Why Dukes Say I Do (26 page)

“I know,” he said. As he shifted to take the seat beside her, Isabella felt a moment of panic. Which he must have sensed, because he was careful to keep some distance between them. “But you must learn to share the burden,” he said, reaching down to where their hands were joined. “I, too, have grown too used to being in control of things. But the devil of it is, Isabella, that we are none of us in control of things. It simply isn’t possible.”

“I am in control of myself,” Isabella said quietly, looking down at their hands rather than at the man beside her.

“You are,” he said, bringing her hand closer, and slowly, carefully, finger by finger removing the kid glove that covered it.

She took in a breath and held it as they both watched him work the leather over her hand, unclothing her hand with as much care and finesse as if he were removing her gown.

“No fair,” she said softly, raising her eyes to meet his. “Your hand is still covered.”

He raised one auburn brow. “So it is,” he said with that crooked grin. “I suppose you’d better remove my glove. For fairness’s sake, of course.”

“Of course,” she agreed, quaking inside despite her outward stillness. As he had done, she took his hand in both of hers and finger by finger removed the glove until his left hand was as naked as her right one. Tossing his glove to join hers on the opposite seat, she examined his hand. It was not the hand of a pampered gentleman. Though his nails were neatly trimmed, there were calluses where he’d held farm tools, or repaired bridges, or done whatever else the village of Nettledean had asked of him. It was the hand of a man who was not afraid of hard work. A strong hand.

Wordlessly he entwined their fingers and held her hand against his. Palm to palm.

There was something about the feel of his naked hand against hers that was more intoxicating than a kiss, more intimate than sex.

“Our hands fit well together,” Trevor said quietly. Isabella noted absently the tiny lines radiating from the corners of his blue eyes. They were the eyes of a man who laughed, who showed compassion, who labored alongside his tenants when necessary in the warm sun.

He was everything her late husband was not.

She wanted to look away, suddenly frightened at being the focus of such a good and honorable man. But she did not have the strength to do it. For all his virtue, he also commanded a degree of power over her.

“We fit well together,” she agreed. “For now.”

At last she managed to break the spell and look away. And it may have been her imagination, but she could have sworn she felt his disappointment.

“For as long as you’ll have me,” he said, after a moment. He lifted their joined hands to kiss the back of hers. “I’m not Wharton, Isabella. I won’t hold you captive or try to bend you to my will. I don’t want that kind of marriage.”

In spite of herself, she was curious. “What kind of marriage do you want?” It had never actually occurred to her that he would have any sort of expectations about their marriage. Foolish, she realized now, but she’d been so busy wrestling with her own fears and expectations about marrying again that she’d not considered he might have some sort of fears over the match. He was a man after all. And men, as she well knew from past experience, held all the power in marriage.

“I would very much like a marriage like my parents had,” he said without a trace of bashfulness. It was one of the qualities she most appreciated in Trevor—his matter-of-fact way of explaining things. “Theirs was a love match, of course, so we’ve already missed the mark there, of course. But what I would like, very much, for us is to have the sort of partnership they shared.”

“I do not know that I’ve ever seen a marriage such as that,” Isabella said truthfully. She had hoped for such a match with Wharton, or at least something amicable. But he’d been too unwilling to allow her any sort of free will for that sort of marriage to develop between them. “I should like to try it, though.”

“I think we’ve already proved we work well together,” Trevor said, stroking the back of her hand with his thumb. “We managed well enough with Eleanor and Belinda.”

“When you weren’t ripping up at Eleanor over her gown,” Isabella said with a grin. “I thought the talk about redheads and their tempers was an old wives’ tale.”

“She’s my little sister,” he said with mock affront. “I am not ready to think of her as able to wear a gown like that. If it were up to me she’d wear pinafores and her hair in braids for the rest of her days.”

“Which is why it’s a good thing I was there to smooth the waters,” Isabella said. “I suppose you are right. We do work well together.”

“An excellent start for a marriage partnership, I think,” he said. “But now you must allow me my male pride and let me slay this dragon for you.”

“Which one?” Isabella asked without irony. “There are several chasing me at the present time.

“Not,” she added, “that I acknowledge you alone will be the one to find this person, mind you. I still believe that I should have a hand in ferreting them out and making them pay.”

“That bit of stubbornness aside,” Trevor said seriously, “I think we should work on the unknown dragon first. Thistleback is likely on his way back to London now. And my grandmother is there are as well. We will deal with her when we travel there in a week or so.”

Isabella couldn’t stop the gasp of surprise she felt at his announcement. “Do you mean it?” She was so relieved that she felt tears well in her eyes. She hadn’t known how much her worries over the dowager’s threats against Perdita’s match had been preying on her mind.

At his nod she threw her arms about his shoulders and hugged him close. “Thank you, Trevor. Thank you so much. I know you did not wish it, but I will be so relieved to have this particular worry removed from my mind. You cannot even imagine.”

“I did promise you that I would go there with you if you agreed to spend time with me doing some estate business. And with the Palmers’ ball out of the way, you have attended all of them.”

“I know,” she said, pulling back from him and hastily wiping the tears from her eyes. “But, as you know, I am not accustomed to gentlemen who keep their word.”

He handed her his handkerchief, which she took with a sheepish grin. “I hope you will learn to expect it, my dear,” he said, squeezing her hand. “You deserve it.”

She wasn’t so sure about that, but she could hardly argue with him when he was being so incredibly good about everything. Still, she was feeling a bit uncomfortable with the degree of emotion she’d just shown, so she turned the subject back to the one he’d begun with. “I cannot think of who might wish to frighten me. Only a few people know the true circumstances of Gervase’s death. My sister, Georgina Mowbray, the dowager, and your personal secretary, Lord Archer. To everyone else we put it about that Gervase’s death was a terrible accident.”

“I didn’t realize Lord Archer was aware of what had happened,” Trevor said thoughtfully. “He has seemed to be quite reliable in our correspondence over Ormonde estate business.”

Isabella frowned. “You have been in correspondence with Lord Archer?” she demanded. “For how long? And why didn’t you tell me earlier? That might have gone a long way toward appeasing the dowager!”

Trevor had the good grace to look abashed. “I have handled much of the estate business at Ormonde House since my cousin’s death.” He thrust a hand through his russet hair, revealing his agitation. “You know me well enough by now to know that I could not allow the people of the ducal estate to suffer because I do not wish to bow to my grandmother’s wishes. I knew Lord Archer’s brother at university and he always seemed to be a levelheaded fellow. So I allowed Archer to guide me. He likely did most of the work for my cousin in any case.”

Isabella shook her head, dumbfounded. “I should have known it,” she said finally. “It did seem rather out of character for someone as conscientious as you to abandon the estate just because you were unhappy with the dowager.”

“So,” Trevor continued, once more taking her hand in his. “If you have allowed Lord Archer in on your secret, I suppose that means you trust him?”

“Implicitly,” Isabella said. “Which is why I do not think he can have anything to do with the threats against me. If it comes to it, I should think it more likely that the dowager was behind the plot than I would believe it of Lord Archer.”

“But what motive would she have for frightening you?” Trevor extended his long legs before him in the cramped interior of the carriage. “If she truly wished to frighten you, wouldn’t she keep you in London so that she could watch the results of her handiwork?”

“She was devastated by Gervase’s loss,” Isabella said, thinking back to the days just after the duke’s death. There had been some speculation that the dowager would go into a decline. Of course that had come from her own maid, who was loyal to a fault and given to dramatics. “Even so, I believe you are right. If she blamed Gervase’s death on me, which she may well do, she would have kept me close to her so that she could see me suffering through her torments. She would hardly send me into the country where it would be more difficult to manage her little surprises.”

“Whoever it is,” Trevor said, “they must have either followed you to Yorkshire or traveled with you. Have you noticed anyone who seems familiar lurking around? A servant who takes too much interest in you, perhaps? Or a face on the streets of York who looked like someone you’d seen before?”

Isabella shook her head. “No,” she said with a weary sigh. “I’ve racked my brain trying to think of who it might have been that sent the letters or the snuffbox or ruined my painting, but I can think of no one. I trust all of the servants who came with me from London and I haven’t seen anyone in our trips to York or out and about in the village who looked familiar.”

To her dismay, she felt tears well in her eyes again. For someone who prided herself on her self-possession, Isabella was losing control of her emotions with disturbing frequency. She turned her head so that Trevor wouldn’t see, but he missed nothing.

“There now,” he said, gathering her up as if she weighed nothing and pulling her into his lap. “I know you’re frustrated with this business. I am, too, if you want to know the truth. In fact, I might burst into tears at any minute. I can be quite the watering pot actually. You are in for a long and tearful marriage with me, I’m afraid.”

She laughed at this absurdity, even as he took his handkerchief from her hand and dabbed at her eyes. They both grinned at each other like fools until something changed between them. He kissed the end of her nose. And said, his voice barely a whisper, “Let me share your burdens, Isabella. My shoulders are broad. I can carry them.”

She might have resisted, but confronted with this man who seemed willing and able to give her shelter, she found she no longer wanted to. Slanting her head, she leaned forward and took his mouth in a sure, strong kiss. Saying with her body everything she was unwilling to say with her voice.

To her awe, she felt him tremble against her for just the barest moment before he slipped his arms around her and kissed her back. Perhaps he was not so laconic about this match as he pretended. His easygoing manner was, she realized, just as much of a disguise as her own iciness. Donned to protect the tender soul beneath.

He allowed her to take the lead in the kiss, opening his lips only when she licked softly at the seam between them. Surprised and excited by the novelty of being the one to do the pursuing, she tentatively stroked her tongue into his mouth. She could feel the tension in his muscles, the way that he held himself back. She knew with certainty that he was giving her this power. And it overwhelmed her as no degree of seduction on his part could have.

Breathing in his scent of sandalwood mixed with something innately Trevor, she unleashed her own burgeoning passion and kissed him with all the pent-up desire she’d felt since that first night on the roadside in Nettledean. Clumsily she tugged off her other glove and stroked her hands over his chest, frustrated by the clothes that prevented her from feeling his bare skin.

He must have sensed her annoyance, because he pulled off his own glove and unbuttoned his coat and waistcoat, all the while allowing her to take the lead at their joined mouths. Taking her hand, he guided it to his side, slipping it beneath his opened coat and waistcoat. She felt the warmth of his skin through the fine lawn of his shirt but was distracted by the feel of his erection straining against her bottom.

Gathering her skirts in her other hand, before he could protest she came up on one knee and lifted the other to straddle his lap. “There,” she said against his mouth. “That’s much better.”

With one hand she stroked him through his breeches, from base to tip. It was something her husband had demanded of her from the time they were first wed, but she knew instinctively that Trevor was allowing her to do this. There was no demanding hand covering hers, telling her how to stroke him. Only a hand at her breast, stroking her in tandem with her own hand on him, robbing her of breath even as she felt him gasp against her mouth.

“Sweeting,” he whispered, “this is lovely, but…”—he paused as she stilled her hand and squeezed lightly—“god in heaven, we have to stop or I will forget myself.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Isabella asked, against his mouth. “I want to see you forget yourself, Trevor. I am not the only one who needs to lose control.”

He gripped her hand and removed it from his erection, regret shining in his eyes. “That may be true,” he said, kissing her wrist lightly and lifting her hand to rest on his shoulder. “But I choose not to do so in a carriage on the road to Gretna. There will be time enough for you to test me tonight.”

Isabella sighed. “I suppose you are right. It would not be seemly for the Duke of Ormonde to take his wife in a carriage.”

Trevor laughed. “It has nothing to do with seemliness or the dukedom.” His eyes darkened as he kissed her lightly. “I simply know that once I get started discovering every inch of your body”—he pulled back and stroked his thumb over her lower lip—“I will not want any interruptions.”