Lady Adventuress 01 - His Wayward Duchess (7 page)

She hoped that if she wove the narrative of her family around him, she could draw him out and closer to her, to weave him into the web of happy memories and love.

S
he told him of Arabella, who was ten and spent too much of her time falling out of trees and Harry, who was Arabella’s twin and every bit as rambunctious as the little girl, obsessed with one day being a grand duellist, though he was never allowed anything more fatal than a stick with which to hone his deadly skills.

John was fifteen, and away at Eton. He had been growing decidedly studious
, to their father’s pleasure. Though it was generally felt among the siblings that he often took himself much too seriously and could usually do with a bit of fun to keep him from growing cobwebs.

Cassandra shared their parents
’ love of botany and owned a pair of bronze-rimmed reading spectacles, though she hardly ever wore them, for she claimed they made her dizzy.

Holly came next, and after her Rose, w
ho was spirited and adventurous, and engaged to be married to a newly-made Captain of the Navy once he could afford a wife. Holly had always wished she had a bit more of her sister’s fire and zest for life.

Rose understood about daring
, passion and grand love – and Holly didn’t think Rose could ever have found herself in Holly’s shoes. Her manor would have been properly haunted, and her duke inevitably besotted with his new lady.

Timo
thy, the Millforte first-born, was more light-hearted than John, and given to a love of riding and dancing. Despite being two years older than Holly and a year older than Rose, he had always aided and abetted their mischief, and even joined in himself.

H
olly’s younger siblings in particular would adore the mysterious maze that was Pontridge Abbey – she could just picture them leaping from behind shadowed corners and making fun of the ancestral portraits, just as they did in the portrait gallery at home.

One
especially memorable rainy afternoon, when Arabella and Harry were still only infants, the siblings had spent a splendidly diverting afternoon in the family gallery making up marvellous, scandalous and appalling histories for the many ancestors that graced those walls.

Had their governess caught them at it,
they would have received a very thorough talking-to, but she had taken to her bed with a chill, and so their fun had gone unpunished. It was better than playing shades again, which tended to grow dull very quickly, especially when one ran out of silhouettes to make.

“
Truth be told, we are still unable to walk down one of those passages without having to stifle a giggle over one painting or another,” Holly confided to her husband, unable to keep a wobble of laughter from her voice and a sparkle from her eyes.

Strathavon looked into her ey
es a moment, seemingly lost in reverie, before shaking his head to clear away his musings. “It must have been a very diverting childhood,” he said politely.

Holly
wondered if the duke had ever had such fun in this house. As far as she was concerned, houses were never gloomy in their own right, and anything could be made fun given a healthy imagination for games and a suitably large army of siblings to command.

She was in the middle of tell
ing Strathavon the tale of how poor John had wandered into a prank set by Harry and got chased up a tree by an extremely irate goose when she noticed the astonished look her husband was giving her.

“How…remarkable”, the duke commented, from an impossible, icy, distance that still hurt Holly every time she was subjected to it. “You seem to have a very boisterous coterie of relations, my dear.”

He seem
ed mildly horrified by the idea.

“Did you an
d your brother never get up to mischief?”

But he was not in the mood to share even an
inch of his memories with her. “No more or less than any other children. Tell me, do you mean to start on the east wing tomorrow?”

*

The duke was always catching Holly unawares, before she had even a chance of making herself look somewhat presentable. Holly was in the middle of a short break from the cleaning, looking over lists by the window of her study, when a voice from the doorway startled her.

“Holly?”

She turned to find the duke standing behind her, so tantalisingly close, an unreadable look on his face. She wondered why he had come.

Holly raised a hand awkwardly to her cap, which was a little dishevelled and really terribly plain.

“Yes?” she asked huskily, suddenly very aware of the nearness of him, more and more so with every passing second, in fact.

His eyes trailed to the portrait on the wall.

“I see you have found my mother,” he said in surprise.

With baited breath, she wondered if that would annoy him.
And would it even matter if it did?

“
Is that she, then? I wasn’t entirely sure – the name plaque is missing.”

“
Yes. There are more in London.” He looked at the painting a bit longer, then sighed. “This is a good place for it. We must see about having another plaque engraved.”

And just like that
, Holly’s heart swelled, because he thought that his mother’s painting belonged in her study, and perchance that meant a little bit that he felt that she belonged there too.

“I shall see to it,”
she said, aimlessly brushing at a tendril of hair that had fallen into her eyes.

The duke nodded, then reached out with an agonising slowness a
nd brushed the hair out of her face.

“It was in your eyes,”
he said softly, by way of explanation, his gaze still trained on hers.

Holly didn’t
respond, heart somewhere in her throat, and a delightful tingle where his hand had brushed her cheek.

Then he seemed to remember himself and step
ped away, and it was as though the air was suddenly full of frost: cold and bleak. “If you can spare a moment, I wished to go over some of the accounts.”

“Accounts?”
Holly echoed dazedly, before finally coming-to. How did he have such power over her? “Oh, yes the accounts! Certainly.”

“You do not mind? I hope Pontridge has not bored you so much that you have turned to keeping the books as your sole source of entertainment.”

“N
ot at all. I have been mostly occupied with restoration – the house is so very beautiful, it is a great shame to see it in ruin.”

Strathavon inclined his head. “I am glad to hear it – I have always loved Pontridge, much more than any of the other estates. It is, I think, the best home I have ever had.”

Holly felt touched at this intimate confession.
Home
… Lost for words, she merely gazed back into his impossibly blue eyes, before moving to retrieve the books.

H
e drew a chair to sit next to her at her desk, and it was all Holly could do to focus on the ledgers, when what she really longed for was reach out to him. To brush his sleeve with tentative fingers, to feel the warmth of his hand.

His scent and warmth teased her, and she hoped she did not say anything absurd, because after he was gone
, she had trouble remembering anything of what had happened, except for the flood of feelings that had coursed through every fibre of her being.

*

Leaving Holly’s study, Strathavon felt unsettled and confused. Neither was a state that he wore well. It was why he had left as quickly as he had done. He had not wanted to leave, which was precisely why he’d had to.

The house around him buzzed with a life he had not seen in it for years. Servants went about their business, and the place came to life under Holly’s expert touch. There was warmth in the windows and a sense of comfort. She had even managed to get rid of the white soup.

But the house was not the only thing thawing under her guidance – more and more he’d found himself caught up in her stories, in the sparkle of her eyes or the tilt of her wrist. His heart was waking up as if from a long slumber in some forgotten crypt, and he was not at all sure how he ought to approach this new problem.

For a problem it
was – the Duke of Strathavon could not afford to love. He had learned already the harsh realities of losing the people one cared about the most. Love was… inefficient. Careless. Unnecessary. He had seen too many times the chaos it caused and the wreckage it left in its wake.

H
e could not remain at Pontridge for much longer: the risk was too great. He did not trust himself to resist the undeniable pull of her rosy lips, the temptation of her soft skin.

Strathavon hated being chased out of his ow
n house. But he had no choice – he knew without the least shred of doubt that it was her wide innocent eyes that would finish him off.

D
espite the unpleasant edges of his temper, to which she had borne witness despite the distance which he had tried to keep between them, Strathavon had seen that one emotion in her eyes which had the power to undo him entirely.

Just then
, in the study, while she explained the accounts to him, she had glanced up briefly with an achingly wistful expression painted across her lovely face.

She had looked at him with a sweet
, trusting love – an affection he had neither wanted nor expected in the eyes of the woman he had married simply because of her exemplary domestic management. And she had been so
close
to him. He’d smelled her orange blossom scent, which would likely haunt him for days…

But
, no. Alas that such a thing could never be. Love opened him up to possibilities of pointless pain which he could not in good conscience inflict on her, on himself – on anyone! It was a thing best lived without.

He had
believed that keeping his every hour occupied with the estate would chase out any thoughts of the woman he had so carelessly married – but the opposite had happened instead.

He’d caught himself wondering what she would say to this, or
think of that. And what she was doing up in the damnable attic, when he was miserably barricaded away in his own study.

Sylvester’s late
father had considered idleness to be the source of every vice. He’d often said that those who have nothing to do always unfailingly endeavour to entangle themselves in folly merely to pass the time. That was why Sylvester had endeavoured to throw every effort into learning the running and repair of his holdings. That was why he had chosen to marry a woman who could be a helpmeet in his quest.

Yet, here he was, caught in a tangle of sheer folly all the same. He hated feeling uncertain.

But when she had looked at him, smiled her shy smile, and said his name, something inside him had broken or warped. It was as though his soul knew hers: a connection beyond mere human knowledge. He’d known in that moment that her trust and gentle kindness would be the undoing of him.

He
’d known that he could not touch her or look at her, no matter the desires that coursed through him at her nearness.

But most impo
rtantly, he could not kiss her. Yet this was exactly the urge that had suddenly taken sway of him in the study: to taste her lips, and to pull her into his arms, to feel her softness against him.

It was as
though he had been utterly possessed by her.

Undeniably
, there were many women more beautiful, but it was not mere prettiness he admired in Holly. It was her manner, her liveliness, and her bright eyes that had first captured his attention. She had a spirit that was truly remarkable.

She was to him
more lovely than any celebrated society beauty ever could be. This was not a turn he had ever expected, when picking himself a plain, practical bride.

He needed space and distance so that he might make sense of this unexpected new
turmoil.

“
Your Grace, there has been an urgent letter,” Strathavon’s valet informed him, interrupting his reverie and the tortuous silence of the library.

“Ah, good.
Give it here, Nichols.” The duke could not hide the relief in his voice. Whatever it was would doubtless prove a most welcome distraction.

Mr John Nichols, his lordship’s most esteemed valet
, seemed to sense his master’s agitated spirits, because he had been only half as acerbic as usual that morning, when commenting on his lordship’s sorry-looking, crumpled coat.

He wondered what it was that
had so agitated his usually unflappable master, and had even ventured a guess that it had aught to do with the young lady upstairs.

Sylvester found that the note was from his cousin Avonbury, scribbled in the man’s unmistakably frightful handwriting. According to the frantic missive, Avonbury had got himself into yet another absurd romantic scrape, from which Strathavon was now obliged to disentangle him.

That, at least, would serve as some distraction.

Really, with the estate in shambles and Avonbury in a whole new set of trouble
, poised on the brink of social disaster, the least thing on Strathavon’s mind should have been whether or not he felt something unusual for the mousy girl raising dust in the old yellow parlour.