The Way to a Duke's Heart: The Truth About the Duke (16 page)

“I’m very . . .” She hesitated, as if loath to speak the word. “I’m a very dull person, too serious for my own good. My sister says I was born without enough good humor.”

“My father said I was born with too much.”

“Enough for two people at least,” she replied.

The road dipped and twisted, and Charlie slowed the horse. “I didn’t kiss you merely out of excessive humor. Nor because I drank too much wine.”

“I wish you hadn’t done it at all.”

He shouldn’t ask, but he had to know. He had never in all his life been so twisted up over a woman, nor so driven to know what she felt for him. Until that kiss, he would have laid even odds she found his interest flattering at best; but that kiss . . . No woman could kiss a man like that if she felt nothing for him. “Then why did you kiss me back?”

She didn’t move. “Too much wine.”

“You had one glass.”

“I shouldn’t have had any.”

“Leave a kiss within the cup, and I’ll not ask for wine,” he murmured.

“It was madness,” she said, almost wistfully. “As well you know. A moment of weakness. Heaven knows a week in Frome might drive anyone mad, at least temporarily. Had we been ourselves, in London, it never would have happened.”

Charlie was silent. She might be right; if the Durham Dilemma hadn’t sent him out into the countryside, he probably would never have crossed paths with an outspoken widow who cared more for account books than contemplating his—or any other gentleman’s—handsome face. It was somewhat shocking how sobering he found that possibility. “Then I am glad for Frome, because I don’t regret it, madness or not.”

She heaved a faintly sad sigh. “Where are we going?”

“Just a little farther.”

“Is this about—about that kiss?” Her voice wobbled on the last word.

“Ah—no.” He cleared his throat. “Did you see the account books yesterday? Mrs. Bates said you went to Mells.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Mr. Scott produced them at last.”

“And did they persuade you to invest?”

“Yes,” she said again, beginning to sound annoyed again. “The canal is quite sound, and only slightly exceeding its projected costs. Is that what this is all about? You wanted to know my opinion of the canal?”

They were almost where he wanted to go. Charlie turned the horse off the road at a clearing, slowing the animal to a cautious walk. “Have you written to Lord Marchmont yet?”

“No, he’s already left for London—as Mrs. Bates and I intend to do tomorrow morning,” she added defiantly.

“Good.” Charlie brought the carriage to a halt and jumped down, tying the reins to a nearby sapling. “Come with me.”

“Why?” she demanded. “What are you up to? Can you not tell me anything?”

“I want to show you,” he said. “Get down.”

Scowling, she reluctantly held out her hand. Charlie took it, then hauled her down bodily, ignoring her startled exclamation. “I’ve already seen the canal works,” she said as he pulled her along by the hand. “What are we doing here?”

He led her through the trees and stopped on the edge of a little knoll, looking down over the canal where a lock was being built. He had learned yesterday that this was the linchpin of the canal, in more ways than one. “Down there is the problem,” he said, waving one hand over the scene. It looked much like the rest of the unbuilt canal, with towering mounds of displaced dirt above deep pits, crawling with men and horses and carts. “That lock should lead to the aqueduct toward Vobster.”

“What is the problem?” She was frowning as she scanned the landscape. “Are they stealing? Not building it properly?”

“No,” said Charlie. “The locks. They aren’t working, especially not this one.”

“They trialed one and it performed well!” she protested. “Mr. Scott designed them himself, and custom-built the iron gates!”

“Perhaps that’s why he won’t admit they’re failing—but they are. And you yourself told me this canal depends on efficient locks, given the drop.”

She said nothing, her face pale and set.

“The canal is going to fail, Tessa,” he said gently. “Scott’s been hiding quite a bit from you because he’s in desperate need of more funds.”

“How did you discover it?” she asked numbly.

“I got the chief engineer drunk. He’s in despair because he thinks he’ll be blamed for it.”

She jerked as if he’d struck her. “Perhaps they can be fixed—”

“With a great deal more money, perhaps,” Charlie agreed. “Will you risk your brother’s funds on it? With a man who’s already kept the truth from you?”

“Why?” she asked after a moment. Her face hadn’t altered much, still stony and leached of color. Charlie guessed she was reviewing everything Scott had told her, every promise he had made, every accounting he had shown her.

“He’s treasurer of the canal company, with a personal bond of ten thousand pounds. I believe he’s hoping, as you suggested, to get in enough new money to repair and improve the locks so the canal can be finished. If he can finish the canal, it might yet be made profitable, even if not for several years. If he can’t, shareholders will demand their money back and the company will collapse, taking his bond with it. And he’ll have no canal to ship his iron, either.”

She swayed on her feet, and for a moment he feared she would faint. He made a motion toward her, and she put her hand on his arm, her fingers digging into his flesh. “How did you learn that?” she demanded. “How? I asked every question, examined every ledger—”

He didn’t tell her it was because men like Scott and Tallboys found it easy to lie to a woman. He didn’t tell her Scott had put her off for days while Tallboys created a fresh ledger that didn’t show the costs of the failing locks or include Mr. Lester’s warnings about them. He didn’t tell her he had spent yesterday bribing a clerk and a crew foreman to hear their unvarnished thoughts once the engineer poured out his anxiety, or that they confirmed Lester’s charges. “I wanted you to know,” he said instead. “Before you wrote to Marchmont to send the funds.”

She shoved him away. “How can that be right?” she cried. “How? I don’t—” She put her hands on the sides of her head and paced away from him. “It can’t be right,” she insisted. “There are models of successful locks—all they need to do is build ones like those! Why would they persist with unworkable designs? It makes no sense!”

“I agree—” he started to say, but she shook her head.

“Take me home.” She turned and stormed toward the carriage. “I can’t believe it.”

“Very well.” He followed her to the carriage, where she threw herself into the seat and turned away from him, her face set in fury and indignation. She didn’t say a word as he drove back into Frome, even when he handed her down at the inn. “Should I walk you up?” he asked, thinking he could have a quick word with Mrs. Bates. The news had hit Tessa hard.

“Why?” She looked at him with dead eyes and turned to walk away. “I’m perfectly well.”

He caught her arm. “I can see you are not,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry—”

“For what?” She didn’t tell him to release her, but her tone conveyed it fully. “What have you done wrong?”

He was sorry she’d been lied to, and sorrier still that she had believed it. He wasn’t sorry she knew, and he wasn’t even sorry he’d had to tell her. But he knew Tessa.
She is so enormously clever
, Mrs. Bates had said, and she was right. Tessa was perhaps the most intelligent person he’d ever met, man or woman, and she had made it her shining virtue, her point of pride. But he had never known a clever person who liked to be proved wrong, even less when they had been deceived and not spotted the deception. Tessa didn’t trust lightly, but even the keenest mind had to accept some things on faith. Scott had treated her with apparent respect, as if he esteemed her as much as any man, and all along he’d been playing her for a fool. Charlie allowed her every right to be angry and humiliated and shaken.

He let go of her arm and she walked away without a backward glance.

Chapter 14

H
e couldn’t sleep that night. It had begun to rain after dinner, first a gentle drizzle that steadily grew harder until it drummed on the slate roof and rattled against the windows. Charlie sent Barnes and the other servants to their beds and sat in front of his sitting room fire, drinking brandy and brooding.

What the hell was he doing? He’d come into Somerset to catch a blackmailer, find Dorothy Cope, and eliminate any threat to his inheritance. So far he’d located Hiram Scott but done nothing to confront him, heard not one word of Dorothy, and learned nothing of any help in saving his brothers and himself from penury and disgrace. Instead he’d cultivated an old lady’s devotion, gone out drinking with engineers and laborers, and fallen head over heels for a direct, confident woman who thought him a bit of an idiot. Which, all things considered, he most likely was.

He let his head fall back against the hard sofa and sighed. If only Tessa Neville had been a jolly, middle-aged woman. If only Scott had been the calculating thief he’d pictured. If only Edward or Gerard had come instead, and left him to continue his useless but happy life in London.

That last thought floated away as soon as it drifted through his mind. Edward and Gerard wouldn’t have known the first thing to say to Tessa. She would have astounded Edward, horrified Gerard, and neither would have ever truly appreciated the first thing about her. He raised the brandy glass to his lips. He wasn’t sorry Tessa was as she was, either. That was his entire trouble—he liked her too damned much just as she was, and he didn’t know what to do about it. That was why he was sitting in the dark, drinking alone, trying to think how he could raise her spirits after the devastating blow of this afternoon. Perhaps he could go pound Hiram Scott into a bloody mess; that would satisfy two inclinations at once, and he had almost convinced himself it was a brilliant idea when there was a faint knock on the front door.

Tessa Neville stood on his doorstep, soaking wet. Her dark curls had escaped her bedraggled bonnet and hung in sodden ropes around her neck. Rain dripped off the tip of her nose. She looked up at him with those magnificent green eyes and said, “You were right.”

“It shocks me as much as it shocks you,” he said. “Come in out of the rain.”

“How did you know?”

“A lucky guess,” he said. “Did you walk here?” There was no carriage or horse behind her. It was a miracle she hadn’t gotten lost or been swept into the stream by the gusting rain.

“I don’t believe you. It wasn’t a guess at all,” she said.

“Come inside,” he said again. “It’s raining, you see.”

“How did you know to ask?” She stayed on the doorstep as if she hadn’t heard him. When he reached out and took her arm to pull her through the doorway, she didn’t resist. “To get the engineer drunk? To—” She paused, then sneezed loudly.

“That’s what wastrels do, my dear; we get drunk with anyone who cares to lift a pint with us.” He peeled the cloak from her shoulders and tossed it back outside before closing the door. It couldn’t get any more wet than it already was, lying out on the steps. He rooted in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. “Here.”

“You sought out the engineer,” she said, letting him fold her hand around the handkerchief when she made no move to take it. “Why?”

Charlie shrugged, unknotting her bonnet ribbons as she just stood there, pale and soaked and stunned. “Chance.” He hadn’t been looking for fault in the canal; he didn’t care one way or the other about that. His hope had been to learn something about Scott, anything that would hint at why he sent Durham the blackmail letters. It was really nothing but chance that the engineer, thinking him a skeptical investor, had poured out his doubts and guilt instead.

“You’re not a wastrel,” she said in a low voice. Her eyes were unearthly in the low light. “You’re not a scoundrel.”

“I knew I would improve your opinion of me, given enough time.” He got the bonnet off and smoothed a strand of wet hair from her forehead. Her skin was cool and damp under his hand. “You should get dry,” he murmured, but his fingers stayed where they were, moving over her skin, touching her hair.

“Why did you come to Frome?” Her voice had dropped even further, into a husky register that did terrible things to his already faltering restraint. “Was it because of the canal?”

“Yes,” he lied without hesitation. “Let—Let me ring for Barnes. You should have some tea . . . or coffee . . .”

“I don’t want tea.” She stared up at him with those stunning green eyes. Water dripped from her sodden clothes in a steady plip-plop on the floor, but neither one of them moved. “What would you do if I kissed you?” she whispered.

He looked at her for a long, long moment. Even dripping wet and almost blue with cold, she was beautiful. She was magnificent, in every way. “I would kiss you back,” he replied. “And take you to my bed to ravish you for the rest of the night and most of tomorrow.” Her lips parted, and he took a painful breath. “Which is why I should drive you back to The Golden Hind and put you safely into Mrs. Bates’s hands. You need a hot bath and dry clothes and a cup of tea, and if you stay here . . .”

“Make love to me,” she whispered. “Ravish me.”

He held very still. “I don’t believe it counts as ravishment if the victim requests it.”

She looked up at him and touched his chest, her fingers light but steady on his waistcoat buttons. “I don’t care what you call it. I want you.”

His heart slammed into his ribs. His hands shook as he stroked her jaw, the side of her neck, the smooth slope of her collarbone. “Christ, Tessa. A woman shouldn’t say such things to a man . . .”

She blinked. Her fingers moved down his chest. “You want me, too.” Charlie inhaled so hard his eyes closed.

“Mrs. Bates told me you weren’t like other women,” he said between his teeth. “I didn’t know how right she was . . .”

She leaned into him, her breasts soft against his chest. “You don’t want to bed me?”

He wanted her so badly, bed be damned. There was a sofa ten feet away, and a wall right behind her. He sucked in a deep, fortifying breath, trying not to push his hips forward, against hers, even though his pulse was screaming for just that. “You’re upset. In the morning—”

She brushed her lips along his jaw. “Do you think I’m not myself?”

“You’ve just had a terrible shock,” he tried to say. Holy Mother of God, her hand was still moving, lower across his stomach, and he wasn’t a decent enough man to move away. “Don’t . . . ah . . . regret . . .”

“I wanted you,” she went on, sounding remarkably lucid and damnably certain, “even before you kissed me the other night. Please, Gresham . . . Charles—”

His mouth was on hers before she finished saying his name. This was Tessa, strong-willed and confident and bold. It seemed as though he had wanted her forever, and now that she admitted she wanted him . . . there wasn’t a moment to be wasted in hollow protests.

Tessa had known when she slipped out of the inn in Frome that she was going to end up in Gresham’s bed. He wanted her, and she couldn’t deny any longer that she wanted him. The sensible worries that had consumed her before had been eroded and undermined by that kiss, that breathless moment when it seemed as though her soul had finally found its mate. For two days she had tried not to think of it; souls did not have mates, and even if hers did, it certainly wouldn’t be the wealthy, impossibly handsome, silver-tongued Earl of Gresham. Her soul’s mate was far more likely to be a practical village merchant intent on stretching his every farthing. Instead, for reasons she didn’t understand, she was falling, helplessly, deeper in love with Gresham every day. Every argument her head made, her heart ignored. She didn’t want to fall in love. She hadn’t even wanted to like him. And yet here she was, soaked to the skin, winding her arms around his neck and kissing him back as if her life depended on it.

He broke off the kiss with a groan. “You’re soaking wet,” he breathed, his fingers working at the buttons of her dress. “This dress has to go . . .”

Tessa nodded. “Yes, hurry.” She began working at the lower buttons. She only dimly felt the chill of the rain now. It was desire, not cold, that made her fingers shake as she forced one button after another free of the fabric. His fingers were slower than hers, but he was also still kissing her neck and jaw, and when all the fastenings of the dress finally parted, there was no hesitation at all in the way he stripped the bodice from her.

“Even your shift is soaked,” he muttered. Tessa nodded, struggling out of the clinging wet fabric as he peeled it down her body and went to work on her petticoat. Now she felt the chill again, in just her undergarments. His arm went around her waist as she shivered, but then he stopped. Tessa looked up into his face and felt her stomach knot up at the focused desire she saw there. Gently, almost reverently, he traced his fingertips down her throat to the curve of her breast, circling her erect nipple through the wet lawn of her shift.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment forever,” he said in a dark voice.

Tessa licked her lips. “So have I.” Her back arched involuntarily as he scraped his thumb over her flesh.

His gaze flew to meet hers. She had never seen him so intent and serious, and touched his cheek. “Are you that surprised?” she asked, trying to smile. “I was certain you knew . . .”

“That’s it.” He stopped stroking her breast only to sweep her into his arms, lifting her right out of the crumpled pile of her wet dress and petticoat. “I want you”—he kissed her as he strode through the hall—“naked”—and again at the foot of the stairs—“in my bed”—Tessa laughed, clinging to his neck as he paused, pressing her against the wall for a moment so he could nip her earlobe between his teeth before continuing up the stairs—“for many hours to come.”

“I’m not leaving,” she said as he opened a door upstairs and then kicked it closed behind them.

“Not for a very long time,” he agreed, letting her feet down and spinning her around to unlace her corset. When it came loose, Tessa pulled it off but backed away.

“Take off the shift,” he commanded.

She shook her head, winding her finger in the ribbon that held it closed. The fabric of her shift was plastered to her skin, so wet it was almost transparent. “Take off your coat. And waistcoat.”

His grin flashed, dangerous and promising rather than lighthearted and easy, and he stripped off the garments.

“Now the boots,” she said, backing toward the bed.

His dark gaze fixed on her, he complied, advancing on her all the while.

“The shirt,” she whispered, her heart pounding in her ears. “The trousers.”

“The shift,” he retorted, whipping the shirt over his head.

She bumped into the bedpost, and reached behind her to curl her fingers around it for strength. He was beautiful, broad-shouldered and lean-waisted, his skin golden in the light of the lone lamp. His hair fell loose around his temples, ruffled by her own hands, but didn’t hide the heat in his eyes. Without the elegant trappings of crisp cravat and tailored waistcoat, he wasn’t the imposing earl, but just a man . . . who wanted her as desperately as she wanted him. With shaking hands, Tessa reached for the hem of her shift and tugged it off, casting it aside with a faint plop as it hit the floor.

His gaze sharpened into ravenous hunger. All trace of laughter and geniality vanished from his expression. “I should have brought another lamp.”

She shifted her weight. “I could go get it.”

That devil’s grin touched his lips, and he looked at her with gleaming eyes. “You wouldn’t make it to the door.”

“Oh?” She made a motion as if to try it, but he caught her before she’d gone two steps.

“Do you really want to leave?” he whispered, brushing aside the wet tangle of her hair so he could skim his lips along the back of her neck. His hand moved down her arm to cup lightly around her breast. “Don’t tease me any longer, Tessa . . .”

She shivered, as much from his words as from the way he was playing with her nipple again. “I haven’t teased you at all.”

He laughed softly, still touching her gently, his fingers tracing her hip bones, the edge of her ribs, the faint swell of her belly. His chest was broad and solid against her back. “You’ve driven me half mad.”

“No, I meant I wasn’t trying . . .” Her words scattered in a sigh as he wrapped both arms around her. He was still nuzzling the back of her neck, and every slight scrape of teeth on her skin made her quiver. “I didn’t
mean
to tease you,” she tried to explain.

“That’s undoubtedly why it worked so well.” He was kissing her shoulder now, his breath hot on her skin.

Tessa bit back a moan and wet her lips. “Charles,” she said. It felt daring and intimate, using his name. Of course, she was naked, pressed up against his nearly naked body, eyeing his bed with longing. Intimacy felt right.

“Charlie,” he whispered. “I despise the name Charles. It sounds so pompous.”

Tessa laughed in spite of herself. “You are hardly pompous.”

“I certainly hope not now.” He flattened his palms on her waist and slid them down over her hips, then leisurely back up the front of her body. This time she couldn’t hide the moan. “You’re bewitching,” he said in a voice both soft and dark. “Simply exquisite.”

“Charlie . . .” Her knees were giving out as he stroked his wicked, beautiful hands over her skin. She managed to turn in his arms to face him, touching his face with an unsteady hand. “Make love to me . . .”

“Yes,” he said as if roused from a dream. With shocking ease he picked her up and carried her to the bed. “Absolutely.”

Restraint faded quickly in bed. Tessa had a fleeting thought that he must be the very wickedest of rakes, because no man should be able to wring such feelings from a woman. Every inch of her skin seemed to grow more sensitive, as if her nerves were straining toward him. It confounded her. She was no virgin, and she’d thought she knew what to expect. But with Charlie . . . He turned her onto her back at one point, and she realized she hadn’t even noticed she was on her stomach. He surrounded her, engulfed her, until she had no capacity for thoughts or feelings that didn’t center on him, and her, and the way they moved together.