Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
The day of their promenade dawned bright and cheery, and Jessamine dressed with more than her usual optimism.
Today, she would be seen out with Andrew and William.
When she entered the nursery, she found Andrew asleep in the chair, his head tipped back to reveal his neck. As she watched, he twitched as though in the throes of a bad dream. Her heart twisted when she recalled how he had told her that he also had nightmares.
In the crib, William stirred, but after checking on him, Jessamine moved to Andrew’s side. In sleep, he looked younger than he did when he was awake, his face relaxing, all the harshness softening into gentle lines.
She had seen that expression—that softness—before when he looked at her. Cautiously, she reached up and tapped him on the shoulder.
Instantly, he was awake, eyes flying open and finding hers, alert within the space of half a second. As he registered she was the one to have woken him, he relaxed by increments, settling back into the chair.
She perched on the arm, leaning over him. “Imagining I was the French?”
“Something like that.” His arm came up to slide around her waist. “It’s still early. What are you doing?”
“I came to check on William. I’d expected you to be in bed already.”
“I thought Lucy looked tired.”
He was so caring. Even when he pretended he was, he was.
How could she have ever thought him cruel and inconsiderate?
“How has he been overnight?” she asked, nodding toward William.
“Well,” Andrew said, a little wryly, his arm settling a fraction higher on her hip, “I didn’t get here until late. But while I’ve been here, he has been perfectly fine.”
William chose that moment to break into a squall.
“My angel,” Jessamine called, absently kissing the side of Andrew’s head as she left his arms to pick up the tiny babe. “You should sleep,” she said to Andrew, snuggling William against her chest. “Get at least a little rest before we show off this boy to the world.”
“Ah, yes.” He glanced from her to the baby, then rose, looking as though he had already stiffened from his vigil in the chair. “I take it you’re looking forward to the event?”
“Immensely.”
He smiled, and his hand caressed her elbow as he passed. Jessamine stared at the door long after he had passed through, her heart pounding.
This felt… It felt different.
As though they had passed through some sort of invisible barrier and come through the other side.
“Did you see that?” she asked William, who continued to grizzle, no doubt in need of changing.
“Your father—though really, you ought to call him uncle—hasn’t run away from me.
Sometimes, I even think he might like me.
” She laughed, cradling him closer. “I don’t know what I want, Will.
Sometimes I want nothing more than for him to be mine, and other times I think there would be nothing scarier. ”
William gurgled up at her, and she smiled down at him.
“Of course,” she said, rocking him, “you come first. You have always come first for both of us. I promise you that we will do nothing that will risk your security or happiness, even if that means we learn to… exist together.”
Now she’d had the taste of what more could feel like; the last thing she wanted was to merely exist together.
But for William, if necessary, if she was worried they were getting in deeper than they could handle—and heaven knew neither of them were particularly well-versed in intimacy—then they could still pull further apart.
Go back to how things were, but with a better understanding of one another.
The main thing was ensuring William was well looked after.
All the rest could wait.
Andrew hadn’t been entirely sure what to expect from his first promenade with William and Jessamine, but it hadn’t been the parade of servants accompanying them.
Lucy pushed the large perambulator, which looked rather like a carriage in miniature, and Jessamine strolled by his side with one hand tucked neatly in his arm.
The sun shone, and he felt rather than saw the gazes on him.
In the army, everything had been simpler.
There, the rules were very clearly laid out, and everyone knew precisely where they stood.
There was an agreed-upon hierarchy. Here, everything seemed rather blurrier around the edges.
He had never been intended to inherit, and thus, he had never been introduced to this world in quite the same way as his brother had.
Similarly, Jessamine had grown up half her life in Scotland, and not just Scotland, but a tiny village in the upper Highlands, by the sounds of it, entirely separate from this world.
They were both playing a game they only had a few of the rules to. And neither of them, especially him, would ever admit that they were out of their depth.
She tilted her face to the sun. He wondered how much she was thinking of last night, and wondered too if she would mind overmuch if he took her to the nearby copse of trees and kissed her until her beautifully soft lips were pink and swollen.
“What a lovely day for a stroll,” she said with a sigh, glancing over at where William was asleep in his pram. “You’ve gone all stiff, Andrew.”
“I dislike being on display.”
“You were the one who suggested this.”
“It was a good idea,” he said, doing his best not to look around them as though they might be under attack. “And I stand by it. But that doesn’t make its execution any easier.”
“You attended the ball with me,” she said.
“I did. But there, I had you to dance with.”
A smile ghosted over her lips, and he felt absurdly pleased. “Ah, so I made the experience more enjoyable?”
“You know you did.”
“Even though you had lots of experience dancing the waltz with ladies who were not me?” she teased, her voice light.
“That was an entirely different experience.”
“How so?”
“Because you are my wife,” he said simply.
When he’d first entered that room to find her straight-backed and refusing to relinquish William despite his most pressing arguments, he had thought there could be no world in which he would ever learn to tolerate her. And yet here they were.
“Oh, is that all?” She arched a brow at him. “So, if you had offered for one of those other girls, it must have been the same?”
“I would not have offered.”
“Because you were a captain?”
“A captain makes a perfectly acceptable husband,” he said. “But that’s not the reason.”
“Then what is?”
“Because none of them compelled me to marry,” he said simply. “I had no interest in any of them.”
“You had no interest in me when we first met,” she pointed out.
“In my defense, we had barely spoken by the time I offered for your hand, so that fact has very little to do with you. If I had known you longer, I might have offered for you based on your merits alone.”
She did an exaggerated double take as she looked at him. “Heavens above. Can this be how it feels to have one’s husband flirt with you?”
“I’ll admit I’m not practiced at the art.” He placed his hand lightly on hers. “But you wanted the truth, and that is my truth. You make an excellent duchess.”
“And mother to William,” she said, smiling up at him.
“And that,” he admitted. “It plays no little part in my decision.”
“I’m flattered.” She looked directly ahead. “You know, I never aspired to win a duke’s hand. That was never my goal, and I was not as grateful for your offer as I ought to have been. But…” She bit her lower lip. “There are some benefits to being a duchess.”
“Oh?”
“Well, for one thing, I have a duke for a husband, which naturally makes me the envy of every other lady I see. And it transpires I am shallow and petty, because that brings me far too much joy. And then there is the fact that you are a young and handsome duke, which adds to their envy. Do you know how few young and handsome dukes exist in London?”
Andrew did his best to keep his laughter from his face. Of the two of them, George was always considered the more attractive; he had that open charm that Andrew had never mastered. Andrew had always been considered stern and forbidding.
“I like a scowl,” she said, squeezing his arm. “There is something remarkably charming about it.”
“Charming?”
“Not every man can scowl with such distinction. And you have such forbidding eyebrows! It truly is a masterful expression.”
“How fortunate you must feel, then, to see it with such regularity.”
“Oh, but you do not scowl half as much at me anymore.” She beamed up at him. “And that, you know, is proof that we are getting along better than we ever have before, don’t you think?”
He opened his mouth to agree, just as the Duchess of Setton stopped before them. “Jessamine,” she said, the affection obvious in her voice.
Andrew had no strong feelings toward her except for the way she so clearly loved Jessamine.
Over the course of this entire situation, he had contrived a hatred of their father, the Earl of Debley.
Both for abandoning Jessamine and for seducing Rebecca, a woman who should have had any number of ways to escape.
The fact she had not was a testament to the lasting control of both Andrew’s father and her own.
Yet there was no denying that his daughters had found family with one another. And although he hated Lord Debley, he could not hate the Duchess of Setton.
“You must come for dinner,” the Duchess was saying, taking Jessamine’s hand in both of hers. “And you, Your Grace. I would be delighted to have both of you with us.”
Jessamine looked at him, and he could already sense the hope in her gaze.
This was something she wanted. And perhaps he could want it too, doing things that made her happy. He would lose nothing from an evening spent with fellow peers—albeit ones with a far greater claim to the titles they held—and Jessamine would thrive.
The duchess leaned over the pram and touched William’s downy hair with her finger. “He’s so tiny and so sweet,” she said in awe.
Jessamine hooked her arm through her sister’s and grinned, the sort of secret grin that made Andrew wonder what he had missed. They gave each other a long look, their expressions saying more than their words had.
William woke under the burden of this affection, and his tiny face screwed up into a cry. Andrew had still not mastered his inherent discomfort at the sound; it made every muscle in his body tighten the way it did when there was a foe to be fought. Something to defeat.
But the only thing to defeat here was the needs of a fragile baby, and so often he felt utterly out of his depth. If it were down to him, he would give the boy a similar treatment to the one he had received as a boy: one of discipline and rigid conformity.
But Jessamine had opened his eyes to something new.
“Oh, my darling,” she cooed, swooping down and scooping him up into her arms.
Everyone who passed stared. Very few ladies of the ton treated their babies with such overt affection in public, and certainly none who were rumored to have inherited their husband’s bastard child.
Andrew felt a rush of affection. This would do more to combat the rumors than any practiced pose they could strike together, and she had no idea she was doing it.
William stopped crying as he stared, mesmerized, at Jessamine. Andrew came closer, unable to help himself, and rested a hand on the small of Jessamine’s back. Her weight shifted, and she leaned against him slightly.
Every tiny gesture they exchanged pushed them closer to the point of no return, and although he was still determined not to sire a child with her—not yet, at least—he found himself fearing the intimacy less and less.
Then, to Andrew’s delight, William’s mouth curved. The motion looked awkward, almost, as though he wasn’t sure precisely how to achieve the effect of a smile. First one corner twisted up, then the other. Gums peeked through between his lips.
A toothless, carefree smile, aimed straight at Jessamine.
For all intents and purposes, his mother.
Jessamine let out a little gasp, and Andrew slid his arm around her more firmly, holding her against him. He placed his other hand under the one supporting William’s head.
“Did you see that?” she whispered.
“I saw it,” he said. “He smiled at you.”
“He smiled.”
“Oh.” The Duchess clasped both hands against her chest. “He is the most delightful baby, Jessie! Rebecca would be so pleased to see the way he has taken to you.”
“I love him,” Jessamine said, and Andrew felt the weight of those words.
I love him.
Andrew kissed her hair, blind to the fact they were in public.
He wanted nothing more than to take her back home and kiss her all over, exactly how she liked it.
A reward, of sorts, for opening her heart to Rebecca’s son so completely.
But also because he wanted to, because he craved the taste of her on his tongue.
It was at times like these, when his heart ached with need for her, that his resistance fell in tatters around him.
“Tonight,” the duchess was saying. “You must come tonight. I can’t wait to tell Henry the news.”
“Of course,” Jessamine was saying, and Andrew took a moment to reevaluate his plans.
Perhaps taking his wife home and pleasuring her immediately was not his best idea.
He could learn to be patient.
Probably.
“All right,” he said. “Tonight it is.”