I Married the Duke (5 page)

He released her hand and watched her take another sip. She coughed again and her eyes watered.

“You needn’t drink it all in one swill,” he murmured.

“I told you I haven’t drunk b-brandy before.”

“So you say.”

“C-Captain, if you—”

“How do you feel? Any warmer?”

“Why m-must you always interrupt m-me?”

“We haven’t spoken enough for an ‘always’ to exist yet. You have done all in your power not to come within twenty feet of me since you boarded my ship and refused my bed.”

Her gaze shot from the glass to his face.

He lifted a brow. “True?”

“N-No.”

She didn’t think he believed her.

“Now another,” he said, sliding the bottle across the table toward her.

“I will b-become intoxicated if I h-have another.” Her head was muddled already. But she was warm. Warmer than she’d been in days. She feared it had less to do with the brandy than with the man’s quietly wolfish gaze upon her.

He leaned back in the chair, his long legs stretching out to one side of her, trapping her against the table. He folded his arms over his chest. “What are you afraid of, duchess? That under the influence of alcohol you will abandon your haughty airs and do something we will both regret in the morning?”

Men had attempted to cajole her, to seduce her, to make love to her with words so that she would succumb to them. They had treated her to endless flatteries, and when that had not sufficed they had forced her. No man had ever spoken to her like this, so frankly. And no man had ever made her want to do something she would regret in the morning.

But his words now were not meant to seduce.

“You are ch-challenging me, aren’t you?” she said. “T-Testing my m-mettle, like you would test any sailor aboard your ship.”

“Do you wish to be a sailor now, Miss Caulfield? Trade in the dreary life of a governess for adventure on the high seas? I suppose I could arrange that.”

She set her glass on the table beside the bottle. “F-Fill it.”

He chuckled. She liked the sound of it. When he looked at her with amusement, she imagined he actually found her amusing.

She was not amusing. She was serious, professional, determined, and responsible. Except for boarding a ruffian’s ship and sitting before him wearing a blanket, she’d done nothing especially adventuresome since she could remember.

She lifted the glass to her lips. “I am n-not afraid of anything. Especially not of m-men.”

“I begin to believe it.” A smile lurked at the corner of his beautiful mouth. The cabin was a haze of mellow woods and salt-smelling air and heat growing inside her. She could not seem to look away from his mouth. It was not in fact wise to sit before him wearing only a blanket.

“This is u-unwise,” she heard herself say.

“Medicine is rarely easy to swallow.” His voice seemed a bit rough.

She dragged her attention to her glass.

“Why do you cover your hair?” he said abruptly.

“Because I do n-not wish it to be seen by rapacious s-sea captains.” She took another sip of brandy. “Next question.”

He laughed. She did not like it. She
loved
it—warm, rich, and confident. His laughter burrowed into her, into someplace deeply buried.

“What thoughts had you so lost in bemusement atop that you did not notice even the rain, duchess?”

“I have t-two sisters.” She could not tell him of her fear. “I have not seen them in an age. I m-miss them.”

“Tell me about them.” The golden lamplight cast his features in light and shadows so that he did look mythical. It was not her imagination or the brandy. It was him.

“Why?”

“I have a brother.” He gestured to the framed drawing on the wall. “Common interest. And, given your earlier refusal of my bed, we’ve nothing better to do tonight.”

“D-Do you speak to all women in this manner?”

“Only governesses wearing little more than a blanket.”

“Do you come across th-those often?”

“Never before.”

Over the rim of the glass she met his gaze. The brandy rushed down her throat. She sputtered.

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a neatly pressed white kerchief. He set it on the table between them. She took it up and dabbed at her watering eyes, studying the charcoal drawing. The boy’s eyes were shadowed sockets of fear, his shoulders hunched, the lines of his face severe. Yet the skill of the artist had brought forth his natural beauty, despite the darkness.

“That p-picture is of your brother?”

“A self-portrait.”

“At s-such a young age he is an artist?”

“He is now six-and-twenty. He drew that from memory. Now tell me of your sisters.”

She set down the handkerchief. “Eleanor is g-good and fair, with golden hair and golden-green eyes, and t-tall and slender like a Greek m-maiden of old.”

“Athena, warrior goddess.”

“Wise, but not a warrior. She would rather read than ride or walk or do j-just about anything else. She spends her days tr-translating texts for the Rev— for our father from Latin into English. No one knows. Others th-think it is his work. When I asked her once if she m-minded, she said she preferred it.”

“She is modest.”

“Perhaps.”

He leaned forward to refill her glass, and she smelled clean sea and warmth upon him. What would it be like to be held in his muscular arms?

She must be drunk already.

She had been grabbed, groped, clutched. She had never been held by a man.

He poured brandy into his glass and set the bottle on the table. “And your other sister?”

“Ravenna is a Gypsy.”

The glass halted halfway to his mouth.

Arabella chewed the inside of her lip. “Dark eyes. D-Dark hair. Cannot be indoors. Cannot b-be still. Cannot be quelled.”

“That last is like her sister, it seems.” He drank the contents of his glass in one swallow.

“I am responsible for them.” The words tumbled from her tongue in a rush.

He refilled the glasses. “You?”

“It is why this p-position I go to now is so important. I must . . .” His glass was empty again. She swung her gaze up to him. “Why are you dr-drinking too? You are not chilled.”

“A gentleman never allows a lady to drink alone.” He held the glass in the palm of his hand with ease. Except he was not at ease. Tension seemed to set his shoulders, and his jaw was hard with restraint.

Restraint?

“You are not a g-gentleman. Are you?” she said. “You did not seem so when you denied my request for passage in Plymouth.”

“Which I then recanted.”

“And teased me about your b-bed.”

“A show of gracious generosity on my part.”

“Not just now.”

“That was to put you at ease.”

“What sort of women d-do you usually speak with so that you could imagine
that
would have put me at ease?”

His eye hooded. “I am a sailor, Miss Caulfield.”

Oh
.

But . . .
champagne
? And his clothing . . . it was very fine. Handsome. He looked like a gentleman, except for the scar and black kerchief and shadow of whiskers on his jaw and wolfish glimmer in his eye and havoc he was wreaking with her insides.

She wasn’t thinking straight.

“Gentlemen tr-treat ladies better,” she said.

“So I hear.”

“Some gentlemen.”

He leaned forward, his knees coming around hers. “Not all?”

“Not . . . most.” She lifted her attention from their knees locked together.

Hungry
.

His gaze upon her was hungry. Like the wolf looking upon the lamb.

He stood abruptly, the chair scraping back, and swiped his hand around the back of his neck. “Not this one, apparently.”

She got to her feet and the blanket drooped open. But she was warm finally. Her teeth clacked but deep inside her swirled heady heat. The lamplight threw his good eye into shadow, but she saw the confused desire there. He was both unsteady and authoritarian and he looked at her like no man ever had before, like he wanted her but did not understand that he did.

“I think you should go to bed, Miss Caulfield.” His voice was low. “Now.”

She could not think. The brandy stole her reason. Her head spun. Dr. Stewart was right: she was intrigued. More than that. She was
infatuated
. Upon so brief an acquaintance. Like a schoolgirl. Like the schoolgirl she had never really been because even then she had been serious, learning to be a lady despite all. When the other girls at school nursed
tendres
for the dancing master, she did not. She had remained directed and determined, waiting for a prince to come along and tell her the destiny that was just out of her grasp.

Now, with only two glasses of spirits, a piratical shipmaster threw her into foolish infatuation.

It was ridiculous.

She must halt it before it got out of hand.

“Why d-did you order Joshua to follow me about ship?” She said it like an accusation.

“So that I would know where you are.”

“D-Doctor Stewart s-said—”

“What did he say?” He stood so close she could feel the heat from his body.

She was having difficulty breathing. “He said I would not be the first.”

The door swung open. “Captain, I have hung the lady’s garments in the warmest location aboard. Shall I make up the bed?”

The captain stepped back from her and nodded, turning his head away. “Do.”

His steward went to the little cabin off the captain’s day cabin. A dart of panic shot through Arabella. On wobbly knees she moved toward the door.

“No escaping, duchess.” The captain stepped forward and swept her up into his arms. “Not this time.” He carried her into his bedchamber. To his bed. She could not catch breath. His arms gave her no quarter. Thrillingly muscular arms. And hard chest.
She was touching his chest
. A man was carrying her to his bed, a man with desire in his eyes who smelled of salt and sea and heat and power, and she was frightened because the drunken part of her wanted him to carry her.

“No.” She struggled. “You must n—”

He dropped her onto the mattress and backed out the door. “Rest well, duchess.” He disappeared.

She pressed her burning face into the pillow while Mr. Miles tucked the blankets around her and made clucking sounds like a nurse settling an infant into a cradle.

“Dr. Stewart will be in within an hour to see that you haven’t taken a fever,” he said. He left. No key sounded in the door, nothing trapping her except the softest mattress she’d slept on in years and a cocoon of warmth bearing her into sleep.

H
E SHOULD NOT
have drunk a drop. He should have remained sober so that when the magnificent cornflowers grew hazy then wild then caressed him like a touch, he would not have started imagining peeling the blanket off her to reveal the woman beneath.

With nothing to conceal it, the ruby ring had dangled from its modest ribbon where the blanket gaped at her breast as though it weren’t worth five hundred guineas and she had no cause to hide it. Only the sight of that ring, and some remnant of gentlemanly honor his father and the Royal Navy had drummed into him, had restrained him from doing as he imagined.

She claimed she did not belong to any man. Except for her saucy tongue, she responded to his decidedly ungentlemanly teasing as predictably as any virginal governess.

But that ring told another story. Unlike his rakish cousin the Earl of Bedwyr, however, Luc preferred his women unentangled. Also, not shivering. Or tinged blue.

He climbed the companionway to the main deck. The rain had let up while he’d been below fantasizing about undressing a woman while she sat before him. Wind sheared off the ocean to port cold and fresh. Within two days they would make harbor at Saint-Nazaire and his passenger would set off toward the castle,
his
castle to which he himself had not been in many months but where his brother, Christos, and his friend, Reiner of Sensaire, were now in residence.

She was going to
his house
—his chateau that had come to him from his mother’s family, the mother who abandoned her young sons upon the sudden death of her husband, to then cast herself into the hands of revolutionaries in her home country. Now, a beautiful little English governess had sought him out to take her there so she could work for his friend.

What were the odds? Luc wasn’t much of a wagering man, but he suspected they were pretty damn slim.

The sea spread out around him, and the solid boards of his ship and the bleached sails above were peace. With a turn of his head he could see in every direction. He passed the remainder of the night as he usually did, watching the stars. Though he would have liked his hands around the ship’s wheel, he had drunk too much brandy, and while seven months ago that wouldn’t have much affected his ability to steer his vessel, he wasn’t so much of a fool that he believed he could steer both foxed and one-eyed.

A
pirate
. He laughed. The One-Eyed Captain they would have called him if he had remained in the navy. Now when he returned to London he would be the One-Eyed Heir. And someday, perhaps, the One-Eyed Duke.

That one-eyed duke would require an heir.

He tried to imagine the society debutantes he had been introduced to in his youth before he escaped to war. The only face he could conjure was hers. Even pale and shivering, she was stunning. And she was not as disinterested in the company of a man as she said. Brandy had revealed a longing in her eyes that had gone straight to his groin.

He didn’t need that sort of trouble. There would be women to spare in Saint-Nazaire who could satisfy his needs quite satisfactorily.

If he could endure two more days of not touching her.

Her hair bound up beneath that linen was driving him mad. Each time he’d glimpsed her across deck he nearly ordered her locked in the bilge so he wouldn’t be tempted to accost her and strip that damn turban off. She had to know that binding any part of her tightly away from sight made her all the more tempting. Especially that hair.

It was glorious. Golden-red. The linen had slipped while she drank his brandy, and a crest of luxurious color showed above her brow. Like spun copper. He’d drunk with her to avoid snatching that turban away and seeing all of it. Then he had thrown her into his bed, despite her protests. That he had removed himself from the bedchamber was a miracle he was still too foxed to fathom.