When a Duchess Says I Do - Grace Burrowes Page 0,69

a guarantee against conception.

“Thank you,” she said. “For all of it, but especially for denying yourself.”

Duncan did not want her thanks, but perhaps on the Continent, the etiquette for such moments required it. He remained in her arms, bracing himself just enough to allow them room to breathe. Her scent was on him, roses and woman, and a tension he’d been carrying for years had fallen away. The urge to speak to her of that luscious feeling of freedom was bounded by caution.

Had Matilda made love with him because she wanted to stay with him, or because she planned to leave?

He eased away and took a handkerchief from the night table. “I won’t be long.” He passed her the handkerchief and took himself behind the privacy screen. A cold, wet cloth ruthlessly applied to intimate locations helped restore his mental functioning.

He climbed back under the covers, and Matilda bundled against his side. His breeding organs were all too ready for a re-match, which would be greedy and inconsiderate.

“Let me hold you,” he said, wrestling Matilda atop him. “You do know that the measures I took are not sufficient to reliably prevent conception?”

She drew a finger along his brows, her touch exquisitely relaxing. “The women I’ve consulted said it’s as good a precaution as any.”

“My wife didn’t find it adequate, but then, she was not a well-educated woman, and that precautionary measure was not consistently taken.”

Matilda’s finger traced down his nose to sketch his lips. “You were young. She was your wife. Why exercise restraint?”

“She was not my wife when she conceived the child, and I was not the father of her child.”

Matilda looked both sad and unsurprised, as if she’d puzzled out the conclusion of a moralizing novel a hundred pages from the end.

“Tell me, Duncan. I suspect this story matters a great deal.”

“The story didn’t matter to anybody who might have given it a happier ending.” The bitterness of that truth still haunted Duncan more than a decade later, but mostly as old grief, as disappointment in himself and in those he’d trusted.

Matilda folded down onto his chest and wrapped him close. “Tell me.”

Even having become her lover, Duncan was hungry to know Matilda more intimately. He didn’t know all of her secrets, he had not won all of her trust, but he’d made a start.

And she had made a start earning his. “Once upon a time,” he began, “there lived a small boy who grew up in his uncle’s vicarage. The small boy was taught right from wrong, and right from potentially wrong, until life presented him with not a single moral conundrum. He went into the church, and from there, the whole bloody business went straight to hell.”

Matilda gathered him close. “I can keep a secret. Give me the rest of it.”

She was keeping secrets. Now that desire had ebbed to a dull roar, her secrets bothered Duncan more than ever. He was keeping secrets too, though, and for what purpose except to pretend the past had happened to another man?

For the first time since taking off his collar, Duncan prepared to recite the whole, miserable, rotten tale. He stroked his hand over the woman whom he hoped to make his wife and vowed to give her and her alone the truth.

* * *

“If you’d told Mr. Parker about the woman, he mighta paid for more than a few pints,” Herman groused.

Herm was practicing a card trick—a cheater’s maneuver by any other name—though the dear lad would never be a card sharp. Herman lacked sincere friendliness, which Jeffrey knew to be the successful card sharp’s most essential trait.

“If I’d told Parker about the woman,” Jeffrey said, “I’d have been confessing to trespassing, you idjit. Do you fancy a trip to New South Wales?”

Herman attempted to shuffle the deck, the cards splattering all over the common’s plank table. “You didn’t have to mention that part. We mighta been passing by the home wood when we seen her, along the lane, like.”

“Mr. Parker is a military man, Herm. Didn’t you notice how he stood like he had a poker up his arse? His coach was crested, with the panels turned.”

Herman gathered up the cards. “When did you see his coach?”

Herman, Herman, Herman. Ma’s last words had been to look out for Herman, but a brother grew weary of such a thankless task.

“Man’s gotta step around to the jakes, don’t he?”

“So what’s being military got to do wiff it? Half the men in England have taken the king’s shilling a