Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
“The Duke,” Penelope demanded the following day. “I must see him.”
The butler, a silver-haired man of considerable composure, blinked. His gaze drifted past Penelope’s shoulder to the empty drive, as though confirming she had arrived alone, without an invitation, and apparently without any intention of pretending she needed one.
“My lady,” he began, in the measured neutral tones of a man assessing the weight of her authority. “His Grace is not currently receiving guests.”
“I did not ask whether he was receiving.” Penelope held his gaze. “I asked where he is.”
The butler’s eyes flickered, his internal calculations shifting. He cleared his throat. “He is in the back gardens, my lady.”
“Thank you.”
She stepped past him before he could formulate a protest.
She had rehearsed her confrontation on the walk over. Last night she had lain awake with his words moving through her mind like water under ice, persistent and cold.
The boy has potential. It isn’t being trained.
She had polished her response until it was a blade. She would be composed. She would be direct. She would deliver her ultimatum and depart with her dignity intact.
That would be the end of it.
The corridor was cool and dim, smelling of old wax and woodsmoke.
The house felt settled rather than decorated, filled with heavy, unhurried furnishings that spoke of quality rather than a desire to impress.
She moved through it without slowing, her heels clicking a sharp rhythm on the stone floors.
It occurred to her this was the first time she had approached Brigrock Hall the proper way.
She pushed open the garden door, and the air changed.
The gardens made her pause.
She had expected the same rigid order as the house, but here, the formal architecture had been surrendered to the wild.
Old stone paths were half-hidden by encroaching moss.
Foxgloves had seeded themselves in tall, nodding drifts along the south wall.
A climbing rose had abandoned its trellis entirely, spreading in a wide, unruly curtain of white and thorns above the gate.
The grass grew thick and unharvested, and in the far corner, a pear tree leaned at an angle that suggested it had been yielding to gravity for a century.
It was beautiful. The specific, unself-conscious beauty of something that had been left alone long enough to become itself.
A gravel path ran through the center, ending at a low stone wall. Beyond it lay a small lake. The water was still and dark, edged with rushes. Late morning light moved across the surface in slow, shifting sheets of silver.
Penelope lifted her hem against the long, damp grass and walked toward the water. The air was heavy with the scent of turned earth and cool moisture. For a heartbeat, she forgot her rehearsed speech entirely.
The surface of the lake broke.
The Duke came up from the water without warning. His hands gripped the mossy bank, and he surged upward, water cascading off his frame as he rose.
Penelope stopped dead.
Every word she had prepared left her head simultaneously. They simply departed, as though they had never existed.
She had known he was tall. She had registered the breadth of his shoulders. But there had always been the intervening reality of clothes—the wool, the linen, the starch—all the layers that made a man legible and manageable in polite company.
There were none of those things now.
He was built the way she imagined the men of old paintings were built. The kind of sketches she had seen in her father’s books and privately considered exaggerated. Nothing about this was exaggerated.
Water ran in long, shimmering lines down the heavy muscles of his shoulders and the ridged, hard plane of his stomach. There were scars. A deep, jagged line along his ribs, another that crossed over his shoulder and disappeared down his shoulder blade like a pale ribbon.
She had been married. She had seen a man undressed. But she had never seen anything like this.
A wave of heat crashed from her chest to her face. It was physical, mortifying, and impossible to hide. She spun around, her back to him.
“Trespassing again.” His voice came from behind her, dry and unhurried. There was a low, vibrating quality to it, almost amused. “Must run in the family.”
Penelope pressed her hands flat against her skirts. Her cheeks were burning, and she was profoundly grateful for the distance between them.
“I have come to speak with you,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt, though her pulse was thrumming in her throat. “It is a matter of importance.”
“Then speak.”
“You are not dressed.”
“That is true.”
Water lapped softly against the bank. In the reeds, a bird called once and went silent. She stared straight ahead at the overgrown garden gate, focusing on a single white rosebud.
“I would ask that you dress before we continue this conversation.”
Nothing for a moment. Then the sound of movement. The wet, heavy drag of cloth over skin. The unhurried efficiency of a man who had dressed in far worse conditions and found her presence merely a curiosity.
“Then do not turn around. I shall say when.”
She didn’t move. She kept her eyes on the roses and tried to think of absolutely nothing, a feat that required significant effort while her ears were tuned to the sound of him moving behind her.
“You may turn around,” he finally said.
She turned.
He had pulled on a shirt and trousers, but both were soaked through.
The damp linen clung to the lines of his body with a fidelity she found profoundly inconvenient. The shirt was translucent across his chest, the muscles beneath it as visible as if he had bothered with no clothes at all. She forced her gaze directly to his face, a deliberate act of will.
“You were saying,” he said.
She lifted her chin, clutching at her fading composure. “I came to ask you to stay away from my son.”
Something moved in his expression, not surprise, but something quieter and more considered. He reached for his jacket, which lay folded on the stone wall, but he didn’t put it on. He just held it.
“I have been trying to,” he said.
“Try harder.”
“He comes to my estate. I don’t seek him out. You might remember that I have ordered both of you to leave—twice.”
“You found him in those woods yesterday.” She kept her voice level, though it felt thin. “You stayed with him. You let him watch you shoot, and then you gave him a lesson. That is not a small thing to a seven-year-old boy. Especially one like my son who seeks a—”
She cut herself off from saying a father figure.
Her hands tightened at her sides. “He came home and talked of nothing but you for an hour.”
“And that is the trouble.” His voice remained neutral, but his eyes narrowed. “That he found something worth admiring.”
“The trouble is that you are cultivating a connection I did not approve and do not want.”
He tilted his head slightly, the grey of his eyes darkening. “Was I meant to leave him alone in the ferns?”
“You were meant to return him to Lord Hillsborough. Directly. Without a lecture attached.”
“I could have done that,” he said. “He would have learned nothing.”
“That is not your decision.” The evenness in her voice slipped. She felt the heat of her own anger rising to meet his stillness. “He is my son. What he learns, and from whom, is mine to decide. Not yours. I don’t want him in your company.”
The shift in his face was small and exact.
“Someone like me,” he drawled. The words were low, precise, and carried a sudden, dangerous weight.
Penelope’s stomach dropped. “I did not mean it that way.”
“You didn’t have to.” He took a step toward her. Then another. “Someone like me. And what, pray, do you know of me, Lady Romwich? Of what I am?”
She knew what he meant. She could hear the shape of the gossip in the air between them: the stories of violence, of a temperament shattered by war, of a man who was no longer safe for society.
“I know enough,” she whispered.
“Do you?” He took another step.
She did not move, though every instinct told her to flee.
“Enough to make a decision about my son’s wellbeing,” she murmured. “He will not be in your company again. I will see to it.”
“See to it.” He repeated the words as if testing their weight and finding them lacking.
He took a final step, and now the distance between them was gone. The scent of him clouded her senses. She had to tilt her chin back to maintain his gaze.
“What exactly do you think you can do, my lady? You think you can stop me?”
Her heart was striking against her ribs with such force she was certain he could see it through her bodice.
“I will do whatever it takes to protect my son.”
He looked at her for a long, heavy moment. His chest rose and fell beneath the wet shirt, the damp fabric sticking to his skin. His eyes moved over her face, tracing her features with an unhurried, predatory attention.
Then his hand came up.
She went still; she wasn’t afraid. It was something far more complicated— a frantic, electric tension that made her skin prickle.
His fingers caught her chin. His grip was firm, not rough, but entirely certain of itself. He tilted her face up to his. She met his eyes because she refused to look down, refused to let him see her tremble.
“So fierce. So protective… I wonder, if anyone has protected you, taken care of you, for a change,” he muttered.
The question caught her off guard, a sudden, sharp needle pricking through the balloon of her indignation.
“I do not require being taken care of,” she snapped, though her voice lacked its previous iron.
“You do not?”
He didn’t let go. His thumb brushed the line of her jaw, a slow, deliberate movement that trailed fire in its wake.
The calluses on his skin spoke of more than just a soldier’s life; they felt like a map of everything she had been taught to fear and everything she was currently, helplessly, drawn toward.
“You came here to warn me away,” he murmured, his head dipping lower until his forehead nearly touched hers. “You tell me I am dangerous. Well, perhaps I am. But only when you are around. I… I do not know myself around you, my lady.”
“You… you should not say such things,” she whispered, her breath hitching.
“I should not want to see you with your hair down, either,” he rasped, his voice dropping. “I should not want to know if your skin is as soft as it looks under all that silk. I should not want to taste the words right off your mouth every time you find a new reason to challenge me.”
His gaze dropped to her lips and stayed there, heavy and demanding. Penelope felt a traitorous ache bloom in her chest, and she found herself leaning into the heat of him.
“Penelope…” he said, his thumb pressing firmly against her lower lip, pulling it down just enough to reveal the white of her teeth.
“All I can think about right now is how much I want to feel you come undone in my arms. I want to see that composure of yours burn away until there’s nothing left but this. ”
His fingers tangled deep into the hair at the nape of her neck, tilting her head back to an impossible angle. He didn’t look like a duke; he looked like a man who had finally reached the end of his tether.
“Heavens, Penelope,” he groaned, his eyes darkening to the color of a storm-tossed sea. “I have been starving for you.”
She had been cold for years. She had lived inside that coldness and called it dignity, called it her shield against a world that had hurt her.
She had not known, until this exact moment, how freezing she had been.
The gravity of him was terrifying, the way he looked at her as if she were something he had already decided to own.
Her husband had looked at her like a piece of furniture. The ton looked at her like a ghost. This was neither.
She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even blink.
He kissed her.
It wasn’t a question. His mouth found hers with a devastating certainty.
The final defense in Penelope’s chest—the carefully rehearsed arguments, the maternal fear, the icy pride—disintegrated.
Her hand went to his chest before she knew she had moved it.
She felt his heartbeat under her palm, fast and heavy, mirroring her own.
She was kissing him back.
The composure she had carried into the garden was gone, replaced by a desperate, starving heat.
She felt his hands, solid and warm through the silk at her waist, pulling her flush against his damp, hard frame.
She didn’t pull back; she leaned into him, her fingers curling into the wet linen of his shirt.
The garden door creaked open.
“Your Grace—”
Penelope pulled herself away, turned, and saw a footman stepping through, carrying a copper watering can. He froze, then bowed and scuttled away.
Penelope tore herself even further away, so sharply the gravel shifted under her feet. Her hand flew to her mouth, her lips stinging and swollen.
The Duke was watching her. He was perfectly still, showing no triumph, no amusement. He simply watched her with those grey eyes that seemed to see everything she was trying to hide.
She could not stay. She could not breathe.
“Good day, Your Grace,” she managed, her voice whispery.
She turned and fled up the gravel path. Through the beautiful, unruly garden. Through the cool, silent corridor. Past the butler, who stood in the hall and looked at her flushed face with an expression of profound silence.
She walked down the drive at a measured, dignified pace. She did not run, though her heart demanded it.
She pressed her fingers against her lips, the taste of him still lingering there. She kept walking, her gaze fixed straight ahead, realizing with a jolt of terror that she had failed to say a single word of what she had come to say.