A Duke of Her Own (Desperate Duchesses #5)

A Duke of Her Own (Desperate Duchesses #5) Page 55

And Eleanor? He could see only the back of her head, but Gideon’s hand was rumpling her hair, holding her with such tenderness that even he, coldhearted bastard that he was, felt…something.

“Isn’t it romantic?” Lisette said, squeezing his hand.

It took everything he had not to pull away from her.

“They love each other so much. She waited for him. And he came to her the very first moment he could. I suppose he’s been thinking of her every day for years.”

He could just imagine that.

Unfortunately.

Chapter Twenty

The Duchess of Montague was smiling with a fierce happiness that Eleanor hadn’t seen since her brother gained his majority. “Just wait until your father learns of this,” she said to Eleanor, more or less under her breath. “He’ll be so pleased.”

They were leading Gideon to the drawing room, since her mother had graciously allowed that her daughter might have a short unchaperoned conversation with the duke.

“It’s utterly mad, of course,” she continued. “We’ll have to deny all rumors. The duke should be mourning Ada; of course, he is mourning Ada. We won’t announce anything. We’ll keep it entirely secret. You’ll have to drop Villiers. But no one knows of your engagement to him; it will be a seven-day wonder.”

“Villiers is going to marry Lisette,” Eleanor said flatly. She glanced back to find that Gideon had been caught by Anne. She felt a qualm, given Anne’s express dislike for Gideon, but her sister seemed to be behaving politely enough.

“Lisette’s father won’t be happy with that. Gilner will have to come home now. I can’t imagine that he wants his daughter to marry Villiers, not with those children of his in the picture.”

“Villiers is a good man,” Eleanor said. “And a duke.”

“What’s more, there’s the question of Lisette herself,” her mother continued, not even listening. “The other night the squire rattled on about his elder son being engaged to Lisette, but it was clear to me that the man was desperate to save his son. The poor boy has been living abroad for years, ducking the marriage.”

The conversation felt both morbid and ill-bred, so Eleanor moved to a sofa and sat down, hands folded.

“I’ll allow you fifteen minutes together,” her mother said. “No more than that, if you please. I can’t have the servants gossiping more than they’re already likely to do. I suppose Astley will spend the night, but I’ll instruct him to leave tomorrow morning. This really is a most disgraceful visit.” She looked entirely happy.

Gideon appeared, and the duchess slipped out, closing the door firmly behind her.

Eleanor felt as if she were having one of those odd experiences described in the papers by people who claimed to have encountered a ghost. Surely this Gideon could not be the living, real Gideon? But there he was, standing in the door frame, apparently solid and real.

Yet the Gideon she had known for the past few years, ever since his eighteenth birthday, was polite, unfailingly mannered, and distant. Entirely correct behavior for a married acquaintance.

This Gideon had feverish eyes, so fervent that her own dropped, which meant that she saw he was holding a sparkling object in his right hand.

A few weeks ago she would have flown to him. Now she sat primly on the sofa. She could feel the weight of her panniers on either side of her legs, holding her down.

Gideon didn’t move either. “You’re so beautiful,” he said finally. All she felt was a wave of embarrassment because his voice was thick with emotion.

She opened her mouth and said just the wrong thing. “I’m terribly sorry about Ada’s death.” His face went slack, as if the only thing holding him together had been the fire in his eyes. “I apologize!” she cried, jumping to her feet. “I didn’t mean to bring up such a painful subject.”

Grief was much easier to sympathize with than love, or whatever emotion he had been displaying before she mentioned Ada. So she fetched him from the doorway and brought him over to the sofa and patted his hand, just as the sister of a good friend would do. Like any acquaintance with a warm affection for a newly widowed man.

“You should know that I concluded all ceremonies for Ada before travelling here,” he said.

Eleanor managed a weak smile.

“She was Quaker. Did you know that?”

And, when Eleanor shook her head, “Her father permitted it. She was quite devout. I wasn’t…I’m Church of England, of course. But I liked her rector, Mr. Cumberwell. He buried her immediately at St. John’s in Westminster. Quakers have a very simple ceremony.”

Eleanor curled her fingers around his. “I’m glad that she found solace.”

“I told Cumberwell to take her portion and endow a chapel in her memory. He refused because he said she wouldn’t have liked that. So we’re giving the money to a Foundling Hospital instead. I don’t want it.”

“Ada loved children,” Eleanor said soothingly.

“I shouldn’t be here with you,” he said, “but I couldn’t stop myself.”

She resisted the impulse to shrink back on the sofa, to stop the conversation before it could start. There was something indecent about all the emotion in his eyes, as if she were seeing something she had no right to.

“I feel shame,” he said, hardly pausing for breath. “But shame is something a man can learn to live with. I felt shame years ago because of our love, because of the way we—we were together. The shame I feel now is nothing compared to that.”

Eleanor was starting to feel ill. In some remote part of her mind she wondered whether she could stage a faint, in order to force him into silence. He was still turning that sparkling thing, a ring of course, a diamond, in his fingers. They were long and too slim, she thought. Almost prehensile. Grasping.

And then she caught her own thought, as if someone else had said it, with an echo of shock. She was thinking about Gideon. Gideon. The man she loved. The most beautiful man in the world.

But when she looked at him now, she saw little to admire. The sharp planes of his cheekbones seemed too thin, almost hollowed. His chin didn’t have even the shadow of a beard; he hadn’t had facial hair at eighteen, and perhaps he simply never developed it.

Some part of her mind insistently compared that to the line of another jaw, another man’s jaw…

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said miserably, “but I had to come. Because of Villiers.”

Eleanor started. It was as if he had read her mind.

“You can’t marry Villiers; it’s absurd. It’s disgusting,” Gideon said. “I couldn’t allow such a thing to happen, couldn’t allow such an abomination, not when I knew you were really waiting for me. I felt as if I would be turning my back on God Himself if I did not save you from that marriage.”

Eleanor fruitlessly tried to think of a comment. Was she supposed to agree that she’d been waiting for him for years? She would sound like the worst sort of wet hen.

But Gideon didn’t seem to require an interlocutor anyway. “Ada died without pain,” he said.

“Wonderful,” Eleanor managed. Though that didn’t seem quite the right response either.

“She was walking across the floor of the library, they told me, and she started to cough. I know people thought she was malingering,” Gideon said, “but she wasn’t. A coughing attack was a terrible thing, once it started. She would bend over and hack so violently that I felt as if her lungs must be injured.”