CHAPTER FIVE
FRANCESCA BLINKED, for a moment too taken aback to think. Then she lifted her chin and responded in a glacial tone, “I beg your pardon? I am sure I haven’t the slightest notion what you are talking about.”
“Please. That innocent expression may work with others, but not with someone who’s known you since you were in short skirts. I am talking about your little performance tonight.”
“Performance? Don’t you think you are being a trifle dramatic?”
“No. What else would you call it? First you contrived for the three of us to attend the theater tonight—even though you are not friends with her.”
“How can you know that?”
Rochford shot a level look at her. “Francesca…really, give me a bit more credit than that. Then, when we got to the theater, it was ‘What do you think about this, Lady Althea?’ and ‘How do you like that composer, Lady Althea?’ Not to mention your plan to leave the two of us together while you went to call on the Eversons. Admit it. You were practically throwing Althea Robart at me this evening. I must say, it isn’t like you to be so ham-fisted.”
“Yes, well, if the woman had even an inkling how to carry on a conversation with a man, I wouldn’t have had to be,” Francesca retorted in an aggrieved tone.
“Why? Don’t tell me that she has set her cap for me. I cannot imagine her unbending enough to pursue anyone. Nor can I envision her mother seeking anyone else’s help, either.”
“No. No one asked me to. Althea is not trying to catch you. I think that should be clear.”
“Again I ask, why?”
Francesca simply looked at him for a long moment, wondering whether there was any good way out of this situation. At her delay, Rochford crossed his arms and cocked a brow at her.
“Don’t bother to think up a lie. We both know I shan’t believe it.”
She grimaced. “I daresay not. Can you not accept that I was simply trying to do you a favor?”
“By saddling me with a woman who can recite her entire family tree for five generations back?” he retorted.
“I did not realize she was so boring,” Francesca admitted. “I am not well acquainted with the woman.”
“Yet you thought she was the perfect woman for me?”
“No. I thought she was only one of a number of candidates.”
He stared, seemingly bereft of speech. Finally, speaking each word with great care, he said, “Why would you have any candidates?”
“Well, really, Rochford, it is time that you married. You are thirty-eight, after all, and as the Duke of Rochford, you have a duty to—”
“I am well aware of my age, thank you,” he ground out. “As well as of my many duties as the Duke of Rochford. What I fail to understand is why you thought I was seeking a wife. Or why you should be the one to provide me with prospects!”
“Rochford!” Francesca cast a glance up the staircase. “Shh. The servants will hear.”
She turned and picked up the candelabra, then slipped into the drawing room, motioning for him to follow her. She set the candelabra down on the nearest table and closed the door behind her.
“Very well.” She faced him, squaring her shoulders. “I will tell you, since you are so insistent.”
“Please do.” Rochford watched her grimly, his entire body taut as wire.
“I did it to help you,” Francesca began a trifle nervously. “I looked around and found several women whom I thought would be…qualified to be your duchess. I wasn’t trying to push any particular one upon you. But I thought that if you were around them, you might come to realize that you had an affinity for one or the other.”
“You still have not explained why you felt compelled to do this.”
“Because of what I did to you!” Francesca exclaimed, feeling tears rising and battling them back down. She took a deep breath and went on more calmly. “Because I believed Daphne instead of you. Because I did not trust you. I broke our engagement. I wanted to make up for the mistake I made fifteen years ago.”
Rochford looked at her for a long moment. His face was set and his voice deadly quiet as he said, “You broke our engagement, and when you found out you were wrong, this was your response? To find me a wife to replace the one I lost?”
“No. Of course not,” she protested. “You make it sound quite horrid.”
“How else is it supposed to sound?”
“I was not offering her as a replacement for me. That is absurd. I just thought— I know that you have not married all these years. And I feared that I— Well, that what I did to you must have influenced you against marriage. That I made you feel that women were not to be trusted, that we would all fail you. I felt responsible.”
“Not marrying was my choice, Francesca.”
“I cannot help but feel that if it had not been for me and what I did, you would have married long ago,” she insisted. “I was concerned about you. And I thought that this is a skill I apparently have, bringing couples together. I did not mean to upset you, truly. I was trying to help. I mean, obviously you must marry.”
He grimaced. “Now you sound like my grandmother.” He swung away, pacing a few steps, then whirled back to face her. “Do you think that I am so incapable of wooing a woman that you must do it for me? So lacking in charm? Do you think that I will frighten off any prospective bride if I am left to my own devices?”
Francesca’s eyes widened. “I—I—”
He stalked back to her, anger fairly crackling off him. “Am I so clumsy? Tell me, you are the one who would know. Was my courtship that dreadful?”
He stopped, looming over her, and she stared up at him, stunned. His anger was overwhelming. He seemed so huge, so close, his eyes lit with an inner fire.
“Was my kiss that unappealing?” he went on, his voice so low she could barely hear it. “Was my touch that repulsive to you?”
Then, astonishing her even more, he grabbed her by the arms and pulled her to him, his mouth coming down to seize hers in a hard, thorough kiss.
Francesca felt rooted to the spot, every thought in her head flying off into the atmosphere. She was aware of nothing except the fierce grip of his fingers upon her upper arms and the hot, hard pressure of his lips upon hers. A flame shot to life inside her, and she trembled, astonished as much by her own reaction as by what Rochford had done.
He moved his mouth against hers insistently, opening her to him, and his tongue swept inside. Heat washed through her, and her skin prickled. She felt strangely giddy and weak, as if she might tumble to the ground if his hands were not clutching her arms, holding her up.
Just as suddenly as he had kissed her, he pulled back. His eyes were wide, the light in them fierce. He let out an oath and pulled his hands away from her. Then he turned and strode out the door.
For a long moment Francesca stood where she was, staring after him. Her heart thundered in her chest, and her breath came hard and quick in her throat. She felt dazed, bombarded by a hundred different emotions.
His words had twisted her heart, and tears welled in her eyes. She had wounded him unknowingly. She wanted to run after him, to cry and beg him to stay and hear her out. Hurting him had been the furthest thing from her mind. Somehow she must make him believe that. She must make him see that she had meant nothing unkind by what she had done.
How could it have turned into such a disaster? She had thought he might be a bit annoyed at her machinations, but it had never occurred to her that he would be so furious. Now, however, she feared that she might have lost Rochford entirely, that she might no longer even have him as a friend. The thought of that made her cold all through.
And why had he kissed her? His kiss could hardly be considered an expression of feeling—or, at least, not an expression of any good sort of feeling. His mouth had been hard and brutal, seizing her lips, not asking or seducing. There had been more anger than passion in the way he had grabbed her and pressed his mouth to hers. It had almost been as if he were punishing her.
But what she had felt had been anything but punishment.
Francesca raised her fingertips to her lips, laying them gently against the tingling, sensitive flesh. She could still feel his lips on hers, the taste of his mouth. And deep in her abdomen there was a molten heat. Everything inside her was now jangling and alive in a way she had never felt before…or at least not in years and years.
She wanted to fling herself on her bed and indulge in a good cry. She wanted to curl up and float in the memory of that kiss all over again. Indeed, she was not sure what she wanted at all.
Shaken and confused, Francesca turned and, picking up the candelabra, made her way up to bed.
THE DUKE OF ROCHFORD strode through the front door of White’s, looking neither left nor right. He wasn’t sure why he was there. He certainly had no desire for company right now, but neither had he been able to face the prospect of going back to the huge empty Lilles House.
All he wanted, he thought, was to settle down with a bottle of port and drink himself into oblivion. With that purpose in mind, he gestured toward Timmons, the maitre d’, and flung himself down in a chair across the room, in an area unoccupied by anyone else.
He leaned his head back, closing his eyes as he struggled to restore himself to some semblance of calm. How the devil did she manage to get him twisted around like this, after all these years? He knew that he was generally regarded as an even-tempered sort—calm in a crisis and slow to anger. It was only with Francesca that he found himself on the edge of exploding.
Footsteps stopped beside his chair. Rochford kept his eyes closed in the hopes that the person would decide to pass him by. But there was no sound of anyone moving on, and after a moment he let out a little sigh and opened his eyes.
“Gideon!” He didn’t know who he had expected his visitor to be—perhaps one of the chaps who were always determined to speak to a duke, seemingly impervious to set-downs or hints—but he certainly had not thought he would see the man who was now standing beside his chair. “What are you doing here?”
“I belong to this club,” the other man answered, a faint smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “Perhaps you remember—you put me forth for membership.”
Rochford grimaced. “I am quite aware of that. It is just that you are so rarely here—particularly not at this time of the evening.” He gestured vaguely toward the chair sitting at a right angle to him. “Sit. Please.”
“One might say the same about you.” Gideon, Lord Radbourne, sat down in the chair Rochford indicated.
Gideon was a cousin of sorts to the duke, another grandnephew of the much-feared Lady Odelia Pencully, and there was a faint hint of family resemblance between them. Both were tall, with thick, dark hair, but Gideon was somewhat shorter, broader of chest and shoulders, and his hair was a shade lighter. It was not that which set him apart, though, so much as the way he carried himself and the harder, warier set to his face. Though an earl, Lord Radbourne had grown up on the hard streets of the East End of London, unaware that he was actually the son of the Earl of Radbourne. It had been only a year or so ago that the truth of his existence had been made known, but in that time he and Rochford had grown into a kind of friendship that had less to do with blood than with their essential natures.
The duke shrugged now, saying, “I admit I am not much one for clubs. I fear I am a boring sort. However, I do drop by now and then for a tipple before bed. But I do not have a beautiful wife waiting for me at home.” He looked significantly at the other man.
“Neither do I,” Gideon returned. “Irene has gone, along with her mother, to visit Lady Wyngate, her brother’s wife. ’Tis almost time for Lady Wyngate’s lying-in, you see.”
“Ah.” Rochford nodded sagely. “And she wants Irene there for the event.”
Gideon’s normally saturnine face lightened with a grin. “I sincerely doubt it. Maura and Irene get along like oil and water—and that is when they are feeling pleasant. No, ’tis Irene’s mother whose presence is requested. Irene is merely traveling with her. Her mother will doubtless be there several weeks, but Irene, I am sure, will be back within a sennight, if she can bear it that long. But for the moment, I am at loose ends.”
“And not enjoying it, I’ll warrant,” Rochford replied. His cousin’s deep attachment to his new bride was well known throughout the ton. There were even those who called him henpecked—though none dared do so to his face, of course.
“No.” Gideon frowned. “I don’t understand it. I was well content by myself before I met Irene. ’Tis strange how empty my house seems without her now.”
Rochford shrugged. “I fear that is a subject beyond this bachelor’s understanding.”
Timmons arrived with the bottle of port and, observant man that he was, two glasses. They spent a few minutes pouring and sipping in companionable silence.
Then Radbourne, with a glance at his companion, began, “I wasn’t certain whether you were desirous of company. You looked as though…I’m not sure…perhaps as though you might be in need of a second.”
The duke let out a short laugh. “No. Nothing so dire as a duel. Only…Lady Haughston.” He finished his drink and poured another.
Gideon did not appear to be particularly enlightened by this explanation. “You are…at odds with the lady?”
“She is the most infuriating, most difficult, most…impossible woman I have ever known!” Rochford burst out.
Gideon blinked. “I—I see.”
“No, I am sure that you do not,” the duke retorted. “You have not spent the last fifteen years trying to deal with the woman.”
Gideon made a noncommital murmur.
“Tonight is just the latest of her many—do you know what she is doing?” The duke fixed him with a black stare. “Do you know what latest idiocy she is trying to foist on me?”
“Indeed not.”
“She wants to find me a wife.” Rochford’s mouth twisted on the word, as if it tasted too bitter to bear. “She has set out to choose the woman she thinks will make the best Duchess of Rochford.”
“I presume that you did not ask her to,” Gideon ventured.
“Indeed not. She thinks that if she finds me a wife, it will somehow make up for—for something that happened long ago.” He paused and glanced at Gideon. “Oh, devil take it! The truth is, she broke off our engagement.”
Gideon gaped at him. “Engagement? You and Lady Haughston are engaged?”
The duke sighed. “We were, long ago. She was not Lady Haughston then. It was fifteen years past, and she was only Lady Francesca, the daughter of the Earl of Selbrooke.”
“But how have I never heard this? I mean, of course I would not have known it at the time, but since I’ve been returned to my family… I cannot imagine why Aunt Odelia or my grandmother or someone has never brought it up.”
“They never knew about it, either,” Rochford replied. “It was a secret engagement.” He sighed, and suddenly he looked older, weary. “Francesca had just turned eighteen. I’d known her practically all her life, of course. Selbrooke’s estate, Redfields, bordered on my lands at Dancy Park. But that last winter, when she was seventeen, and I saw her…” A faint smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “It was as if the scales fell from my eyes. It was Boxing Day, and we held a ball. There she was, wearing long skirts at last, with a blue ribbon in her hair that matched her eyes. I was stunned.” He glanced at his companion ruefully.
“I know the feeling,” Gideon assured him in a dry tone.
“Yes, I imagine you do, at that. So…I fell in love with her. I tried not to. I told myself she was too young. She seemed to return the feeling, but I knew that she had not even made her debut yet. She had not been to London parties, only country things. She knew few men, beyond her relatives and the locals. How was she to truly know her heart?”
Rochford was silent for a moment as he took a drink, then gazed reflectively into his glass. When he looked up again, his face was set, all emotion carefully absent from it. “Finally, I could not bring myself to wait until she had had her first Season. I feared that if I stood back, some other man would move in and sweep her off her feet.”
“So you compromised by making the engagement secret,” Gideon said.
“Exactly. I could see the stars in her eyes. I knew that she thought she loved me. But I feared that she was simply dazzled by her first romance. I could not bear to set her free, with no knowledge of my regard for her, my hopes for the two of us. But I did not want her irrevocably bound to me by a public engagement. If she changed her mind or if she realized that she did not love me as much as she had thought she did, then she would be able to break it off without being subjected to the scandal.”
“I see.” Gideon had not been raised among his peers, but he had learned enough about the society in which he now lived to know that a broken engagement was an enormous scandal that could haunt a woman, in particular, for the rest of her life. As a result, both parties rarely cried off, even if one or the other began to have doubts about the upcoming marriage.
“Unfortunately, in the end I proved to be right. She did not love me enough.”
“What happened?”
The duke shrugged. “She was deceived. She was made to believe that I was having an affair with another woman. I tried to tell her what had really happened, but she would not believe me. She refused to see me. By the end of the Season, she had become engaged to Lord Haughston. And that was the end of it.”
“Until now.”
Rochford nodded. “Until now.” He polished off the liquor in his glass and reached out to pour another drink. “Recently she discovered that she had been lied to, that the woman in question had arranged for Francesca to find the two of us apparently in flagrante delicto. She realized that I had told her the truth and that she had been wrong, that she had treated me unfairly.” He raised the glass toward Gideon in a kind of salute, saying, “So she decided to make it up to me by finding me a wife.”
Gideon watched silently as the other man downed the drink. He had never seen Rochford consume liquor at quite the pace he was drinking it now. Of course, neither had he ever seen him looking quite so…off balance. The duke was one of the most self-contained men he had ever met, rare to show anger or even irritation. But tonight, clearly, he was disturbed, fury bubbling just below the surface, seemingly ready to jump out at any moment, and it was clear that he was having to hold it in with some effort.
“Why the devil did she take it into her head to do that?” Rochford exclaimed as he set his glass down with a thud on the small table between them. “God, and to think for a little while I was fool enough to believe—”
When he did not go on, Gideon prodded quietly, “To believe what?”
Rochford shook his head and made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “It doesn’t matter. It’s nothing.” He paused, then went on. “She told me what she had found out, and she apologized. And then she maneuvered it so that I agreed to escort her and Lady Althea Robart to a play. I thought…”
“That she wanted to go back to—”
“No!” Rochford replied quickly. “Good Gad, no. There’s no question of that, of course. But I thought, perhaps, she hoped we could be better friends now. Then she started throwing Lady Althea at me. Lady Althea, of all people!”
“I don’t know her.”
“You don’t want to,” the duke told him bluntly. “She is pretty enough, but too high in the instep for me. Not to mention that after ten minutes of her conversation, one is ready to go to sleep.”
“Do you still love Lady Haughston?”
Rochford glanced at him, then quickly away, saying gruffly, “Nonsense. Of course not. That is, well, of course I have some degree of feeling for the woman. We are old…not exactly friends, of course, but, in a way she is almost family.”
Gideon cocked a skeptical eyebrow at that description, but refrained from saying anything.
“I have not been nursing an unrequited love for her all these years,” the duke went on firmly. “We could never go back to what we were, what we felt. It has been fifteen years, after all. We both lost those feelings long ago. I’m not angry because I hoped the two of us might— No, it’s just Francesca’s absolute gall in deciding to take over my life. Everyone lets her manage things. She is terribly good at it, maneuvering and arranging.”
A smile lifted the other man’s lips. “I have had experience.”
“But that she should decide to do it for me!” Rochford’s dark eyes snapped. “That she thinks she is better able to choose a wife than I am. That I need her help in getting a woman to marry me!” A muscle in his jaw jumped as he clenched his teeth.
Rochford poured himself a fourth drink and took a healthy slug of it. “Then she has the nerve to preach duty to me. To me! As if I were some young fool who flits about indulging my whims, with no concern for my name or family. As if I had not devoted my life to the title and the estate since I was eighteen years old. To top it off, she implies that I am getting past the age of marrying. As if I must seize some silly girl and father children as fast as I can before I am no longer capable of reproducing!”
Gideon smothered a smile. “I feel sure she did not mean to imply that.”
The duke made a disgruntled noise and sipped his drink.
“Pardon me if I am prying—you know my manners are not polished,” Gideon began. “But do you mean not to marry?”
“Of course not. I will marry. I must. Eventually.”
“You do not sound eager.”
Rochford shrugged. “I have simply not found anyone I want to marry. Everyone reminds me of my duty to have progeny, and I suppose they are right. The line must go on. And my cousin Bertram has no desire to inherit all the work and responsibility that go with being a duke. But surely there is time yet. I am not quite ready to ‘shuffle off this mortal coil.’” He swirled the brandy around in the bottom of the snifter, watching the dark liquid broodingly. “I will find a wife someday. And I will do it in my own way, without any help from Lady Haughston.”
“I must say, she did rather well for me,” Gideon pointed out mildly, watching his cousin. “I cannot imagine a mate better suited for me than Irene.” He paused, then added, “You might let her try.”
Rochford snorted. “It would serve her right if I did.”
This thought seemed to arrest him, for he stopped speaking and stared off into space for a long moment. Finally a slow smile curved his lips, and he thoughtfully took another drink.
“Maybe I should,” he murmured. “Let Lady Haughston see just how much she enjoys finding me the proper duchess.”