An American Duchess (6 page)

He blinked. Miss Gifford sported a lot of bare skin. Her upper arms were bare, as were her thighs—in the gap between her short skirt and her rolled-down stockings. Underneath the dress, much of her must be naked.

Heat washed over him and he moved behind a potted palm to hide what must be a blindingly obvious erection in his trousers. Anger and embarrassment hit him. She was his brother’s fiancée—albeit his convenient one—and he had no business feeling anything about her skin.

On the dance floor, Sebastian rushed Miss Gifford through the crowd in a waltz that looked like his brother was racing to find a bathroom.

Where was Julia? Nigel’s gaze scoured the small round tables at the far side of the large room. Egyptian-style pillars separated that section from the dance floor, and couples lounged in the shadows. Nigel did not see any woman who looked like Julia—black hair in a neat bun, elegant and understated.

“Nigel!” At the edge of the dance floor, a woman with bobbed dark hair waved wildly at him. He could see the tops of her stockings below her short skirt, rolled down just below her knees like Miss Gifford’s.

He had no idea who she was, though she’d addressed him intimately. Her partner’s legs appeared to be made of India rubber, wobbling back and forth as the man passed his hands over his knees. Making wild gyrations, the girl moved toward the floor’s edge.

“Nigel, come and dance,” she called.

Her lips were a vivid scarlet, her eyes darkened with kohl. Some cosmetic, thick and black, was clumped on her eyelashes. There was something familiar about her, something that got under his skin...

“Julia!” Her name came out in a roar of shock.

The creature in front of Nigel was nothing like the demure English lady who had climbed into Zoe Gifford’s motorcar that morning. Several feet of her dark hair had been cut. Her face was made up like an actress on Drury Lane. As for her dress—

It revealed so much of his sister’s legs that his hands clenched into fists. Julia’s entire body moved with the jazz beat, her hips flowing back and forth in shocking invitation.

Nigel grasped her wrist and hauled her off the floor. “Did
she
do this to you?”

Tugging against his iron grip, Julia’s expression became one he readily recognized. She glared. “If by ‘she,’ you mean Miss Gifford, then yes. And if by ‘this,’ you mean that she is trying to coax me to have fun, then yes. This
is
fun, Nigel.”

“Fun.” He spat the word. “You are barely dressed.”

“This dress is fashionable. And not quite shocking if every other woman in the room is wearing the same thing.”

Someone tapped on his shoulder. It was Julia’s partner—a pasty-looking young man who was obviously at university. “Look here,” the lad began. “She’s my partner.”

“Bugger off,” Nigel snarled.

Quaking, the boy retreated. Nigel rounded on Julia. “You were giving him ideas.”

She burst out laughing.

“What is so funny?” he barked.

“Nigel, he is a sweet young man. We were simply dancing. You think my behavior is shocking? That young man is the son of Viscount Hardley and, to quote, you just told him to—”

“Never mind what I told him.” This was Zoe Gifford’s fault. He refused to lose control due to her—even control over his language. “That is not what I would call dancing. Married people have less contact during their private relations.”

This made Julia double over, helpless with laughter. It was good to see her enjoying herself. Irritating to have it at his expense.

“What has she done to you?” Two days. That was all the time Miss Gifford had spent under his roof, yet Julia’s hair was now gone, her demure face was painted, and she was making rude gyrations in a public place. He hauled off his coat and threw it around Julia’s shoulders. It reached her knees and engulfed her in an envelope of decency. “We are returning home.”

“I am not leaving, Nigel. I want to dance.”

A slender hand landed on his arm, and the scent of exotic roses surrounded him. As he jerked around, Miss Gifford, the culprit, smiled up at him.

“You are making a scene, Your Grace,” she said. “Why don’t we discuss this at our table?”

“I am making a scene?” The words came out with all the calm that pervaded the atmosphere before men rushed out of a trench with rifles. “My sister is cavorting half-naked on a public dance floor.”

“Which is perfectly natural in a dance club,” Miss Gifford pointed out. “Dragging her off the floor and throwing your coat over her is more fitting to the last century. If you are so concerned about appearances, look around you, Duke. You are creating the scandal here.”

Dimly, he became aware of the stares. Hundreds of them. Grunting with anger—how dare she be in the right?—Nigel watched Miss Gifford lead Julia to a table. Sebastian was there, along with a group of rainbow-colored drinks. Two glasses in front of his brother were already empty.

Miss Gifford handed him a full one in a revolting shade of yellow-green. Nigel put it down. He didn’t drink things the color of urine. “What in hell were you thinking?” he growled at her. “Julia is in mourning.”

Julia threw off his coat so it landed on the back of the chair and sipped a pink drink.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Miss Gifford said. “Lady Julia can’t be mourning for the rest of her life.”

Julia set down her drink and Sebastian whisked her onto the dance floor. Damn his brother.

Miss Gifford jumped to her feet and stood in front of him. From this view, he could see a considerable amount of her smooth, bare thighs. He grabbed his drink, downed it and sputtered. “Sweet,” he choked.

“You certainly are not. Dance with me.”

“I do not dance.”

“I can teach you.”

“Leave me alone, Miss Gifford.”

“I won’t. Not until you have one dance with me.”

The loud, raucous music pounded in his head. It grew louder, slamming through his skull like relentless explosions. The thunderous beat became the burst of shells. It was engulfing him. Nigel shut his eyes—a fatal mistake. With every screech of the music, he could see the endless showers of flying mud and men. Roaring filled his ears and sweat trickled down his back.

“Dance with me, Your Grace. Surely you can’t be afraid of attempting to dance.”

His hands were shaking hard now. He had to get out—

He jolted to his feet. Turning his back on Miss Gifford, he ran to the stairs and took them three at a time. The dining room was a roar of noise. Cigarette smoke hung in the air like fog, like the ash-filled air of no-man’s-land.

He shoved past the doorman, slammed open the door and stalked out into the night.

A car horn sounded and Nigel plastered his body against a brick wall beside him. His entire body shook. His mind was like Pandora’s box—demons poured out and he couldn’t jam them back in.

“Nigel, what is wrong?”

He whirled. Miss Gifford came up to him and put her hands on his arm. “Nigel—”

“Langford. The appropriate form of address is to refer to me by my title,” he snapped, turning his back to her. What in hell would she see in his face? Why had she come after him? “Go dance with my brother,” he barked.

“No.” Her hand skimmed up his arm and rested on his shoulder. “You are shaking and are pale as a ghost. You ran out of the club as if someone was chasing you.”

“Stop touching me.”

But she did not listen. Her body moved closer until he could feel her softness pressing against his side. He felt the warmth of her bare skin through his clothes. Her breath brushed over the back of his neck.

He needed distance. Grasping her hands, he propelled her back. He had to face her to do it.

“What happened to you?” Her large violet eyes searched his face.

He fumbled for a cigarette. A mistake, for it revealed how much his hand still shook. It would take a long time for the physical reaction to subside. But he got the damned smoke out and stuck it between his lips. “I was upset at the sight of my sister.”

Miss Gifford shook her head. “No, this is not anger. This is panic. I understand now. You’re suffering from shell shock.”

“I am not. There is nothing wrong with me.”

“There are many things wrong with you, Langford, and this explains them all. No wonder you didn’t want to talk about war. I apologize for everything I said. You’re obviously suffering.”

“I am not suffering.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of—”

“I am not ashamed. And I am not weak.”

Her plucked brow arched. “You’re afraid to admit there is anything wrong with you. Good heavens, how could there not be? My brother died in France. He wrote letters home. He tried to be strong and stoic for a long time. Then he began to fall apart. He wrote about how he couldn’t stand the shooting and the shelling, the mud, the wet trenches, the sickness any longer—”

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with me, Miss Gifford. The only things I brought back with me from the War are the scars on my face and on my soul. My mind is completely intact.”

She shook her head. He despised sympathy, but her soft, sad expression ladled it over him by the bucketful. “You can’t deny what you feel. You may actually have to face your emotions—”

“I do not have emotions. Now, return inside. Dance in whatever shocking way you want with Sebastian. But send Julia out to me. I am taking her home.”

Her look of concern hardened to iron-strong determination. “Why? So she can be alone, with nothing to do but think of the man she lost? That is not going to help her get over grief. That will force her to wallow in it. She needs dancing and excitement and fun, Langford.”

“You cut her hair, for God’s sake.”

“Even you can’t be afraid of a woman’s haircut.”

“I am
not
afraid. There is no reason for Julia to change. She is a lady, not a dance-hall floozy.”

“You can’t lock her away as if this were Victorian England.”

“Julia is under my protection. I shall take care of her as I see best.”

For the first time, he realized his voice had risen. Everyone in line outside the club was staring at them. Blast Miss Gifford.

“She is not your chattel, Your Grace. Julia is a grown woman, and every change she made today is one she chose to do. If she wants to cut her hair, she can. If she wants to go to university, she could do that, too. The world is changing, Your Grace.”

“My world bloody well is not—”

A flashbulb exploded in his face. All he could see were spots before his eyes. The instant his vision cleared, a horn blared so loud, it sounded as if it were inside him. Jolting back, he took in the scene in an instant. A weaving car, going too fast.

Miss Gifford froze. Nigel caught her up in his arms. She weighed almost nothing—far less than a wounded soldier. He jumped back as the car lurched into the curb, its tires crunching over the spot Miss Gifford had been standing on.

The door opened, and the drunken driver fell out as he tried to get out.

“Oh, God, I could have been crushed like ice,” she muttered.

He set her on her feet and turned her roughly. “It’s not a joke,” he said heatedly, his chest heaving, his heart pounding. Something was burning through him, something he didn’t understand. It wasn’t the usual cold that hit him before the battle memories attacked him.

He looked down; she looked up. Her eyes were huge violet circles beneath the bright club lights, but her usual expression was back on her face. Jaded amusement. She had no idea what danger was about. She made him want to—

“I should thank you,” she said, “for saving my life—”

His mouth slammed into hers.

Heat. The sweetness of a cocktail. Lightning shot through him, riveting him to this moment in time. Her mouth answered his fierce kiss with hunger. Her kiss was scorching. She was so utterly unlike any woman he’d known before. Vibrant, infuriating but so damn alluring.

Her tongue found his, making him sweat beneath his evening dress. His body had been cold for as long as he could remember. Now he was heating up.

Brilliant light exploded around him. The glare of it froze him. His brain registered two words—
scandal-mongering newspapers
—just as Zoe Gifford pulled out of his embrace.

Sebastian shouted something at him in an inebriated slur, and his brother hit him for the second time in two days.

 5 

AT THE SAVOY HOTEL

Several hours later, Nigel pressed a towel filled with ice against his eye, the ice chipped from a block in the kitchens of the Savoy Hotel around the corner from Murray’s. If he were to open the door of his suite, he would hear the strains of the orchestra in the ballroom downstairs, playing jazz for the partying crowd. Drunken laughter. And witness more couples stumbling through the hallways, sinking to the floor to kiss passionately and indecently before they even reached a bedroom. Indecent.

He had ripped off his tie. Now he paced his hotel room like a caged cat.

He had told reporters he was Oswald Warts, Oxford student, and the girl he’d kissed was an actress’s understudy. Luckily, none of the press recognized him, as he was practically a hermit at Brideswell—except for the few times he came up to London to see his man of business and to visit his friend Rupert, who had been badly wounded at the Somme and was in a charity hospital. Given the late hour, he’d insisted they spend the night at the Savoy, and he had taken two suites: one for Julia and Miss Gifford, one for Sebastian and him.

A snore sounded from the adjoining bedroom. Sebastian was sprawled across the bed, fully dressed and unconscious.

“I don’t know what in hell to do.” He wouldn’t sleep tonight. After what had happened, he was certain he would have nightmares. He didn’t want to wake his brother with his screams and have Sebastian witness them.

What could he do? He couldn’t let the wedding go ahead, but what could he do with Sebastian? The problem was not just the rumors; it was Sebastian himself. He was drinking more. He’d grown even angrier, edgier.

Nigel didn’t know how to give his brother any peace. He couldn’t just say: do your duty and prefer females. Father had tried that and it had sent Sebastian on a self-destructive path that had seen him spend much of his time dead drunk.

If the blasted marriage ended in divorce, wouldn’t that lead to more rumors about Sebastian?
Of course his wife kicked him out—he was batting for the other team.

Sebastian wasn’t going to be able to fool Zoe Gifford. Her kiss had been hot enough to melt the soles of Nigel’s shoes to the sidewalk. He had never been kissed like that.

It made him hot, when he was so accustomed to feeling empty and cold. It made him hunger for more. But—

“It cannot happen again,” he muttered to his brandy glass. “Not with my brother’s fiancée.”

A soft knock sounded at the door. It was 3:00 a.m. The party in the ballroom was still roaring at full speed—he could feel the rhythm of the music through the floor.

Groaning, he got up. What if he hauled the door open and faced bobbed blond hair, huge violet eyes and painted lips? He remembered discovering traces of her red lipstick on his mouth.

Heat seared him just thinking about it. Perhaps he had better not answer that door. He’d never had his control snap like that. Was it another symptom of shell shock—hauling unsuspecting women into scorching kisses? He didn’t think so, but losing control like that left him stunned.

Another knock. “Langford, open the door. It is Zoe and Julia. We want to make sure you haven’t beaten each other senseless.”

Both of them. At least it meant he wouldn’t be tempted to—

No. Hell, he would never be tempted to do that again.

He took his bag of ice from his eye and opened the door. Miss Gifford walked in, beautiful in a dark blue silk robe tied at her waist and frothing around her ankles. Feathers adorned the neckline and the cuffs. Julia wore a new robe of scarlet silk.

“You have quite a shiner, brother,” Julia observed. “I’ll go check on Sebastian.” She quietly went into their brother’s room.

Miss Gifford walked up to him with her arms folded over her chest. Her face was scrubbed free of makeup. Soft pink lips. Unusual purple eyes with long, gold lashes. Soft, ivory skin.

She was beautiful. Luminous.

Then her finger jabbed his chest. “Julia is afraid she has made you angry. She’s worried she hurt you. Don’t you think she’s grieved enough?” she asked in a quietly furious voice.

She always put him on the defensive. “Of course Julia has not made me angry,” he said. “And of course I want her to stop grieving.”

“Then tell her that. She can’t live in the past. She believes she won’t have a home to live in once you are married. She fears she will be displaced by your wife, and that if she is very lucky, she might be allowed to live in a cottage.” Miss Gifford’s voice vibrated with indignation, though it stayed low in tone. “If this is true,” she went on, “Julia’s only hope for a future is marriage. And she doesn’t want to marry because she is still in love with the man she lost. I can understand what that is like. But she needs to fall in love again, and she can’t if you insist she must act as though it is still 1914. You are like that madwoman in Dickens—Miss Havisham or whatever her name was. Let your sister brush off the cobwebs and take off her unused wedding dress and find love!”

He gazed into her snapping violet eyes. “Thank you.”

“What does that mean? Will you do something? Or are you going to tell her to drop her hems back below her knees this instant?”

“I will talk to her,” he said stiffly. Without the ice on his eye, it stung again.

“Then do it now.” Miss Gifford turned and walked out.

Damn it. All he wanted to do was kiss her. He slapped the bag against his black eye. The pain of doing that helped cool his ardor. Just barely.

Then Julia came out of Sebastian’s room. Cautiously, and that in itself broke his heart.

“Are you very angry? I shouldn’t have done it.” Julia sank down to the wing chair and she looked up at him with tear-filled eyes. “Is it very wrong to go dancing when Anthony never will?”

He didn’t want her to spend her life mourning. He felt like a wretch. She had been grieving, and he was making her worry about his reaction. “It’s not wrong to go on living. Miss Gifford is right about that.”

His little sister looked so different. She had always been elegant, even as a little girl. Now even the way she tilted her head looked lively. Her bouncing hair drew his gaze. She looked freer, lighter, and she glowed in relief from her worry.

“You are extraordinarily beautiful, Julia. You look even lovelier with bobbed hair.” And he meant it. “Do you want me to take you home tomorrow?”

Julia wiped away her barely fallen tears. She gave him a wobbly smile as she stood to return to her room. “No, Zoe will drive me. But we are going to leave you to bring Sebastian home.”

He closed the door after Julia, then lay down on the sofa. He must have slept, but he woke up shouting, bathed in sweat. Jerking upright, he listened, heart pounding. Soft snores came from his brother’s bedroom. His brother was in a deep, drink-induced sleep.

Nigel sank back in relief. He stayed awake until morning, staring at the ceiling. Then he went downstairs, had breakfast and walked into the Savoy’s smoking room.

A high-backed wing chair and a newspaper hid his view of the occupant, but long legs stuck out—shapely legs revealed by a short skirt. Nigel identified the legs at once with a deep sigh.

It was Zoe Gifford—a cigarette held between her fingers, a newspaper in her hands.

All around, elderly gentlemen were muttering. Who had let her in? What were the standards of the Savoy coming to? What was the world coming to?

For a moment, Nigel sympathized with Miss Gifford. A devastating war had killed millions, had recarved Europe, had torn wounds that might scar over but would never heal. And what shocked Englishmen was a woman in the smoking room in a short skirt with her legs crossed.

He took a seat across the room, facing the window, and opened his newspaper.

A shadow fell over him. He lowered the paper. Those legs were in front of him. Zoe blew a smoke ring. “I heard what you said to your sister.”

“You listened in on a private conversation?”

“I was closing the door. It wasn’t my fault you started speaking before you were sure I’d gone. Thank you for what you said to her. She was worried about your disapproval.” Her now-painted lips curved in a smile. “She recognizes she does not have to obey you, but she does not want to fight with you.”

“I told her the truth. Thank you for urging me to.” He cleared his throat. “About what happened outside Murray’s—”

“Don’t worry, Your Grace. You know what American girls are like. We meet a boy at a dance at eight, and we’re necking in a rumble seat with him by midnight.”

He dropped his newspaper. Smiling, Miss Gifford walked away, and he had to loosen his tie.

But she cared about Julia. In the light of morning, he saw she had done a wonderful thing for his sister.

* * *

Zoe took the elevator up to Sebastian’s room. She rapped on the door—repeatedly—until Sebastian threw it open.

His eyes were bloodshot, his golden hair a disheveled mess, his clothes rumpled. “Oh, it’s you, Zoe.” He leaned against the door frame. “I’m in here alone. You shouldn’t come in, angel. It’d be a scandal without a chaperone.”

“In the state you’re in, I doubt anything could happen. Your head must be pounding.”

He groaned. And let her in.

He sprawled in a silk-cushioned chair, long legs spread out in front of him. This time he held the monogrammed towel filled with ice against his head.

Blunt and honest. That was what a Gifford was. “Sebastian, our engagement is a ruse, and it can’t be anything more. I—I was in love with someone else, and I lost him, and I don’t plan on falling in love again. No matter what.”

Sebastian had changed. When she’d met him in New York, he’d oozed charm. Now he seemed to be smoldering with anger all the time. She felt it in his tension, his drinking, his wildness.

On a groan of pain, he got down on one knee before her to take her hand. “I know, Zoe. But I’m falling in love with you. And I can’t help it.”

He gazed up at her, looking hungover, but vulnerable and gorgeous. With his blond hair, long-lashed green eyes, full, pouty lips, Sebastian was breathtaking.

But she didn’t want to kiss Sebastian and she couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss with Langford.

She’d thought him icy? He had been filled with fiery desire. His kiss set all her nerves aflame. She’d almost turned into a puddle on the sidewalk, she’d been so hot.

“I’m not going to fall in love with you, Sebastian. I can’t.”

Because of Richmond. “That’s the only reason why,” she said under her breath as she left Sebastian’s room.

* * *

A loud, sputtering sound came from the gray, cloudy sky over his head.

Nigel froze, reining in Beelzebub so they were motionless on the long stretch of Brideswell’s gravel drive. He knew the sound. It was the tempestuous choking of an aeroplane’s engine. His heart pounded. He expected to hear the explosion of machine-gun fire. That was what you heard—the engine roar over your head, then the cracking sound as the ground around you was blasted by gunfire.

The war was over. Had been for four years. Four years that didn’t seem real at this moment....

Was he just imagining the sound? It was so damn clear against the other sounds he knew of Brideswell—the whip of the wind through trees, the caws of crows.

A bright yellow biplane flew out of a bank of thick cloud. It banked and made a wide turn over the trees that flanked the road at the end of the drive. The plane started to drop, and Nigel realized it was going to land on the lawn.

Then the engine stalled and his heart almost stopped in his chest.

The plane dropped fast. Then the engine roared and it swooped upward, clearing his head generously. As if it had struck Beelzebub, the spooked animal reared.

Nigel had let the reins go slack to watch the aeroplane. Too late, he gripped them, but he lost his balance—

He tumbled from his horse to wet ground. As he hit the earth, he saw the plane touch down.

He pushed up, his back sore and his arse aching. The yellow plane rumbled over the ground, coming to a stop just before the stone wall that bordered the lawn.

Zoe Gifford jumped out, pushed up her goggles and ran to him. “Are you all right? The damn engine is fickle. It ran fine yesterday when I purchased her, but on the way here, she decided to get temperamental.”

For two days after their run-in in the Savoy smoking room, he had avoided Miss Gifford. Dinner had been the only meal that had forced them into the same room at the same time. She would say things about women’s rights to goad him, but he refused to be drawn into the conversation.

He felt that if he started arguing with her, everyone in the room would know he’d kissed her. The incident hadn’t appeared in newspapers, so apparently his Oswald Warts story had worked.

But Sebastian knew. His brother had come to his study the next afternoon, demanding to know what had happened.

“It won’t happen again” was all Nigel had said.

He didn’t know why it had happened. Miss Gifford should be the last woman he wanted to kiss. She drove him mad.

Now she had flown her aeroplane too close to him and sent him falling off his horse onto his arse. So why was his blood thrumming as she reached for him?

Nigel jumped to his feet. He did not want her helping him up. He kept hearing a sound in his head—the droning sound an aeroplane made when it was shot down, just before it crashed.

“The engine had stalled. You could have killed yourself.”

She shrugged. “I got it going again. The trick is to not panic.”

“I saw more men than I can count crash in aeroplanes.” He’d seen the burned, mangled bodies of the pilots hauled by medics to ambulances. Most of them didn’t survive the crash.

She folded her arms over her chest. “And if a man can’t handle an airplane, obviously a woman can’t?”

“Why risk your life by flying, damn it?” His chest was heaving and his hands shook. He was losing control. “You don’t need to die. Millions of men had no choice but to go to war and be blown away. Why in God’s name would you want to die? Most of the beggars I saw at the end would have traded anything to hang on to life.”

She’d gone very white.

Bloody hell. He’d forgotten she had lost her brother. “I apologize, Miss Gifford.” He said it stiffly. If he unbent for a moment—or got too close to her—he feared he would kiss her again.