Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Port and Madeira appeared on silver trays as the pudding trays were cleared away.
Alice sipped her Madeira and let the sweetness settle on her tongue. Mrs. Forsythe had not spoken since Kenneth’s intervention. She sat rigidly in her chair, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on a point above the fireplace that appeared to offer her the comfort of total neutrality.
The retired naval captain had resumed his monologue on coastal defenses, and Alice listened or pretended to listen, which amounted to the same thing.
Kenneth sat four seats away. She could feel his presence in the room without looking, the way one felt a hearth fire from across a cold parlor.
“Your Grace.”
The voice came from her left. She turned.
An elderly woman in plum-colored silk leaned toward her from across the table.
Alice recognized her vaguely—the Dowager Viscountess Hargrove, who had been introduced before dinner and had offered a handshake of surprising vigor for a woman of her years.
Her eyes were sharp and bright, blue as the sky.
“I have been meaning to ask all evening.” Lady Hargrove smiled brightly. “When might we expect to hear happy news from Bearmoor? The nursery must be due for a new arrival by now. A duke ought to have spares beyond the existing set.”
The table, which had been operating at the pleasant hum of post-dinner ease, went quiet in increments. Heads turned. The naval captain’s monologue died mid-sentence, its subject abandoned like a ship run aground.
Alice opened her mouth, but no sound emerged.
Four seats away, Kenneth had set his glass down. She did not need to look at him to register the change in the air around him.
Before either of them could speak, Lady Ashton filled the silence.
“One does wonder,” she said brightly, “whether the Duchess has found the existing arrangements quite manageable. The Duke’s boys are famously spirited.
One hears stories from the staff, of course.
I understand the previous governess resigned within a fortnight.
” She paused for a sip of wine that served no purpose except to let the words settle over the table.
“Perhaps a new baby would be a lot to ask of a woman still finding her feet as a stepmother. One would hate to see the poor dear overwhelmed.”
The silence that followed had a different quality than the one Mrs. Forsythe’s words had brought about. Faces arranged themselves into expressions of polite interest that concealed the sharper appetite beneath.
Alice immediately understood that she was being watched not because these people cared about her answer, but because the spectacle of a new duchess fumbling under fire was the most entertaining thing Harcourt Hall had offered since the ram-and-drainage-ditch anecdote.
She set her glass down. The crystal clinked softly against the table.
“Lady Ashton.” Her voice came out steady, clearer than she had expected.
“You are kind to concern yourself. But I must correct a misapprehension.” She straightened in her chair.
“Frederick and Charles are not at all difficult children. They are bright, curious, and occasionally inventive in ways that test the patience of adults who have forgotten what it was like to be seven years old. They are also loyal, honest, and capable of a kindness that would put many grown members of this table to shame.”
Lady Ashton’s wineglass paused halfway to her lips.
“I have been a duchess for a matter of weeks,” Alice continued.
“I am still learning; I will readily admit that. But no one at this table, or any other, has the right to speak ill of those boys. They are the sons of the Duke of Bearmoor. They are my stepsons. And I will not sit here and listen to their characters reduced to gossip and dinner-party entertainment by people who have never troubled themselves to learn which one is which.”
The room went quiet.
Alice could feel her pulse in her fingertips, in her throat, in her cheeks. She had not planned the words. She was afraid to glance at her husband after having made such a spectacle of herself.
Kenneth’s voice came from four seats away, low, controlled, carrying the weight of absolute authority delivered at conversational volume.
“My wife speaks for our family.” His gaze moved from Lady Ashton to Lady Hargrove and back, encompassing every face at the table without haste.
“The boys. The household. The nursery. These are not subjects for public speculation. They never have been, and they never will be. If anyone at this table harbors further opinions about my sons, my wife, or my household, I invite them to keep those opinions precisely where they belong—which is nowhere.”
Harcourt cleared his throat. The sound was heroic in its transparency, the desperate intervention of a host who could see his dinner party sliding toward the kind of incident that would be recounted in drawing rooms for the next three Seasons.
“I believe,” he said, rising, “that Lady Harcourt has arranged entertainment in the music room. Shall we?”
Chairs scraped as the guests rose.
Alice stood up and smoothed her skirts. She did not look at Kenneth. She did not need to. She could feel his gaze on her across the room as they moved.
When Lord Harcourt shook Kenneth’s hand and wished them a good night, she found herself breathing more easily.
The carriage door closed, before the vehicle lurched forward. Darkness swallowed Harcourt Hall, and Alice leaned her head against the glass and let the tension drain from her body in slow, aching increments.
They rode in silence for several minutes. The springs creaked beneath them. Hedgerows blurred past the windows, dark against a darker sky.
“Thank you,” Alice murmured, staring at her reflection in the glass. “For defending me at dinner. You did not have to.”
“I did.”
She turned. Kenneth sat across from her, one arm resting on the sill, his profile cut sharp by the lamplight. He was watching the road ahead, or the darkness that stood in for it.
“Whatever the circumstances of this marriage, you are my wife,” he said.
“We are family. And I have not treated you as such.” He paused.
The lamplight caught the line of his jaw, the shadow beneath his cheekbone.
“I have been… discourteous. I told myself that distance was a form of decency, and I was wrong. I apologize.”
Alice’s throat constricted.
“There is another matter,” Kenneth added.
His voice had roughened, the way it did when the words cost him.
“The runner has produced nothing. I intend to hire a private investigator, a man I have used for estate matters. He is thorough. He will not stop until Rachel is found.” He turned to face her. “I should have done this weeks ago.”
Alice swallowed. “Kenneth.”
She was not entirely certain who moved first. One moment, she was sitting across from him; the next, she was in his arms, drawn onto his lap. She went willingly, her knees settling on either side of his thighs, the green silk bunching between them.
His arms tightened around her, and their bodies pressed together, the heat between them turning into a raging fire that shot down to the apex of her thighs.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “For trying to find her. For defending me. For all of it.”
She tilted her head back. His face was very close, his eyes dark in the dim carriage and fixed on her mouth. The raw, hungry look in them stole her breath.
He leaned forward and captured her lips with his own.
The kiss consumed her.
The taste of him flooded her senses, port and warmth and a need that matched her own in its ferocity. His hand moved from her back to her waist and pulled her against him, and she gripped his shoulders and kissed him back with a desperation that frightened her.
His tongue swept across her lower lip, and she opened for him. The sound that escaped her throat was low and involuntary and seemed to undo whatever remained of his restraint.
He groaned against her mouth, a vibration she felt in her teeth, and his hands tightened on her waist.
His mouth left hers and traced a path along her jaw, down the column of her throat, to the hollow at its base where her pulse hammered. Her fingers tangled in his hair, pulling the dark curls, and he made a sound against her skin that sent heat to the pit of her stomach.
His hands roamed across her back, her ribs, the curve of her hips through the silk. He traced the underside of her breasts through her bodice, and she arched into the touch, a gasp escaping her that the carriage walls could not contain.
She pulled at his shirt, felt the linen come free of his waistband, and her fingertips found warm skin above his hip. He hissed through his teeth, and his hips shifted beneath her.
She trailed her lips over his throat. Tasted salt and cedar.
Felt the vibration of his groan beneath her lips.
His hands slid to her thighs, gripping them through the silk, and she rocked against him and heard the sound he made, low and guttural and stripped of every pretense he had ever constructed.
She could feel his hardness pressing against her center.
Then his hands stilled.
Alice felt the change before she understood it. The gradual cessation of movement. The tension returning to his shoulders. The shift in his breathing from ragged to controlled, each inhale deliberate, the disciplined respiration of a man reassembling himself piece by piece.
His hands circled her waist, before he gently lifted her from his lap and set her on the seat beside him.
She looked at her hands in her lap. The green silk was creased where his fingers had gripped it. She smoothed the fabric.
No. She would not endure another rejection.
“It is late.” She kept her voice level. “The evening was charged. The wine. The confrontations. It clouded our judgment.”
“Alice.” He lifted his head. “I did not mean to—”
“Goodnight, Your Grace.”
The carriage had stopped. Alice reached for the door handle before the footman could open it from outside, descended into the cold night air of Bearmoor’s gravel drive, and walked toward the castle without looking back.
She climbed the stairs. She walked the corridor. She entered her chamber, closed the door, and turned the lock.
She undressed alone. The green silk fell, and she stepped out of it and pulled the nightgown over her head, feeling the cotton settle against her skin where his hands had been.
Her hips, her waist, her ribs, the underside of her breasts—every place he had touched now burned with the humiliating heat of wanting and being found lacking in return.
With a sigh, she climbed beneath the cold sheets and pulled them to her chin, staring at the canopy. Lady Ashton’s words echoed in her mind.
“Well, she was available. That seems to have been her primary qualification.”
She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her lips. She would not allow the tears to fall.