being a coward?”
“Never!” Amélie said. “But there might be even more talk if you retire to the country, my lady. Because they will think you are afraid, you see.”
“We can return for the Elston ball,” Theo decided, thinking aloud. “By then my new wardrobe will have been delivered; Cramble can send it to the country and we’ll have the final fittings there.”
She stood up and took a last look at the mirror. The dress was still altogether too virginal, but the jarring touch of raspberry helped turn it to something with a claim to style.
Her heart beat a little rhythm at the idea of seeing James again. Though by now he was likely out of the house, on a horse, or boxing at Gentleman Jackson’s. He had a ferocious amount of energy and couldn’t be kept indoors or he started to look tormented, like a caged tiger.
She’d have to keep that in mind, she thought idly, her fingers trailing down the polished banister as she descended the stairs. Her husband needed regular exercise. Rather like having a dog.
Though James was far from a pet. There was something wild and undomesticated about him, something that was unlike any other aristocrat she’d met. The most she could hope for was to lure him to her.
It wasn’t quite time for luncheon. If James was home, he was probably in the study. A thrill of feminine power went through her. Perhaps he had decided to stay home, at least until he saw her. Perhaps they could go riding in Hyde Park. Now that they were married, she really should become a better rider.
But not until she could wear a charming riding habit of her own design, with braided trim, epaulets, and military flare.
Twelve
Her husband strode through the library doorway the moment Theo reached the bottom of the stairs. His face was dark with rage—but at the sight of her, it cleared, though his eyes remained troubled.
“Hello,” she said, feeling acutely self-conscious.
He said nothing, just grabbed her hands and walked backwards into the library. He smelled faintly of leather and a high wind.
“You’ve been out for a ride,” she said a short time later, when they stopped kissing for a moment.
“God, I’m mad for you,” he whispered in her ear, ignoring her comment altogether. “But I’m surprised you’re able to walk. We shouldn’t have done it, that last time.”
“I wanted you,” she said against his lips. “I want you now.”
“You smell so sweet, like a daisy.”
“You simply must stop calling me that! I insist on being addressed as Theo.”
He had backed her against the wall and a hand was now wrapped around her breast. “I can’t,” he said, rather thickly.
“Why not?”
“Because you may be Theo when we’re at breakfast, or at a play or something, but when I’m holding you like this, you’re my Daisy.” He took her mouth again and Theo melted against him, thoughts fading before the onslaught of his mouth and his hands and the arrogant strength of his body against hers.
“Can’t do this,” James said hoarsely. “You’re too sore. We’re only kissing.” He guided her over to the sofa on the far side of the room and began plucking her hairpins, destroying all of Amélie’s work in seconds. He was unweaving a braid that had taken Amélie a good ten minutes to concoct. “Couldn’t you just leave your hair down when you’re at home?”
Theo giggled. “Can you imagine Cramble’s face if I begin wandering about the house with my hair around my shoulders?”
James’s face loomed over hers, and he kissed her again, hard and dominant. “What if, as your husband,” he growled, “I ordered you to?”
Theo felt a shiver go all the way to her toes. When James got that look, that possessive, tigerlike look, she felt the most embarrassing desire to simply melt into him and do whatever he demanded.
“I’m sorry,” she said, tracing the line of his full bottom lip with her fingers, “but no one can ever dictate how I look or dress again. I made that promise to myself five years ago, when Mama began trying to compensate for my face by embellishing my gowns with frills and ruffles.”
James frowned.
“She can’t bring herself to admit it, but she wanted to make sure that everyone knew I was a girl,” Theo explained.
He had discovered the precariously attached scrap of raspberry silk and pulled it out without further ado. Without a fichu, her bodice showed a great deal of cleavage. “She thought you didn’t look enough like a girl,” he said, sounding stunned. He bent his head and licked a wet, warm path over the curve of her breast.
Then he reared up again. “What
if, as your husband, I ordered you to leave off your drawers?”
She laughed at him, loving the way he was testing the limits of his power. “That would depend on how I felt about you at that moment.”
“And how do you feel about me at this moment?” he demanded.
She arched up, just enough so that she could run her tongue along that sweet lower lip of his. “What would you do if I ordered you to do something?”
His lips parted, and he took a deep breath. “Whatever you want,” he said, his voice fervent. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Then I’d like you to sit quite still,” she said, twisting about and tumbling off the sofa.
James sat obediently. His eyes were black with excitement. “I am yours to command, my lady.”
“Pull down your breeches,” she said, her blood racing.
Without blinking, James stood up and did exactly as she demanded.
Theo stayed on her knees and pointed back to the sofa. He sat down. His organ seemed, if possible, even bigger than it had the night before. At the very sight of it, a little warning twinge came from Theo’s private place.
“All the time you were kissing me last night,” she said, reaching out to caress him, “all I could think about was what it would be like to kiss you.”
“Oh Lord,” James whispered. “I won’t survive it. I won’t.”
“I did,” Theo said, throwing him a saucy smile. She bent over and tasted him.
James let out a hoarse sound and Theo dipped her head a little lower, exploring the velvety feeling of him.
It must have been his groan that prevented her hearing the sound of the door opening. Or perhaps it was the dizzying sense of power Theo felt.
But a second later the sound filtered into her head. She leapt to her feet, met the eyes of her father-in-law, and fled in the opposite direction, straight through the closest door, which led into the morning room. She slammed the door and leaned back against it, her heart pounding as if she’d run from an assailant.
She felt sick. The duke had seen . . . He’d seen everything. He’d seen her there, bending over James’s lap.
“Oh God.” Her knees were too weak to support her; she slid down until she was sitting on the floor. Through the door, she heard the rumble of James’s voice as he spoke, but the words were indecipherable. The sound reminded her, with sickening vividness, of how he had been sitting before her, breeches around his ankles, and she buried her face in her hands.
Did it have to be the duke? Hadn’t she suffered enough humiliation in the last few days? Would it have been worse, though, if a footman had interrupted them? She could have dismissed a footman. No, she would never turn out a person for being unlucky enough to see her behave like a doxy.
They’d have to retire to the country for the next month. Or year.
The muffled sound changed pitch; her father-in-law was speaking.
Shifting to the side, she stretched up and opened the door slightly. If he was calling her a brazen slut, she might as well know the worst.
But he was laughing.
Laughing!
Her heart thudded a panic-stricken rhythm in her throat. Was laughter better than scorn? Or worse? It felt better. Maybe this sort of thing happened often to newlyweds. After all, she and James could have been caught actually making love. And if she hadn’t been so sore, they probably would have been. Theo turned her ear to the crack of the open door.
“I returned to London because I heard about the ugly duchess business,” the duke was saying. “Thought you’d want me to threaten a few reporters, maybe even shut down one of those scandal rags. But it looks as if you’ve been too busy to worry. Who cares if she’s ugly? Obviously it makes her more grateful, huh? I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw she was servicing you as eagerly as any tavern wench might for tuppence.”
Theo’s head dropped forward onto her knees. What did she expect from the duke? Her mother had declared him a coarse fool years ago, and she was obviously right.
“In fact, it’s because she’s ugly,” the duke continued. “You could never get a proper lady on her knees like that—”
“Silence!” James snapped.
Thank God he was saying something, Theo thought numbly.
“I don’t care for your tone,” his father responded, instantly switching to his characteristic angry bluster.
“You are not allowed to ever say anything about my wife,” James replied. His voice, in contrast with his father’s, was icy cold, controlled, and yet deeply dangerous.
Theo took a shuddering breath. At least James was defending her.
The duke seemed not to notice the threat in his son’s voice. “I’ll say anything I want!” he bellowed. “I picked the girl out for you, didn’t I?”
“You did not!”
“I did! You didn’t want to marry her, but I expect you’re glad now. I told you, didn’t I? I told you they were all alike in the dark.”
“I’m going to kill you,” James stated. Years of experience with James’s temper told Theo that his self-control was reaching its limit. He hated it when that happened, when his shouting resembled that of his father.
But as the duke’s words—I picked the girl out for you, didn’t I?—came into her consciousness, she stopped thinking about James. What?
“I may not have had your marriage in mind at the time,” the duke was saying. “I may not have thought of it in precisely that way—”
“While you were embezzling her inheritance!” James roared. With this, Theo realized two things simultaneously: the first was that James’s self-control had finally snapped . . . and the second was the significance of what he had just said. About embezzlement. It couldn’t be true. Could it be true?
“I only borrowed from it,” the duke said, sounding pained. “You needn’t cast such an ugly light on it. After all, look what I’ve done for you. Got you a wife so grateful that she’ll do you in the broad daylight, when Cramble might have walked in any moment. I apologized for her looks when I forced you to propose, but I take all that back now. I never heard of a lady doing such a thing. Never. You’ll save a fortune on mistresses. Just blow out the candles first.”
Theo’s breath was coming in little sobs. Her entire world was toppling, falling about her ears. The duke had forced James to marry her. He had apologized to James for how ugly she was. She had done something that no lady would do, though she hadn’t known it. Still, she did know that intimacies belong only in the bedchamber. Even the servants knew that.
“Do not say a word about my wife,” James shouted. “Damn you!” Rage boiled in his voice now, but Theo didn’t care. He wasn’t denying it.
He wasn’t denying any of it.
The duke—her late father’s closest friend—had embezzled her dowry. Mr. Reede, the estate manager, had to have known that when they were talking the day before. James knew. James knew the entire time. He had sat there and talked about how they could pay the duke’s debts from her inheritance, and the entire time he knew that his father had already stolen whatever money he wished from it.
Her mind spun, putting it all together. She had never seen James drunk. But when he was foxed at the Prince of Wales’s musicale . . . he must have had to drink deeply so that he would have the courage to propose to someone like her.
In the weeks and years to come, when she looked back she identified that as the precise moment when her heart broke in two. The moment that separated Daisy from Theo, the time Before, from the time After.
In the time Before, she had faith. She had love.
In the time After . . . she had the truth.
Thirteen
In the library, James looked up and saw the door to the morning room ajar. He flinched, looked closer, saw a flash of yellow near the floor. Daisy had heard. She’d heard everything.
James jerked his eyes away from the door and turned back to his father.
His stupid, contemptible father.
“I don’t want to see yo
u again.” He felt his throat closing. “She heard you. She heard you. You ass.”
“Well, I said nothing that isn’t true,” the duke said, instantly defensive, swiveling to look at the door.
“She will never forgive me,” James said, knowing it in his bones.
“Given what I saw—”
James bared his teeth, and his father shut his mouth. “We had a chance, you know. Even after the way it happened.”
“I’ve no doubt that she’ll be tetchy,” Ashbrook said. He lowered his voice and added conspiratorially, “Diamonds. It always worked with your mother. Helped us rub along together for years.”
James had stopped listening. “I shall spend my life trying to—to make up for it.” For the first time in years, he wanted his mother. He hadn’t felt a wash of fear like this since she lay dying.
“You’d better leave,” he said now. “Find somewhere else to live. I think that we’re probably done with the pretense that there’s any true feeling between us.”
“You are my only son,” the duke said. “My son. Of course there’s feeling between us.”
“The kinship means nothing,” James said, a terrible feeling of fury and misery swelling in his heart. “I am nothing to you, and Daisy is nothing to you. We are just people you walk by in the hallway, people you use when you need us and then throw away.”
His father’s eyes narrowed. “You’re hardly the victim here!” he said, voice rising. “You’re the one who threw yourself at the girl. No reason for you to whine.”
“I betrayed her—my wife—in order to save you.”
“You didn’t do it for that,” the duke said. “You did it to save your estate and shore up the title. You could have told me to go to blazes, but you didn’t. I thought you’d go all moral and tell me to go to the devil. But you turned out not to be the sticker you pretend to be. We’re not so different.”
James’s fists were clenched. He couldn’t strike his father.
“In fact,” Ashbrook went on, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and don’t you forget it. Your mother didn’t fool herself that I was a perfect man, but we were married, and that was the end of it.” His lip curled. “There’s one way that we are different, though: I’m no whiner. I may have been surprised when you went through with it, but I’m not surprised you’re crying about the results. Be a man, for God’s sake. You’re an embarrassment. You’ve always been an embarrassment, with all that singing. I blame it on your mother.”