Chapter Thirteen
“If you ever use my name to lure her into a room like that again, the wager will be the smallest of your problems.”
Ash found Devlin in the back study with a glass in his hand and a smile he was unable to hide; the smile of a man who had set a trap, watched it spring and was now enjoying the mechanical satisfaction of the springing, regardless of what had been caught.
The study was dim, one lamp, the remains of a cigar in the tray, and Devlin was leaning against the desk as if the desk belonged to him, , and as if the evening belonged to him, which, until twenty minutes ago, it had.
“You sound like a man in love, Ravenhurst.” Devlin’s smile did not waver. “I had not thought it possible.”
Ash did not answer. He stood in the doorway and looked at the man he had called a companion for eight years.
The man who had proposed the wager at three in the morning in a brothel, the man who had lured Imogen Goodall into a room full of courtesans and gamblers with a forged invitation and an invented sister, and the look said everything the silence did not.
Ash walked out of the study and out of the house.
He walked the three miles home to Grosvenor Square without stopping.
The night was warm, the streets were dark, and his shirt was thin against the air.
His hands were shaking, not with cold, but with the particular fury that arrived when a man discovered that someone he had trusted was not someone who could be trusted.
The discovery was not surprising, which made it even worse.
He reached Grosvenor Square at midnight.
He did not sleep. He sat at his writing desk until dawn, the license on one side, the watch on the other and the plan assembling itself between them.
The plan was that tomorrow morning he was going to go to Imogen’s house.
He was going to apologize and tell her about Devlin, the invented sister and the trap.
He was going to show her the license. And tomorrow night, at the Carlisle ball, in front of every person who had ever overlooked her, he was going to ask her to marry him.
Mid-morning. The day after the trap.
Aunt Margery was making her morning calls, her chill improved enough for visiting but not for chaperoning. Cassie was at her dancing master and the house was quiet.
Ash arrived at eleven. Mrs. Glass, the Goodall housekeeper, a solid woman in her fifties who had been with the family since Imogen was a child, admitted him to the morning room without surprise, and she remained in the doorway with a piece of mending; a silent chaperone who was prepared to look the other way if looking the other way was what was required.
Imogen was standing by the window. She had not slept.
He could see the shadows under her eyes, the slight pallor of her face, and the particular set of her shoulders that came when a person had been awake all night and had passed through exhaustion into something clearer and more focused on the other side.
She was wearing a morning gown he had not seen before, pale gray, and she was holding his note in both hands.
The note was creased and soft from handling, which meant she had been reading it again and again, and the reading had not worn the words out.
“I owe you an explanation,” he said.
“You owe me several, Your Grace. You may begin with the one that involves Lord Devlin and a sister who does not exist.”
He told her. Devlin had forged the invitation and had invented a sister.
He had arranged the entire evening as a trap, though Ash did not tell her what the trap was designed to catch, because telling her would have meant telling her about the wager, and the wager was the truth he was not yet ready to admit.
“I will explain everything else,” he said, “as soon as I have earned the right. I am asking you to trust me one day longer. After tomorrow night, there will be nothing between us that is not spoken.”
She set the note down and looked at him.
“Do you mean to marry me?” she asked.
The question was direct, calm and completely without flutter, and the directness of it did something to him that no amount of fluttering could have done. Because directness was trust, and trust from Imogen Goodall was not a thing that was given lightly.
“Yes,” he said. “Tomorrow night at the Carlisle ball, in front of every person who has ever ignored you, I am going to ask you to be the Duchess of Ravenhurst.”
“Show me the license.”
He took it from his coat. The parchment was warm from his body, the wax seal heavy at the bottom, his name in the clerk’s careful hand on the first line.
She took it from him and read it, slowly, her eyes moving across the legal language and the Archbishop’s seal and the blank space where her name would go.
She held it for a long moment, the small document that was going to change both of their lives sitting in her hands, light as air and heavy as everything.
She looked up at him. Her face was calm, her eyes bright and her hands, holding the license, were not trembling.
“Come upstairs.”
He stopped breathing. She was serious. She meant it, and the meaning was visible in every line of her face, every angle of her body and the absolute steadiness of her hands.
“Imogen, I will not. Not before tomorrow. I will not have you give me anything I have not yet earned.”
“You have earned this.” Her voice did not waver.
“You stayed by my side last night. You stood at my shoulder for two hours. You walked past every woman in that room to reach me. You have not slept any more than I have. I do not want to walk into the Carlisle ball tomorrow as a maid making a bargain. I want to walk in as a woman who has chosen.”
He hesitated. He had stopped himself four times now, and every time the stopping had been the hardest thing he had ever done, and each time it had gotten harder.
He was standing in Imogen Goodall’s morning room with her eyes on his face, and her voice saying come upstairs, and the stopping was running out.
“Ash.” She set the license down on the table beside the dried violets. “I have read every book my uncle owned about this. I am not afraid. I have read enough to know what to expect, and I have read enough to know that I want it to be you.”
He looked at her.
Mrs. Glass was in the doorway, and Imogen turned to her.
“I will ring if I need anything, Mrs. Glass.”
Mrs. Glass looked at Imogen and at Ash, folded her mending and withdrew to the back stairs without a word.
Imogen turned back to Ash and held out her hand.
He took it, and she led him to the stairs.
Her bedroom was small, meticulously clean, and defined by a narrow bed she had occupied alone for a decade.
A worn quilt lay smoothed flat across the mattress, carrying a faint spray of dried lavender.
A small writing desk held her notebook, positioned neatly beneath a window looking out onto the garden wall.
Ash paused in the doorway. He studied the space, taking in the frayed edge of the rug and the single candlestick, recognizing that this was the room where she had dreamed and read for ten years.
He was about to permanently alter the history of this space, and the weight of that realization required a moment of quiet acknowledgment.
“It is exactly as I pictured it,” he murmured, his voice pitched low enough to make the small room feel suddenly smaller.
Imogen closed the door, the click of the latch unnervingly loud. “Faded and entirely too practical?”
“Honest.” He stepped closer. “And completely yours.”
The morning light slipped past the thin curtains, filling the air with a soft pale gold.
Standing in the center of it, bathed in the quiet illumination, she possessed a beauty that owed nothing to the artifice of the ton.
There were no powders, no practiced angles, simply a woman in her own morning gown, offering herself to a man she had actively chosen.
“You are staring,” she observed, her hands dropping to her sides.
“I am memorizing.” He moved until he stood directly in front of her. “Are you going to ask me to take off my coat, Imogen, or must I guess your intentions?”
“I believe my intentions have been perfectly clear since we climbed the stairs.” She reached for his lapels, her fingers working the top button of his coat. She moved carefully, her focus absolute.
He allowed her to strip the coat away. Her hands moved to his waistcoat, then to the intricate knot of his cravat, unwinding the linen with a solemn curiosity, as if she were executing a skill she had only ever studied in theory.
When he pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it aside, she stepped back to examine the result.
Her gaze dragged across the muscle of his chest, the flat plane of his stomach, the sharp lines pointing toward his waistline.
“Well?” he prompted, his pulse picking up at the sheer intensity of her scrutiny.
“Reality is vastly superior to Richardson’s descriptions,” she decided, reaching for him again.
He took the laces of her gown, his fingers betraying a slight, infuriating tremor as he worked them free.
The fabric loosened, giving way eyelet by eyelet, until the gown slipped from her shoulders and pooled at her feet.
He tackled the stiff boning of her stays next, the cotton beneath holding the heat of her skin.
When the undergarment fell away, she stood before him in nothing but a thin white shift, the sunlight rendering the cotton dangerously translucent.
“You are overdressed,” Ash whispered, his hands settling on her waist.
He sank to his knees, burying his face against the curve of her hip.
He had never worshipped anyone, but as he kissed the delicate bone of her ankle and worked his way upward, he found the practice remarkably easy to learn.
His mouth traced the tightening muscle of her calf, then found the impossibly soft skin on the inside of her knee.