Douglas: Lord of Heartache (35 page)

“How could you refuse such a reasonable gentleman?” Douglas mused. “It’s as well he did the pretty with you, Guinevere, or he might have to consider some extended travel.”

They fell silent until Gwen leaned back, Douglas’s hand cradled in hers, though she’d no recollection of when their fingers had laced.

“Douglas?”

“Yes?”

She turned a question he’d once asked back on him. “Where does this leave us?”

“Where would you like it to leave us? You know I have wanted to marry you, Guinevere, and now you are carrying our child. If we marry, though, I can’t promise you any understanding like you had with Westhaven. I want to be a husband to you, and I want you for my wife. I know you value your independence, but I simply can’t allow…”

A tremor had crept into his voice, despite this flight of reason and articulation. Douglas swallowed and breathed out slowly before attempting to soldier on.

“For God’s sake, Guinevere.” He brought her knuckles to his lips again. “Please marry me. I don’t want a future if I can’t have one with you. I love you. I will always love you. Please.”

He sat beside her, back straight, eyes forward, while more tears trickled down Gwen’s cheeks. She rose from her seat beside him and knelt between his legs, wrapping her arms around his waist and resting her cheek on his thigh.

“Of course, Douglas,” she said. “Of course I will be your wife.”

“Thank you,” Douglas murmured, wrapping his arms around her and folding his body down over hers. “From the bottom of my heart, from the depths of my soul, thank you.”

***

“Don’t go out there,” Fairly warned Andrew.

“What are you two doing here?” Andrew turned from the kitchen window to regard Fairly, who sat sipping tea on the counter beside Heathgate like a pair of giant, happy raptors.

“I came to hear the good news,” Fairly said, “when they are ready to come in and tell us. I collected Heathgate on my way out from Town, he being the head of the family and entitled to be present. What are you doing here?”

“It was my turn to check on Gwennie,” Andrew said. “And I owe Rose a riding lesson. I take it, from the way Ezra says they’ve been plastered against each other for the past twenty minutes, Douglas and Gwen are in charity with each other?”

“In charity.” Fairly saluted with his teacup. “In love, in lust. Douglas suspects Gwen is breeding. We will have to find a truly impressive wedding present—perhaps the Miller property?”

Andrew paused in the act of pouring himself a cup of tea.

“What a fine idea.” He went back to brewing his tea. “Astrid also suspected Gwen was breeding. When’s the happy event?”

“One would hope a discreet interval after the wedding.”

“One would,” Andrew agreed, “if he wanted to avoid the sharp end of Heathgate’s tongue.”

Heathgate smiled. “I shall be the soul of avuncular tolerance, just as soon as Douglas gets the special license.”

“Shame on you, Heathgate.” Fairly’s smile broadened as he hopped off the counter and appropriated Andrew’s tea. “You aren’t in a position to call kettles black, and neither are you, Greymoor, so leave Douglas in peace. He’s earned it.”

“Suppose he has at that,” Andrew said, gazing out the window at Douglas and Gwen still entwined in each other’s arms. “Though we may have a spot of trouble. Rose is heading out of the stables and charging straight for the scene.”

***

“Are you saying good-bye, Cousin Douglas?” Rose yelled as she churned across the gardens. “That’s not fair. You just got here, and Regis and Sir George haven’t visited yet. You can’t leave already. Tell him, Mama.”

The young lady was trying hard to maintain her dignity, but Douglas could see she also wanted to stomp her small, booted foot.

“I am not leaving, Rose.”
Not
ever.
No words, short of those declaring his love for Guinevere, had given him more satisfaction.

Rose did not appear in the least reassured. “Then why is Mama crying? She cried when you didn’t come visit us. She cried when we went to visit the trout pond. She cried when we sang about the wide water.”

Rose was so upset to relate these tragedies, Douglas knew with a certainty Guinevere had not been the only lady in need of a handkerchief. The idea that he might have imperiled the happiness of either was… would not do.

“Rose,” Guinevere said, holding out a hand, “come here. We have things to tell you.”

Rose, with the instincts of the young and determined, inserted herself between the adults on the bench. “I want to show Cousin Douglas where we planted the flowers. Then I want to show him my drawings, and all the snowflakes I made for him. He could ride out on Regis with me and Sir George, and you can come with us, Mama. Then we’ll bake biscuits, because Cousin Douglas loves biscuits with his tea, and then Mr. Bear and Cousin Douglas—”

Douglas exchanged a smile with Guinevere as he placed a finger against Rose’s busy little mouth. “Hush, child. You needn’t find reasons to keep me here. Your mother has said I’m to stay.”

Rose glanced up at her mother. “Stay? Forever? Like Sir George?”

Like Sir Gawain, if Douglas had anything to say to it. Slaying his ladies’ dragons, eating biscuits, and admiring flowers and snowflakes until he was so old he creaked about the garden, his Guinevere on his arm, fragrant memories blooming around them on all sides.

“Cousin Douglas and I will be getting married very soon,” Guinevere said, and her smile put to rest any lingering doubts Douglas might have harbored regarding her views on their nuptials. “He will become your step-papa, and live with us.”

Rose sprang off the bench and spun around, her smile radiant. “I must tell Sir George! This is the best news ever! My very own step-papa!”

She bolted off, slipping onto the cold, hard ground as she rounded a bed of dormant roses, getting right up, and pelting for the stables, the entire time bellowing good news to her pony, the grooms, and the world at large.

“Ours might be a small family,” Guinevere remarked. “And as parents, we might develop hearing difficulties at an early age.”

Douglas scooted closer to her and tucked his arm around her waist. Guinevere’s head rested on his shoulder, the feel of her beside him warming him as the sun alone could not.

“Guinevere, at the risk of arguing with a lady whom I esteem above all others, and always will, no matter the vicissitudes of married life, ours is unlikely to be a small or quiet family.”

This was a matter about which, as the years and decades slipped by, Douglas’s prediction proved to be the more accurate, if incomplete. Theirs became a large family, though not
always
noisy. They were, however, abundantly happy, even into those years when Douglas and Gwen strolled about their gardens, surrounded on all sides by loving memories and noisy, happy grandchildren.

Read on for an excerpt from
David
, the next book in the Lonely Lords series by Grace Burrowes

Owning a brothel, particularly an elegant, expensive,
exclusive
brothel, ought to loom as a single, healthy young man’s most dearly treasured fantasy.

Perhaps as fantasies went, the notion had merit. The reality, inherited from a distant cousin, was enough to put David Worthington, fourth Viscount Fairly, into a permanent fit of the dismals.

“Jennings, good morning.” David set his antique Sevres teacup down rather than hurl it against the breakfast parlor’s hearthstones, so annoyed was he to see his man of business at such an hour—again. “I trust you slept well, and I also trust you are about to ruin my breakfast with some bit of bad news.”

Or some barge load of bad news, for Thomas Jennings came around this early if, and only if, he had miserable tidings to share and wanted to gloat in person over their impact.

“My apologies for intruding.” Jennings appropriated a serviette from an empty place setting and swaddled a pilfered pear in spotless linen. “I thought you’d want to know that Musette and Isabella got into a fight with Desdemona and are threatening to open their own business catering to women who enjoy other women.”

Not a spat, a tiff, a disagreement, or an argument, but a
fight
.

Please, God, may the girls’ aspirations bear fruit.
“I fail to see how this involves me.” David paused for a sip of his tea, a fine gunpowder a fellow ought to have the privacy to linger over of a cold and frosty morning. “If the women are enterprising enough to make a go of that dodgy venture, then they have my blessing.”

Though dodgy wasn’t quite fair. London sported several such establishments that David knew of, and each appeared to be thriving.

“Bella told Desdemona you had offered to finance their dodgy venture,” Jennings informed him, taking an audible bite of pear and managing to do so tidily.

“Not likely.” Was there a patron saint for people who owned brothels? A patron devil? “Felicity and Astrid are the best of sisters, but they wouldn’t understand my involvement in that sort of undertaking, and, worse yet, their spouses would find it hilarious. I’ll suggest the ladies apply to
you
for their financing.”

He shot a toothy smile at Jennings, who’d taken a seat without being invited, a liberty earned through faithful service that dated back well before David’s succession to the Fairly viscountcy.

“I could,” Jennings mused, “but having seen the challenges facing my employer, I will decline that signal honor.” He saluted with his pear.

“Such a fate would be no more than you deserve,” David said, pouring Jennings a cup of hot tea and sliding the cream and sugar toward him. “Those women positively fawn over you.”

Jennings lounged back, long legs crossed at the ankles as he devoured another bite of perfect pear. He managed to look more dangerous than attractive much of the time, but in his unguarded moments, his brown eyes and dark hair could be—and were—called handsome by the ladies. Then too, Thomas Jennings had a well-hidden protective streak roughly equal in breadth to the Pacific Ocean.

Jennings paused halfway around his pear. “Despite your strange eyes, the ladies are unendingly fond of you, too. No accounting for taste, I suppose.”

“Their regard is a dubious blessing, at best. Will you at least accompany me to the scene?” Because the physician in David had to see for himself that matters had been resolved without injury to anything more delicate than feminine pride or the occasional crystal vase.

Jennings rose, pear in hand. “Wouldn’t miss it. I have never been so well entertained as I have since you inherited that damned brothel.”

While David had never been so beleaguered.

When he’d dispatched matters at The Pleasure House—a round of scoldings worthy of any headmaster, followed by teary apologies that would have done first formers proud—he departed from the premises with a sense of escape no adult male ought to feel when leaving an elegant bordello.

As cold as the day was, David still chose to wait with Jennings in the mews behind The Pleasure House for his mare to be brought around. Why David alone could address the myriad petty, consummately annoying conflicts that arose among his employees was a mystery of Delphic proportions.

“I’ve been meaning to mention something,” Jennings said as David’s gray was led into the yard. With a sense of being hounded by doom, David accepted the reins from the stableboy.

“Unburden yourself, then, Thomas. The day grows chilly.” And a large house full of feuding women and valuable breakables sat not fifty feet on the other side of the garden wall.

“Do you recall a Mrs. Letitia Banks?”

“I do,” David replied, slinging his reins over the horse’s head as an image of dark hair, slim grace, and pretty, sad eyes assailed him. What had Letty Banks seen in David’s late brother-in-law that she’d accepted such a buffoon as her protector?

“You sent me to advise her regarding investment of a certain sum upon the death of her last protector,” Jennings went on as a single snowflake drifted onto the toe of David’s left boot. “I did that, and she’s had two quarterly payments of interest on her principle since then.”

David swung up into the saddle, feeling the cold of the seat through his doeskin breeches. “All of which I am sure you handled with your customary discretion.”

Jennings sighed. “I have.”

Perishing
saints.
Thomas Jennings would scowl, smirk, swear, stomp away, or—on rare occasion—even smile, but he wasn’t prone to sighing.

From his perch on the mare, David studied Thomas, a fellow who, on at least two occasions, had wrought mortal peril on those seeking to harm his employer. “This is a historic day. You are being coy, Thomas.”

Jennings glanced around, making the day doubly historic, for Jennings evidenced uncertainty no more frequently than he appeared coy. “She spends it.”

Coy, uncertain, and indirect was an alarming combination coming from Jennings. “Of course she spends it. She is a female in a particular line of business, and she must maintain appearances. Whether she spends the interest or reinvests it with the principle is no business of mine.”

“She’s not spending it to maintain appearances,” Jennings said. “I believe, despite this income, the lady is in difficulties.”

David masked his astonishment by brushing his horse’s mane to lie uniformly on the right side of her neck. He wasn’t astonished that Letitia Banks was in difficulties—a courtesan’s life was precarious and often drove even strong women to excesses of drink, opium, gambling, and other expensive vices. What astonished him was that Jennings would comment on the matter.

“Thomas, I would acquit you of anything resembling a soft heart”—at least to appearances—“but you are distressed by Mrs. Banks’s circumstances. Whatever are you trying to tell me?”

“I don’t know.” Jennings’s horse was led out, a great, dark brute of a beast, probably chosen to complement its great, dark brute of an owner. “Something about that situation isn’t right, and you should take a look.”

“Might you be less cryptic? If there is looking to be done”—and Mrs. Banks made for a pleasant look, indeed—“then are you not in a better position to do it than I? I’ve met the lady only once.”

Months ago, and under difficult circumstances, and yet, she’d lingered at the back of David’s mind, a pretty ghost he hadn’t attempted to exorcise.

Jennings’s features acquired his signature scowl, which might have explained why the stableboy remained a few paces off with the black gelding. “I haven’t your ability to charm a reluctant female, and my efforts to date meet with a polite, pretty, lusciously scented stone wall.”

Had Jennings noted that the luscious scent was mostly roses?

“You mustn’t glower at the lady when you’re trying to tease her secrets from her, Thomas. You aren’t really as bad-looking as you want everyone to think.”

Jennings took the reins from the groom, and gave the girth a snug pull. “Since coming into that money, she’s let a footman and a groom go, sold a horse, and if I’m not mistaken, parted with some fripperies. She’s reduced to taking a pony cart to market.”

“Thomas,” David said gently, “she is a
professional
. She would likely accept you as her next protector, and her financial worries would be solved. In her business, these periodic lapses in revenue happen. She’ll manage.”

Though the soft-spoken, demure ones usually managed the worst.

Thomas sighed again, a sigh intended to produce guilt in the one who heard it. “I am
asking
you to look into her situation.”

Jennings never asked for anything. He collected his generous pay, occasionally disappeared on personal business, and comported himself as a perfect—if occasionally impertinent and moody—man of business. He was both more and less than a friend, and David was attached to him in some way neither man believed merited discussion.

And really, David could not muster a desire to argue with Jennings on this topic, not even for form’s sake.

“I will look into it,” David said, touching the brim of his hat before trotting off to his next destination.