Chapter Thirteen

BY THE TIME MINNIE SNUFFED HER CANDLE that night and slipped between her covers, all the emotion of the day had passed from her. She felt as if she were standing in the aftermath of a wildfire, the terrain around her blackened and burned as far as the eye could see. She could almost smell the smoke, could feel the hidden embers inside her that had not yet burned to cold ash.

“Don’t fall in love with him, Minnie,” she warned herself. But the room was dark, and her bedsheets had not yet warmed from her body heat.

If only he’d been less handsome, less wealthy…and not at all a duke. A blacksmith. A bookseller. Someone else with that keen mind, those piercing eyes, that brilliant smile that seemed to be made for her alone.

Instead, he was one of the highest peers of the realm. He could have his pick of thousands of women. In fact, he was probably picking a woman right now—that was the sort of thing dukes did, was it not? Dukes entertained women as mistresses, choosing from blond and brown and black hair, depending on the whim of the evening, taking whatever they wanted and leaving a handful of coin as memory. Being a duke meant that one had a perpetual harem at one’s fingertips. All one had to do was ask for it.

The thought should have disgusted her, but for some reason she imagined Robert—no, she had to think of him as the duke, not as a name, not as a person—looking over a passel of girls offered by a thin-faced proprietress. She imagined his gaze settling on some girl with honey-brown hair and a larger-than-usual bosom.

“Her,” he would say. “I want her tonight.”

I want you.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, to imagine that his desire—whatever inkling of it he had—would persist long enough for him to purchase a substitute. She writhed in her bed. But she couldn’t get the notion out of her mind.

He might be in bed with her at this very moment. His hands would brush her br**sts, like so. His lips would find not the palm of her hand, but her neck, her lips. There would be no hesitation, no holding back. There would be nothing but his rock-hard want.

His body would cover hers, and she would surrender to him. She would spread her legs, wrapping them around him…

Those thoughts were enough to warm her bed, but once she’d started the imagery, she could not shut it off. It was her own fingers between her legs, her own hand against her nipple. But she imagined him wanting her as much as she wanted him, taking her in her imagination the way she could never allow in real life. He plunged into her, hard; she shook as she brought herself to the brink. And when she came, biting her lip to keep herself from screaming, it was his face that she saw.

The bed was too hot after that, so hot that she threw back the blanket and let the cold air wash over her, honing her ni**les to hard points once more. But the cold didn’t bring the clarity she so desperately needed.

She stood, crossed the room to the washbasin, and poured from the pitcher. The water was ice-cold; the washcloth rough against her skin.

Maybe he had picked a woman tonight who looked like her. Maybe he hadn’t even picked a woman, but had sat in his chamber and done to himself what she had just done. The thought left her with a deep wistfulness.

If only…

“There are no ifs,” she told herself sharply. “Only what is.”

This was the reality that she had to accept: What had just happened—that was the closest she would ever come to making love with the Duke of Clermont. One night, she might think of him, and if she were very lucky, he might spare a thought for her in response. Her throat tightened with yearning.

It didn’t matter.

She’d learned long ago that her own emotions never mattered. Things were what they were, no matter how she felt about them. And this particular emotion… This one had sent her reeling far enough off course.

Still, she fumbled open her curtains. On another night, she might have looked down—down at the cabbage fields, down at the half ring of crushed gravel in front of her great-aunts’ cottage.

Tonight, for the space of time it took her heartbeat to return to normal, she looked up. Up at the quarter moon, gleaming through the fringe of clouds, up at stars that twinkled for queen and peasant alike. She looked up until the clouds covered the moon and cut out all the light.

IT WAS MUCH LATER THAT EVENING when Robert walked the streets of Leicester again—this time with Oliver beside him. The fog had descended, mixing with the coal smoke to form an unholy pea soup, one that clung to his coat. Somewhere, a church bell to his right began to chime the nine o’clock hour; it was joined shortly by its neighbors to the left, and then those behind him, before him—a chorus of bells that seemed all the more eerie within the quiet grip of the mist.

“What is it?” Oliver finally asked. They’d been walking since the church had rung the half hour without saying a word.

Robert clenched his fist in his pocket.

“I am trying to do the right thing,” he finally said.

The town was quiet. Strange, how sharply the factory whistle divided the days here. One moment, you could not escape the rattle of machinery; the next, it fell still and silent, like some noisome behemoth collapsing in its tracks. It left a curious silence in its wake, one louder than the quiet of a countryside. He could almost feel his teeth rattle with the sound the machinery did not make.

“Is something going awry?” Oliver glanced at him.

“There’s this woman…” Robert let out the words on a great whoosh of air, and his brother cackled aloud.

“God, I’ve been waiting for you to tell me. Sebastian mentioned her and was shocked when I had no idea what he meant. Who is it?”

Robert told him. Not everything—he couldn’t tell his brother about the handbills, as that was a risk that he insisted on taking alone. But about Minnie—how she seemed so quiet until she spoke to him. How she turned him upside down.

“I kissed her. I can’t forget it,” he said. “I can’t do it again. I know how these things are done, and this isn’t right.”

“It’s not right?” Oliver asked mildly.

The silence seemed to hold an edge now. They rarely talked about the circumstances of their brotherhood, but it stood between them. Oliver’s mother had been a governess when the Duke of Clermont had visited her household. What choice did a governess have when a duke pursued? If she said yes, he would have her. If she said no, he would have her.

“I don’t know what right is,” he finally said. “I’m a duke. She’s the great-niece of a woman who has a mere pretension to gentility. If I do something wrong here, you’re the only one I trust to punch me in the stomach.”