Chapter One
A woman set on seducing her husband had to at least find a way to entice him into sharing her bed. Unfortunately, Lady Ashley had no idea how to entice a man who barely looked at her or spent any amount of time in her company.
The night of her wedding to the Duke of Blackstone, Raven Perrin, or Raven as he had asked her to call him in private, didn’t come to her bed. Ashley had breathed a sigh of relief until a thought occurred. She wanted the one thing Raven could give her to make her life bearable—a child.
She might be innocent in the ways of men and women, but she knew enough to know it was unlikely she’d become enceinte if he didn’t sleep with her.
He’d loved Kitty, his mistress, who, a few months ago, was killed by the man trying to hurt Ashley’s friend Lady Courtney.
Kitty had tried to stop the evil man, Baron Lockwood, and paid a dreadful price—her life.
Courtney’s husband Lord Lucien, along with Raven, had killed the Baron when they rode to save kidnapped Lady Courtney.
Raven still grieved Kitty, maybe he always would, but surely, he could do his husbandry duties by her. She wasn’t that ugly. Many men had tried to seduce her when they thought her a lady of easy virtue. So how did she get his attention in the most Biblical sense?
He was a busy man, and she accepted that with his title came many duties both to the House of Lords and his tenants and family.
Maintaining and growing his fortune consumed a great deal of time, and of course he was doubly occupied because of the anonymous investment wager that he did not know to this day, had been issued by a group of ladies, the Sisterhood, of which she was a part.
Winner took all…. The ladies had issued an anonymous challenge to Raven and Fane Deveraux, Earl of Marlowe, that they could generate the better return over twelve months.
The men had no idea who their challenger was.
She couldn’t wait for Raven and Fane to lose, beaten by a group of women.
Only a few months to go now. Tiffany was the brains behind it all.
She was the Sisterhood’s investment guru and the ladies learned from listening to their men talking about what they were investing in, so they knew they were currently winning the wager.
On a sigh, she turned her thoughts back to her problem—Raven and his reluctance to bed her. She tried to think of how she was to progress their marriage. There was precisely four things she was good at.
The first was looking serene when she felt anything but.
The second was making conversation so smooth and effortless that people forgot they were being managed.
The third was finding solutions to problems that polite society would rather pretend didn’t exist. And the fourth, which she had never been permitted to use in public, was an absolutely scandalous imagination.
And her imagination was working overtime.
It was the fourth skill that was going to save her marriage. She was nearly certain.
She sat now in the window seat of her sitting room, ostensibly reading a slim volume of poetry, actually staring at the wall and cataloguing everything she knew about the seduction of unwilling men.
Which, as it turned out, was considerably less than she would have liked, especially considering her scandalous reputation.
She thought trying to be the perfect duchess would do it. But no.
Three months. Three months of flawless ducal table settings, of conversation that stopped just short of anything real, of Raven looking at her across the length of their beautifully appointed dinner table like a man standing outside a warm room and refusing to open the door.
She understood grief. She did. Kitty had been his—well…
Whatever she had been, she was something Ashley clearly was not.
But a woman could only stare at her untouched pillow for so long before she began to develop opinions about it.
He does look at you, she reminded herself.
He watches you when he thinks you cannot see him.
That was something. That was, in fact, everything, because it meant the problem was not desire.
The problem was whatever it was that was locked behind those green eyes that he kept so very carefully shuttered.
Ashley had always been good at opening locked things.
The sound of a commotion in the front hall interrupted her thoughts.
A particular kind of commotion she recognized immediately.
It had a specific rhythm, from the butler’s measured tones, to the sound of expensive slippered heels that didn’t slow down for anyone, and then a voice like warm laughter.
“I know she’s in. Her carriage is in the mews. Don’t be tiresome.”
Ashley set down her book and straightened, pressing her lips together to prevent the smile she could already feel breaking across her face.
Farah.
Lady Ware appeared in the doorway thirty seconds later, windblown from the cool air and entirely unrepentant about it, trailing a rather helpless-looking footman who appeared to have tried and failed to make her wait in the parlor.
“You may go,” Ashley told him pleasantly. “Lady Ware is always welcome here.”
Farah swept in, dropped into the chair across from Ashley with the boneless grace of someone who had never once sat where she was told, and fixed her with a look of unapologetic assessment.
“You look terrible,” Farah said. “Beautifully dressed and absolutely terrible.”
“How kind.” Ashley rang for tea. “You look disgracefully happy, as usual.”
“I am disgracefully happy. I love being married.” Farah propped her chin on her hand, wholly unashamed.
“It is my permanent condition and I recommend it strongly. Which is why I’m here.
” She pointed one accusatory finger. “You are not disgracefully happy. You are gracefully miserable, which is both more exhausting and considerably less entertaining.”
Ashley considered denying it. She had been denying it, with considerable skill, for three months.
But this was Farah, who had once helped her hide a goat in Ashley’s brother, Wolf’s bedchamber, which was a story they had sworn never to discuss in polite company and there was no point in performing for Farah.
“He hasn’t come to my bed,” Ashley said.
The words landed between them with the dull thud of something that had been sitting unsaid too long.
Farah’s expression didn’t change. To her credit, she had always been quick, but she drew a slow breath through her nose. “Not once?”
“Not once.” Ashley reached for the teacup that had appeared at her elbow with grateful efficiency.
“He is perfectly courteous. He is thoughtful. Last Tuesday he left a book on my desk that I had mentioned wanting to read, which I found so unbearably considerate that I nearly cried at breakfast.” She paused. “But he doesn’t come to my bed, Farah.”
Farah was quiet for a moment. Genuine quiet, which from her meant she was actually thinking rather than loading her next sentence. “And you want him to,” she said at last. It wasn’t a question.
Ashley looked at her steadily. “I want children. I want a real marriage. I want—” She stopped.
Amended. “Yes. I want him to.” A child to love and who would love her in return, that was her goal.
A life without love was just too terrifying to contemplate.
Raven didn’t love her, and she wasn’t sure he ever would. But a child… A child would love her.
The fire crackled. Outside, a cart horse passed on the street below.
Then Farah sat up very straight, and Ashley recognized that particular light in her emerald colored eyes with equal parts hope and wariness.
“Right,” Farah said. “We’re fixing this.”
“I have been attempting to fix it for three months, and—”
“Have you, though?” Farah tilted her head. “Or have you been hinting that it might be nice if it were fixed, in a very well-bred way, while being too scared to do anything truly alarming?”
Ashley opened her mouth.
Closed it again.
“I have been sensible,” she said, with a certain amount of dignity. “Raven already thinks of me as this scandalous woman. I thought trying to behave as a duchess would help.”
Farah made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
“Ashley. Darling. I love you, but since you got caught in your dreadful scandal, you have been sensible since the first time I met you, and it has never once solved any of your problems. The goat was my idea. The time we replaced Lady Marsden’s love poetry with a cookery pamphlet was your idea, but you wrote it in someone else’s handwriting, which I think rather tells us everything we need to know about your instincts when you are actually allowed to use them. ”
Ashley pressed her lips together. She had forgotten about the cookery pamphlet. It had been very good.
“The situation,” she said, “requires delicacy. He is grieving. He is—”
“He is a man,” Farah said, not unkindly. “Who has eyes. And you are his wife, who is—” she gestured at Ashley’s general person in a sweeping motion—“quite spectacularly wasted in a cold bed.”
There was a pause.
“Thank you,” said Ashley.
“You’re welcome. Now.” Farah set down her teacup with the air of someone who had decided. “What do you actually know about seduction?”
The answer was embarrassingly brief. Ashley had learned the theory of it from novels that her governess had not known were novels.
She had observed it, in a very peripheral way, at various assemblies and house parties, in the way certain women angled their fans and certain men completely lost the ability to hold a conversation.
And of course, her brothers, both reformed rakes, had been an education in themselves.
But she had no practical knowledge whatsoever, and her one attempt at strategic dinner flirtation last month had resulted in Raven refilling her wine glass very attentively and then excusing himself with perfect politeness, which she was fairly sure counted as a defeat.
She said none of this.