An American Duchess (11 page)

 9 

AT THE GARAGE

Damn English dinners.

Nigel had no time to speak to Zoe alone.

He did, however, have time to meet a “charming” girl his grandmother had invited to dinner. During cocktails in the drawing room, Grandmama dragged the tall, graceful, dark-haired girl to him and made the introduction. “Miss Elizabeth Strutt. Of the shipping Strutts. Her mother and your mother were grand friends at school. Perhaps you might play for us later, Miss Strutt. It is so rare girls even play pianoforte so well. They all seem to think they should be going to university.”

Nigel almost shook his head. In three sentences Grandmama had outlined the girl’s attributes: wealth, noble bloodlines and the fact the girl had been raised to be an old-fashioned lady.

He bowed over Miss Strutt’s hand. At least Grandmama had the decency to move away.

The girl was the same age as Zoe. Her hair was waved and drawn back into a chignon. She wore a fashionable dress, but one of dark blue, much more sedate than Zoe’s short-skirted one of dramatic black, covered with thousands of beads. Or the beautiful rose silk dress that Julia wore. Come to think of it, she looked a lot like his former fiancée, Mary.

“Sorry,” Elizabeth Strutt said, in a cool, jaded voice that reminded him of Zoe. “They’re pushing me at you in hopes of an engagement. Sadly, I am one of those girls who wanted to go to university.”

“What do you intend to study?” he inquired.

Her brows went up. He had just politely told her there was no chance of an engagement.

“What if I told you I am still open to the possibilities?”

Nigel glanced across the room. Sebastian was talking to Zoe, but his brother kept sneaking looks at his friend John Ransome. Standing with her mother, Zoe stole glances at where he and Elizabeth stood. Their gazes met, and then they both turned awkwardly away. Then he looked at her again almost instantly.

What was she thinking? That he was a cad for having ravished her and offered her nothing?

He’d done something unpardonable to her—he’d taken her innocence and not made it clear what he intended to do. There could be a child.

He would have damn well offered her marriage if she hadn’t started her plane’s engine and coasted away.

His hand almost shattered his glass. He needed to talk to her. He wanted to grab her and drag her from the room. He couldn’t do that. Not in front of guests and his family.

“Who is she?” Miss Strutt drawled.

The woman he had to marry.
“My brother’s fiancée.”

“I should have guessed she is the rich American. It is quite obvious she is not one of us.”

No, she wasn’t. Zoe was something different and impossible to understand. She had upheaved his life from the moment she’d appeared in the road outside Brideswell.

Now he was going to be living with her night and day. He would look across from her at breakfast. Go to her bedroom at night. Join her for marital visits.

And he didn’t understand anything about her. No woman he knew would have given up her innocence, not without securing a marriage proposal first.

He did not know what Zoe Gifford wanted from him. But he knew what he had to give her.

Miss Strutt was speaking to him, but he could not focus on a word. In the same way, he had no idea what he ate during dinner. After the women left the dining room, he waited ten frustrating minutes when he muttered answers to political questions he didn’t even hear, then pushed back his chair. “I suggest we rejoin the women.”

He saw surprised looks on the faces of his male guests. There hadn’t been enough time to finish cigars. But he damn well didn’t care. He almost sprinted to the drawing room. And when he burst in, he looked for Zoe. But she was gone.

Grandmama made a beeline for him, her walking stick hastily smacking the carpet.

“Where is—” he caught himself “—Miss Gifford?”

The dowager looked around, rather like an owl. “I have no idea. Why are you concerned about your brother’s fiancée? You should be concerned about your own.”

The problem was his brother’s fiancée was the woman who must become
his
fiancée. Then he blinked. “What fiancée?”

“Miss Strutt will be your intended, as soon as you ask her. I have been assured by her mother that she will accept. We can have the whole matter taken care of in mere days, Nigel.”

Miss Strutt was across the room, with his mother and Julia.

“I just met the girl hours ago.”

Grandmama hit him on the forearm with her lorgnette. “Nigel, in this day and age, this is the best we can hope to do. She is an heiress. She is granddaughter to an earl on her mother’s side. The girl is pleasing to the eye and polite. For an entire dinner she didn’t argue with you or insist on discussing the War or women’s rights.”

“She didn’t?” He couldn’t remember what the woman had talked about.

Grandmama rapped him on the forearm harder. “Duty is the only thing we have, Nigel. The only thing that will keep us safe.”

“It’s too late. I can’t marry her.”

His grandmother let her lorgnette fall to her side. “Nigel, what in heaven’s name are you talking about?”

“You do not want to know. And I don’t want to discuss it. Suffice to say, I am going to get married. But not to Elizabeth Strutt.”

* * *

Zoe had been dragged upstairs by a servant claiming her mother had fallen ill, but the minute she’d closed Mother’s door, her mother whirled around. “That girl intends to grab the duke as quick as she can.”

“What girl?”

“Miss Strutt! Who else?”

Zoe’s stomach felt as if it had dropped off the Woolworth Building. Her mother couldn’t possibly know what had happened between her and Nigel. She prayed Mother did not know.

“I can see you’re changing your mind. I’ve watched you watch the duke. You couldn’t take your eyes off him tonight at dinner. What we have to do is make sure you get in there first.”

When Mother wanted to arrange her life, Mother left all her fluttering behind and became more forceful than a titan of business. “Mother, I’m engaged to Sebastian.”

“That, Zoe, is irrelevant.”

She hardly thought so. And what was she going to do? She couldn’t marry Sebastian now. Mother was right. All through dinner, she’d stolen glances at Nigel. Each time she did it, he tilted his head toward her as if her gaze was a magnet. She had to fight to tear her gaze away.

All through dinner all she’d wanted to do was crawl across the table, jump on Nigel and get all sweaty and excited while she made him turn to steam all over again.

This was like having a fever. And it was close to making her delirious.

Was she in love with Nigel? Or was this just lust? And what if there was a baby? She’d been so busy grasping at life and excitement, she hadn’t thought about that.

“Are you in love with the duke?”

Mother’s words rang in her head like an accusation. But she wanted to be honest and blunt—it was what you should do now. Stop lying. Stop hiding. Just tell the truth. “I don’t know, Mother. I think I might be.”

Or I’m in lust with him. Really, really intense lust. The kind of lust that makes you do crazy, crazy things.

“Well, then you can’t marry his brother. If you marry and divorce Sebastian Hazelton, you can
never
have the duke. It’s unlawful for a man to marry the wife of his brother, if she’s divorced his brother, during the lifetime of his brother. I sent a telegram to our lawyers to check.” Zoe was startled. Mother had asked lawyers about this?

Nigel had changed. He had been awfully passionate with her. And she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She’d felt happy when she’d loved Richmond. She didn’t feel exactly happy about loving Nigel. She felt all mixed up. “Maybe I’m not in love with Nigel—I mean Langford.”

“Zoe, please. I’m your mother and I know you love this man. You can’t marry someone when you are in love with his brother.” Mother shooed her toward the door. “I feel much better now, Zoe. Now, go downstairs and ensure that Strutt creature doesn’t get her hooks into him.”

Zoe rolled her eyes, but she returned to the drawing room. Nigel was in the corner, speaking in a low voice to Miss Strutt.

It made her heart ache to see them together.

In the opposite corner, Sebastian laughed at something Captain Ransome said. Then Ransome took Sebastian’s coffee cup and went to the urn to refill it.

It would be easiest to just quietly say her piece now. But the dowager was within earshot. She might be standing with the Reverend Wesley, but her head was cocked toward Sebastian. At the same time, her gaze was fixed on Nigel and Miss Strutt. Elizabeth Strutt had been going on about the past—hunts and balls she remembered from before the War. Her strategy was apparently to win Nigel by implying she would act as if they were living in 1912, not 1922.

Zoe thought that should be a perfect strategy to snare Nigel, that it was obvious they made the perfect couple, but he looked agitated by the conversation.

If she couldn’t have Nigel—if he was falling under the spell of a woman from his world—why should she end her engagement?

But she walked up to Sebastian. He lifted her hand to his lips and gave her a smoldering look. Why didn’t the man she’d made love with do this? Kiss her hand. Gaze at her as if she were the only thing in the world worth looking at.

Sebastian claimed he wanted a real marriage—and she knew she couldn’t stand up with him in a church, even to go through with a fake one. “Sebastian, something has happened. Things have changed. I need to speak to you alone tonight.”

“My darling, any other night, I would be delighted to slip away to meet you. But not tonight.”

“Why not tonight?” She wanted this business dealt with. “You have other plans for the middle of the night?” She lifted her brow.

“Actually, I do. I’m...meeting a friend of mine at the pub in Brideswell-Upon-Lovey.”

“It’s about our engagement. Sebastian, I have to—”

“Zoe, we’ll talk tonight. I won’t be back late. We can meet at midnight. Outside, by the garage. It should be warm tonight.”

With that much time maybe she could talk herself out of this crazy need she had to break off her engagement. Maybe she could convince herself she had to go through with it.

And as for the duke—engrossed in conversation with Miss Strutt—he could go jump in Brideswell’s frosty lake.

Zoe noticed the dowager take a discreet step back to listen in. “All right,” she said. “Midnight. Sharp.”

* * *

But once Sebastian left, Zoe had a better idea. She assumed he was walking to the garage. He must be intending to drive to the pub, then return to meet her. She would catch him there before he left and get this business sorted right away.

As she hurried down to the garage, she was haunted by her mother’s warning. If she married Sebastian, she’d lose Nigel essentially forever.

She reached the garage. A wooden building, much more modern than the stone stables, had been put up for the automobiles.

Sometimes the chauffeur worked there at night, but tonight there was no light burning inside. A figure came out of the shadows beside the garage door. He quickly darted inside and closed the door behind him. It wasn’t Sebastian—in moonlight, Sebastian’s pale hair would glow like silver.

This man was dark. Nigel?

He was all alone in the garage and all she had to do was walk right in. They could do just what they’d done in the airplane, but this time stretched out in the backseat of a car.

A jolt of desire shot through her that almost brought her to her knees. Well, maybe they couldn’t do that, since she’d been careless about pregnancy before. But they could do other things. She slid the door open a few inches. She was about to slip in when a masculine voice said, “I was worried you weren’t going to come.”

Sebastian’s voice. It was soft and sensuous, as if he was sweet-talking someone. Had he seen her? But he didn’t expect her yet. She was about to call out to him when she saw a glint of light and Sebastian stepped out from between the Daimler and her car, carrying a candle. “But I’m glad you did...John.”

John?

John Ransome stepped forward, into the circle of light of the candle. The glow touched his high cheekbones and ran along the curve of his sulky mouth.

Sebastian’s face was tight with—with something that looked like agony. He took the last step that brought him close to John Ransome, so close their chests almost touched. They were both breathing hard. Their mouths were soft and gilded by the light of the candle and just inches from each other.

Then Sebastian took the last step and he wrapped his arm around Ransome’s neck, splayed his hand in the man’s hair and put his lips against his friend’s mouth.

Shock kept Zoe frozen there, her hand on the door latch. For a few wild moments, she knew she shouldn’t be standing there, watching this, and she didn’t want them to see her.

She turned away and pulled the garage door closed as quietly as she could.

Crossing her arms over her chest, she started walking. She didn’t know where. She just didn’t want to go back to the house.

There had been a play in New York. A jaded, popular Manhattan girl named Maisie had taken her to it. The most scandalous play in the city, she’d been told. Every young woman of good New York society seemed to think that just seeing the play would lead a woman down an intractable path of doom and corruption.

Maisie had been so wild and thrilling and dangerously fun. She had affairs with members of Harlem jazz bands and knew the secret passwords to every hot speakeasy in New York.

She didn’t care what anyone thought of her, and Zoe had spent every moment she could with Maisie. She wanted to learn how you stopped caring so you could live life.

The first moment the two actresses had placed their mouths close enough to touch, the entire audience held their collective breaths, waiting for the forbidden. Then the two girls on stage had kissed.

Zoe had been paralyzed, though Maisie hadn’t been shocked at all. Her large brown eyes had been bright, full of excitement. Her pupils were huge and black with the drugs that were sold in the shadowy back rooms of private parties and speakeasies.