eyes skated down her front and then jerked back to her face.
Betsy looked down too, and found her nipples making little bumps in the soft fabric of her nightdress. She squared her shoulders and gazed back at him.
“There’s my Bess,” he said, voice rasping.
She had floated through the Season as if it were a prolonged masquerade, a game in which the prize was a wedding ring. Here, in the middle of the night, facing a man with stubble on his jaw and no coat, with no more apparent similarity to a gentleman than she had to a queen . . .
This was real.
He was real.
“Please sit,” she said, pointing to the chair by the fire.
One eyebrow arched, but he sat.
“I will sit in your lap,” she told him. “We had better not kiss again, though. It seems to go to my head.”
“Nothing so depraved,” he promised, seating himself. Betsy sank onto his lap, his arms came around her, and her head settled against his chest. It felt like the end of a book, the part of a marriage that authors leave to the reader’s imagination: daily affection and sweetness, a layer of desire never alluded to on the page.
“So you’re my friend again, even though I was an ass?” he asked.
“If you find yourself in the grip of another temper, you must keep it to yourself.”
Jeremy rested his chin on her head. “He touched you.” There wasn’t an ounce of apology in his voice.
“What will you do if I marry him?” she inquired.
“Move to Italy, I suspect. Or Russia, as that’s even further away.”
He didn’t sound as if he was jesting, and his arms tightened possessively. Betsy felt a stab of such pure joy that she didn’t bother searching for a response, just snuggled closer.
“The Season is a game,” she said later, drowsily. “My father says I allow men to hang about me like horseflies at the trough.”
“I shouldn’t have been harsh.”
“Before I debuted, everyone viewed me as a version of my mother, and now they don’t. They think women can be bred for chastity and obedience.”
“You are a Wilde, and a magnificent example of the breed.”
Betsy puzzled over that and decided it was a compliment. Her eyes kept closing because the thump of his heart against her ear was mesmerizing. She almost missed what he said next.
“You’re the best of the Wildes,” he murmured. “The most loyal and true, a brilliant player at billiards and life.”
Did he really say that?
Betsy woke up when her maid pulled the curtains open the next morning. She was tucked in bed, alone.
“We won’t be returning to Lindow today,” Winnie said. “There’s more snow on the way.” She opened the door and ushered in a procession of Lindow grooms carrying buckets of hot water. Lady Knowe would never allow strange servants into an inn bedchamber when one of the family was in bed. It was too easy for strangers to be bribed.
Betsy lay watching and trying to think through a fog of happiness. Just at the moment, she didn’t care about wearing breeches to the auction, or playing billiards in a men’s club. She was contemplating a far more scandalous move, from the view of polite society: rejecting a future duke in favor of a war-damaged man with a lesser title.
She was out of the bath and dressed by the time Winnie discovered Jeremy’s bundle tucked behind a chair. “What on earth is this?” her maid asked.
“Oh, that’ll be my breeches,” Betsy said airily. “There’s an auction in Wilmslow this afternoon, and I plan to wear boy’s clothing.”
“Lady Boadicea!” Winnie cried—using Betsy’s full name as a measure of her distress—“after all the work we’ve done to make you into a proper duchess! With the future duke and his mother in the inn. You mustn’t, you really mustn’t!”
“The duchess plans to wear men’s clothing as well, if they can be made to fit in time. Her great-aunt tried to escape a marriage by fleeing in breeches. Think of it like a fancy dress party.”
“How very peculiar,” Winnie observed. “I have no wish to wear men’s clothing.” She took a pair of green velvet breeches from the bundle. “I suppose if Her Grace . . . I can’t imagine her in men’s clothing!”
“My Aunt Knowe will wear breeches as well.”
“I wouldn’t want to put on nasty old breeches.” Winnie shook out the matching coat. “I think it will fit you, but this costume is wretchedly out-of-date.”
“There’s a portrait of my brother Alaric wearing it in one