JMcNaught - Something Wonderful (12 page)

"Use them to do what?"

"To look steadily into the eyes of the duke. And flutter your lashes a little to show how long they are—"

Alexandra experimentally "fluttered" her lashes, then collapsed onto the pillows, laughing. "I would look a perfect fool."

"Not to a man. They like that sort of thing."

Alexandra sobered and turned her head on the pillow to gaze thoughtfully at Mary Ellen. "You're quite certain?"

"Absolutely positive. And another thing—men like to know you like them. I mean, when you tell them they're oh so strong or brave or clever, they like that. It makes them feel special. Have you told the duke you love him?"

Silence.

"Have you?"

"Certainly not!"

"You should. Then he'll tell you he loves you!"

"Are you certain?"

"Of course."

«
^
»

I
won't do it
, I tell you," Alexandra burst out, her cheeks flushed with angry color. She glowered at the seamstresses who for three days and nights had been measuring, pinning, sighing, and cutting on the rainbow of fabrics which were now strewn about the room in various stages of becoming day dresses, riding habits, walking costumes, and dressing gowns. She felt like a stuffed mannikin who was permitted no feelings and no rest, whose only purpose was to stand still and be pinned, prodded, and poked, while the duchess looked on, criticizing Alexandra's every mannerism and movement.

For three entire days she had repeatedly asked to speak with her future husband, but the duke had been "otherwise occupied" or so Ramsey, the stony-faced butler, had continually informed her. Occasionally she had glimpsed him in the library talking with gentlemen until late in the afternoon. She and Mary Ellen were served their meals in Alexandra's room, while he apparently preferred the more interesting company of his grandmother. "Otherwise occupied," she had now concluded, obviously meant that he didn't wish to be bothered with her.

After three days of this, Alexandra was tense, irritable, and—much to her horror—very frightened. Her mother and Uncle Monty were as good as lost to her. Even though they were supposedly staying at an inn a few miles away, they were not permitted to call at Rosemeade. Life yawned before her, a lonely, gaping hole where she would be denied the companionship of her family and Mary Ellen and even the old servants who had been her friends since babyhood.

"This is a complete farce!" Alexandra said to Mary Ellen, stamping her foot in frustrated outrage and glaring at the seamstress who had just finished pinning the hem of the lemon-yellow muslin gown Alexandra was wearing.

"Stand still, young lady, and cease your theatrics," her grace snapped frigidly, walking into the room.

For three days the duchess hadn't spoken a single personal word to her, except to criticize, lecture, instruct, or command. "Theatrics—" Alexandra burst out, as rage swept through her, hot and satisfying. "If you think
that
was a theatric, wait until you hear the rest of what I have to say!" The duchess turned as if she intended to leave and, for Alexandra, that was the last straw. "I suggest you wait a moment and let me finish, ma'am."

The duchess turned then, lifting her aristocratic brows, waiting.

The sheer arrogance of her pose made Alexandra so angry that her voice shook. "Kindly tell your invisible grandson that the wedding is off, or, if he chooses to materialize, you may send him to me and
I'll
tell him so." Afraid she would burst into tears, which she knew the old woman would only mock, she ran from the room, along the balcony and down the staircase.

"What," asked the butler as he opened the front door for her, "shall I tell his grace—should he inquire as to your whereabouts?"

Pausing in her headlong flight, Alexandra looked Ramsey right in the eye and mimicked, "Tell him I'm 'otherwise occupied.' "

An hour later, as she wandered through the rose garden, her hysteria had cooled to a steely determination. Irritably, she bent and plucked a lovely pink rose and raised it to her nose, inhaling its scent, then she began absently snapping the petals off, one by one, her thoughts in a turmoil. Pink rose petals floated down about her skirts, joining those of the red roses, the white, and the yellow which she had also unconsciously shredded.

"Based on the message you left for me with Ramsey," said a deep, unperturbed voice behind her, "I gather you're displeased about something?"

Alexandra whirled in surprise, her relief at finally being able to speak to him eclipsed by the growing panic she'd been trying unsuccessfully to stifle for days. "I'm displeased about
everything."

His amused glance slid to the rose petals strewn about her skirts. "Including the roses, evidently," he observed, feeling slightly guilty for ignoring her these last several days.

Alexandra followed the direction of his gaze, flushed with embarrassment, and said with a mixture of distress and frustration, "The roses are beautiful, but—"

"—But you were bored with the way they looked when they had their petals on, is that it?"

Realizing that she was being drawn into a discussion about flowers when her entire life was in chaos, Alexandra drew herself up and said with quiet, implacable firmness, "Your grace, I am not going to marry you."

He shoved his hands into his pockets and regarded her with mild curiosity. "Really? Why not?"

Trying to think of the best way to explain, Alexandra ran a shaky hand through her dark curls and Jordan's gaze lifted, watching the unconscious grace of her gesture—really studying her for the first time. Sunlight glinted in her hair, gilding it with a golden sheen, and turned her magnificent eyes a luminous, turquoise green. The yellow of her gown flattered her creamy complexion and the peach tint glowing at her cheeks.

"Would you please," Alexandra said in a long-suffering voice, "stop looking at me in that peculiar, appraising way, as if you're trying to dissect my features and discover all my flaws?"

"Was I doing that?" Jordan asked absently, noting for the first time her high cheekbones and the soft fullness of her lips. As he gazed at that arresting, delicately carved face with its winged brows and long, sooty eyelashes, he couldn't imagine how he'd ever mistaken her for a lad.

"You're playing Pygmalion with my life, and I don't like it."

"I'm what?" Jordan demanded, his attention abruptly diverted from her fascinating face.

"In mythology, Pygmalion was—"

"I'm familiar with the myth, I'm merely surprised that a female would be familiar with the classics."

"You must have a very limited experience with my sex," Alexandra said, surprised. "My grandfather said most women are every bit as intelligent as men."

She saw his eyes take on the sudden gleam of suppressed laughter and assumed, mistakenly, that he was amused by her assessment of female intelligence rather than her remark about his inexperience with women. "Please stop treating me as if I haven't a wit in my head! Everyone in your house does that—even your servants are haughty and behave oddly to me."

"I'll instruct the butler to put wool in his ears and pretend to be deaf," Jordan teased, "and I'll order the footmen to wear blinders. Will that make you feel more at home?"

"Will you kindly take me seriously!"

Jordan sobered instantly at her imperious tone. "I'm going to marry you," he said coolly. "That's serious enough."

Now that she had decided not to marry him, and had told him so, the sharp pain of her decision was lessened a little by the discovery that she no longer felt intimidated and uncomfortable with him. "Do you realize," she said with a winsome smile as she tilted her head to the side, "that you become positively
grim
when you say the word 'marry'?" When he said nothing, Alexandra laid her hand on his sleeve, as if he was her friend, and gazed into his unfathomable grey eyes, seeing the cynicism lurking in their depths. "I don't mean to pry, your grace, but are you happy with life—with your life, I mean?"

He looked irritated by her question, but he answered it. "Not particularly."

"There you see! We would never suit. You're disenchanted with life, but I'm not." The quiet inner joy, the courage and indomitable spirit Jordan had sensed in her the night they met, was in her voice now as she lifted her face to the blue sky, her entire being radiant with optimism, innocence, and hope. "I love life, even when bad things happen to me. I can't stop loving it."

Transfixed, Jordan stared at her as she stood against a backdrop of vibrant roses and distant green hills—a pagan maiden addressing the heavens in a sweet, soft voice: "Every season of the year comes with a promise that something wonderful is going to happen to me someday. I've had that feeling ever since my grandfather died. It's as if he's telling me to wait for it. In winter, the promise comes with the smell of snow in the air. In summer, I hear it in the boom of thunder and the lightning that streaks across the sky in blue flashes. Most of all, I feel it now, in springtime, when everything is green and black—"

Her voice trailed off and Jordan repeated blankly, "Black?"

"Yes, black—you know, like tree trunks when they're wet, and freshly tilled fields that smell like—" She inhaled, trying to recall the exact scent.

"Dirt," Jordan provided unromantically.

She dropped her gaze from the heavens and looked at him. "You think me foolish," she sighed. Stiffening her spine and ignoring the sharp stab of longing she felt for him, she said with calm dignity, "We cannot possibly wed."

Jordan's dark eyebrows drew together over incredulous grey eyes. "You've decided that, merely because I don't happen to think wet dirt smells like perfume?"

"You haven't understood a word I've said," Alexandra said desperately. "The fact of the matter is that if I marry you, you'll make me as unhappy as you are—and if you make me unhappy, I'll undoubtedly retaliate by making you unhappy, and in a few years, we'll both be as sour as your grandmother. Don't you dare laugh," she warned when his lips twitched.

Taking her arm, Jordan walked with her along the flagstone path that separated the rose beds and led to an arbor filled with trees decked out in spring blossoms. "You've failed to take one vital fact into consideration: From the moment I carried you into the inn, nothing in your life could ever be the same again. Even if your mother was only bluffing about putting us both through a public trial, your reputation is already destroyed." Stopping at the entrance to the arbor, he leaned against the trunk of an oak tree and said in a detached, impersonal voice, "I'm afraid you have no choice except to do me the honor of becoming my wife."

Alexandra chuckled, diverted by his ever-present, courteous formality, even now when she was bluntly refusing his hand in marriage. "Marrying an ordinary girl from Morsham is hardly an 'honor' for a duke," she reminded him with cheerful, artless candor, "and despite what you so glibly said when we last parted, you are not my 'servant.' Why do you say those things to me?"

He grinned at her infectious merriment. "Habit," he admitted.

She tipped her head to the side, an enchanting, spirited girl with the wit and courage to spar with him. "Do you never say what you
really
mean?"

"Rarely."

Alex nodded sagely. "Apparently, speaking one's mind is a privilege reserved for what your grandmother disdainfully refers to as 'the lower classes.' Why do you always seem to be on the verge of laughing at me?"

"For some unfathomable reason," he replied in an amused drawl, "I like you."

"That's nice, but it isn't enough to base a marriage on," Alexandra persisted, returning to her original concern. "There are other, essential things like—" Her voice trailed off in horrified silence.
Like love
, she thought. Love was the only essential.

"Like what?"

Unable to choke out the word, Alexandra hastily looked away and shrugged noncommittally.

Love
, Jordan silently filled in with a resigned sigh, longing to return to his interrupted meeting with his grandmother's bailiff. Alexandra wanted love and romance. He'd forgotten that even innocent, sheltered girls of her tender years would undoubtedly expect a little ardor from their affianced husbands. Adamantly unwilling to stand out here like a besotted fool and try to persuade her to marry him with tender words he didn't mean, he decided a kiss would be the quickest, most effective, and most expedient way to fulfill his duty and neutralize her misgivings, so that he could resume his meeting.

Alex jumped nervously when his hand suddenly lifted and cupped her cheek, forcing her to give up her embarrassed study of the entrance to the arbor.

"Look at me," he said in a low, velvety, unfamiliar voice that sent tingles of apprehensive excitement darting up her spine.

Alexandra dragged her eyes to his tanned face. Although no one had ever attempted to seduce or kiss her before, she took one look at the slumberous expression in his heavy-lidded eyes and
knew
something was in the wind. Instantly wary, she demanded without preamble: "What are you thinking?"