Displeasure firmed her full lips into a tight line. “Mytoiletteis none of your concern, Your Grace.”
That was where she was wrong. Everything about her was his concern. From the moment she had turned up in his study in her drab, shapeless gowns and her fichus and her nonsensical caps, she had become the force propelling him through each day. He spent his hours alternately consumed with desire for her, hating his weakness, and fashioning the means by which he could spend more time in her presence.
“On the contrary.” He took a sip of his brandy, timing his rebuttal to heighten her discomfit. He liked her when she lost her rigid grip upon the reins of her control. “If you are instructing Lady Honora and Lady Constance in the feminine arts, should you not demonstrate an aptitude for the fashionable?”
If it was possible to flay a man alive with a murderous glare, she would have done him in then and there. “Your Grace, forgive me, but my dress does not inhibit my ability to teach Lady Honora and Lady Constance French, Latin, and German. Nor does it limit my instruction on music or art or any other topic suitable for ladies of their distinction.”
He had promised to behave, and yet something in him did not wish to honor that promise. There was no means by which she could reclaim the bloody fichu. And now that he had warmed to his subject, he realized he longed to see her in fine gowns that flaunted her glorious figure and displayed her beauty rather than cloaking it.
“I know of an excellentmodiste,” he suggested even though he knew what her response would be. What it had to be, as long as she continued to refuse his offer. “You need not settle for anything less than the best.”
She laughed, but it was a mirthless, forced little sound and it made him long to hear her true laughter instead. “On a governess’s wages, I must settle for what I already own, even if others see fit to thieve it from me.”
“You need not live on the wages of a governess,” he reminded her. “I have ample blunt to spare.”
She had rejected him. Denied him. He couldn’t lie to himself—her rebuff had smarted. But later, it occurred to him he had bungled his seduction rather badly. She was an unwed female, an innocent, and he had treated her in the same fashion he would any camp moll. He had waylaid her, savaged her with kisses, and half-stripped her bare in this study like the unstable beast that he was.
Sometimes, it was difficult for him to recall this was not war. That his time on the battlefield was at an end. After spending years away from polite society, engaged in the bloody, dirty, gritty business of death, returning to ballrooms and simpering misses seemed the world’s cruelest joke.
But Miss Turnbow was no simpering miss.
And he wanted her still.
She had stiffened at his pointed words, and he noted her grip on her snifter had grown so tight, he could perfectly see the delineation of each knuckle. How delicious that she did not wear gloves, though her countenance suggested that was the only luck he would have this evening.
“It would not behoove a woman in my circumstances to accept such an offer, Your Grace,” she pointed out, irritation rendering her tone pert. “Tell me, what would I do after you grew tired of me? No respectable house would open its doors to me. I would be forced to earn my bread on my back.”
Her words were not all untrue, though it pained him to admit it to himself. But his need for her remained, and in his desperation to get what he wanted, he could not envision a time when he would ever grow weary of her in his bed. “The terms would be most generous. I would pay you handsomely. Leave you with enough funds to settle you quite comfortably.”
If he had expected her acceptance, more fool he, for her eyes flashed and her lips thinned. “You told me you would be a gentleman, Your Grace, else I would not have joined you here. Such a despicable topic is not fit for further addressing, and indeed is best forever forgotten, as though it had never been spoken of at all.”
Truth be told, her protest rather stung. He wanted her more than ever. Need was a fierce, hungry creature taking up residence in his blood. It ran thick and hot and heavy through his veins, setting him aflame.
“I am being a gentleman,” he countered, taking a fortifying sip of his brandy. “Is this not an acceptable distance between us? I have not even attempted to touch or kiss you once, though there is nothing I long to do more on this earth than fling that cap from your head and pluck each pin away so that I might see the glory of your hair running unbound down your back.”
Her color deepened, but she did not flee from his honesty as he had suspected she might. Instead, she brought her own snifter to her lips and took a tentative sip of the spirits he’d poured her. She gave a delicate shudder before returning her attention to him.
Her gaze was as pointed as a bayonet. “Words speak as loudly as deeds, Your Grace.”
Yes, and all his words said that he wanted her. Of course he did, else he would not be so consumed by her. He wanted to believe it was the notion of securing the unattainable, a woman so firmly settled in her notion of seeing out her life in the thankless position of governess. He also wanted to believe her deliberate attempts to diminish her allure heightened his curiosity and arousal. That he had grown bored with his wastrel’s life, and she was the diversion he required until the next comely, supple-breasted diversion appeared.
Certainly, her denial had sparked an answering surge of humiliation and anger in him. No one had denied him as he could recall, not before he was the Duke of Whitley, when he had been a soldier on the battlefield and sure as hell not afterward when he had returned to the undeserved praise of the masses. Ladies, strumpets, even lords and dowagers, former friends and enemies, and lovers, all wanted their piece of the Duke of Whitley.
Except for Miss Jacinda Turnbow, who was neither in awe of him nor susceptible enough to his rakish persuasion that she would give him what he wanted.
“Words are safer than deeds,” he countered, watching closely for her reaction.
A wistful grin curved her lips, the first semblance of a true smile he had seen from her. “Sometimes words are far more dangerous.”
He could not help but feel there was a hidden meaning to her words. He continued to study the paradox that was Miss Jacinda Turnbow, who had come to him in his time of need and accepted the Sisyphean task of molding his sisters into proper young ladies. Why had she taken the position? Surely, she could have found a better situation, if not a grander home. More money even, perhaps, than the twenty pounds per annum he was paying her.
“I have seen deeds that defy words,” he said into the silence that had fallen between them, and he wished he had not. Speaking of the war aloud always made his gut swim with bile and his skin go slick with sweat. “Believe me, Miss Turnbow, deeds can be far more vicious, particularly when accompanied by bullets, bayonets, and swords.”
“You speak of your time as a soldier, do you not?” she asked softly, drawing nearer at last.
He did not want to think of the horrors he had seen ever again. But they were never gone. Like the scent of the French captain’s charred flesh, like the sight of Morgan’s severed hand in a river of blood, like the enemy soldiers who had been buried alive, their eyes pecked out by ravens…they would remain a part of him forever. Sometimes, the memories swelled, pressing inside his skull, becoming insurmountable until he could do nothing but purge them by drowning himself in enough liquor to stupefy him.
His hand shook as he downed the rest of his brandy. “If there is any topic that is despicable conversation and not fit for further addressing, it is war.”
