no question but that Jeremy brought out her worst, the carnal impulses she’d inherited from her mother.
“I want to be a duchess,” she said, echoing her fourteen-year-old self, the girl who fiercely longed to win at the game of marriage. “Thaddeus is a true gentleman.”
Jeremy leaned forward and brushed his knuckle across her cheek. “But are you a lady?”
She flinched.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, his eyebrows drawing together. “I didn’t mean it as an insult, Bess.”
“Why did you agree to walk me to the church?”
His eyes searched hers, and she saw the moment when he decided to be honest. “I hoped to kiss you again.”
She had always been so careful, so sure that she could avoid her mother’s mistakes. Yet she had walked out of the tearoom without thought of a chaperone, beside a man who lusted after her.
“Betsy,” Jeremy said softly. His eyes looked almost tender. “Don’t. Don’t think whatever it is you’re thinking.”
“I think nothing,” she said, walking out and leaving him behind.
He was confusing, bitter, dark-tempered. For all she yearned to soothe the anguish he sometimes let slip, she couldn’t.
She caught up with Aunt Knowe in silence. Once they had climbed a flight of stairs, her aunt paused.
“You’re going to have to choose between them.”
“There’s no choice,” Betsy said immediately. “The duchess is marvelous. She’s funny and kind.”
“I didn’t mean between the duchess and her son. You are not marrying Emily,” Aunt Knowe said dryly. “The choice is between Jeremy and Thaddeus.”
“A man’s mother is the mirror of her son,” Betsy said airily. “How could I be luckier? Everyone loves Thaddeus.”
Aunt Knowe pushed open a bedchamber door, and Betsy saw Winnie changing the bed into linens brought from Lindow Castle. Aunt Knowe was a firm believer that to sleep in strange linen, even once, was to court vermin, if not illness.
“Take a warm bath,” her aunt suggested, her eyes softening. “Remember, you have more choices than these two. The men flinging themselves at your feet are legion.”
Betsy came up on her toes and kissed her aunt’s cheek. “You’re wonderful.”
“I’m lucky,” her aunt said. “You children are endlessly amusing.”
As Winnie dosed her bath with vervain, Betsy sat next to the fire and tried to collect her thoughts.
If she was honest with herself, she loved flirting with Jeremy. She wanted to kiss him in a dark corner. She wanted him, with his dark soul and furious eyes, his brandy-drinking, sober-sided sarcasm.
His broad chest, battered hands, and beautiful lips. What man had lips like his? She was fascinated by his lower lip, by the little crease in the center of it. The way his tongue had slipped past her lips.
The way he spoke idly, a flow of words, and all the time his eyes ranged over her lips . . . her bosom, her neck.
He seemed to like her wrists. Was that possible? She caught him looking, his eyes drowsy.
She could swear . . .
But what did she know of lust?
Only that it danced in her limbs and made her mind flood with scandalous ideas. What if she teased Jeremy with kisses, with a lap of her tongue, even with a nip from her teeth? What if she kissed him so passionately that he—
That he what?
She knew nothing.
Oh, she knew the mechanics. But that was nothing.
Chapter Thirteen
They gathered for dinner in the inn dining room, and even Grégoire Bisset-Caron joined them, complaining of a cold but never sniffling.
The duchess carried the conversation through the first course, as she had apparently decided to woo Betsy by describing Thaddeus’s innate aptitude for being a duke, on display from the age of two months.
Betsy listened carefully to the story of Thaddeus’s generosity toward an orphaned hedgehog, but she allowed her mind to wander when his mother described his courage after being stricken with ringworm.
“His beautiful curls fell off in patches all over his scalp,” the duchess lamented.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Thaddeus groaned under his breath.
Betsy liked him for that, because he was irritated but didn’t cut his mother off.
The ringworm finally vanquished, the marquess entered the lists, and the table was treated to the harrowing tale of Jeremy’s childhood bout of mumps.
“You’ve missed the point,” Jeremy observed, when the story of bulbous glands wound down. “You forgot to say how wildly courageous I was in the face of near death.”
“Death?” His father snorted. “You were a frightfully naughty child, but your disobedience wasn’t fatal or near to it.”
“I notice you are not mentioning my cousin’s service in the colonies,” Grégoire said.
Jeremy smiled faintly.