His Secret Duchess

He wanted someone who would satisfy his carnal needs. Not just someone, she acknowledged. He wanted her, and she had been made aware of that for a long time. He had made the first approaches even before his wife’s death. The unwanted brush of his hand against her arm or her hip. The sly, inviting smile. The slide of his eyes across her body.

Not that he had stopped his conjugal visits to Abigail, not even when her body was so wasted that it made almost no disturbance of the bed’s smooth coverings, except for the grotesque swelling of the tumor in her belly. Mary knew the reality of his continued visits too well, having seen the evidence of his passions clearly revealed in the dark bruises on the dying body of the woman she cared for, gently bathing the thin limbs and dressing her, at her instruction, in a pretty nightgown, pitifully awaiting her husband’s expected return.

When Mary finally found the courage to ask, Abigail’s eyes had not met hers.

“Because he’s my husband,” she had said softly. “It’s my duty. I cannot deny him, Mary. It is his right. “

Mary Winters had nodded, placing the skeletonlike arm tenderly under the warmth of the quilts that she piled around the dying woman.

“There are others, Mary, more than willing,” Traywick reminded, pulling her thoughts back to the present, to the question for which she could not imagine an answer.

She knew the truth of what he said. He was rich, prominent in the affairs of the district, tall and stout, his thick body taken as a sure sign of his prosperity. It would be thought that spinster Mary Winters had made a match far above her expectations. Tray wick’s florid complexion and the slightly protruding, mud-colored eyes were not flaws serious enough to put off the women who would be more than willing to take over the running of this house Mary had entered more than six years ago.

In those years, the reins of its management had slipped slowly and yet inexorably from Abigail Traywick’s fragile fingers into Mary’s capable ones. She could not imagine anyone else living here.

Nor could she imagine sharing the upbringing of the boy with another woman. Certainly it would not be with the instantaneous, sisterlike rapport she had found with Abigail.

“You may go or stay. That is your decision, Mary,” Traywick went on. “Your right. But if you choose to stay, it must be, given the change in our circumstances, as my wife.”

“Go?” she repeated unbelievingly. Surely he couldn’t mean—

“I don’t think another woman will be willing to share the management of the household with you, as Abigail was. Her health, you know, almost forced that surrender of her duties, but another woman.”

He let the sentence trail off, its implications clear. Another woman would perhaps demand sole control. Not only of the house, a task she would gladly surrender, but also of the child.

“What of Richard?” she asked. The central question, of course. She watched his thick lips move again into that knowing smile.

“There is Richard, of course. Did you think I had forgotten Richard, Mary?”

“Even if you remarry, sir, he shall still need a governess. A new wife might not be so willing to take on the raising of a child from a previous marriage.”

“Especially if she has sons of her own,” he suggested.

The idea was one that she had not considered. How stupid she had been that the realization of what he really wanted did not cross her mind. She had done everything he demanded. All these years, knowing that she was entirely at his mercy, but knowing also, in her heart, that Abigail Traywick’s body would never produce the son her husband’s vanity demanded.

They had been married five years before Mary came to live here. Even then, there had been eight small markers in the churchyard of the village, all the stones bearing the name of Traywick. A few of the babes had been stillborn, carried long enough for hope, she imagined, to flourish in Abigail’s breast that this time, this time at last, she might produce the son her husband wanted so desperately. And his obsessive desire for a son to carry on his name had been Mary’s protection.

“Besides,” he went on, “Richard is old enough to be sent away to school.”

“He’s still a baby,” Mary argued, but suddenly she knew what he intended: to ease aside the child he had been so willing to claim as his own six years ago, and to put into his place a son of his own loins—now that the convenient death of his barren wife had freed him to marry again. She could be his new wife and could bear the sons he wanted, sons of his own seed. In that position, she would be able to care for and protect Richard. Otherwise…

“Your decision, Mary. Shall you become my wife and continue here in the household you have surely come to think of as your own? To care for Richard as if he were your own son…”

Again he allowed the sarcastic suggestion to fade away. There was no reason to voice the truth. They both were aware of it. She had given him her son, and in exchange she had been allowed to live in this house, to care for the baby and for the woman who willingly pretended she had finally carried a living child within her womb, carried it this time to term.

There had been nothing but a strong mother’s love evidenced for the baby by Abigail Traywick, but her spirit was generous enough to share “her” son with the slender, too-quiet girl who had come to live in her home and who had come, also, eventually, to be her friend.

“You know I can’t leave Richard,” Mary said.

“Then the decision seems simple. You will find me an indulgent husband, Mary. Abigail wanted for nothing. You must be the first to admit to that.”

Still she hesitated, remembering the bruises, and the noise that had sometimes reached even to the sanctuary of her room. Involuntarily she shuddered, but then she wondered why she hesitated. She had already given up so much. There would be the physical surrender, and no matter the painful reality of that, she would willingly sacrifice whatever discomfort it involved to protect the child. She could close her mind to the reality of his body straining above hers in the darkness.

With that thought came the memory of the clearing, and the strong, young body of the man she had loved. So long ago. And of the shadowed chapel where she had spoken vows that bound her then and had bound her since.

“I cannot,” she whispered.

His hand, the fingers broad and spatulate, was suddenly against her cheek. His palm was smooth, softer than her own hands now were, hard worked with the many tasks of’ the household. She had not felt she had any right to complain. There had never been bitterness in her heart about her role, only gratitude that she and the boy were warmly dressed, sheltered from the cold cut of both winter wind and cruel gossip, and well fed. He had never begrudged their care. Despite his cruelty, he, too, it seemed, kept to his bargains.

“You think about it, Mary,” he suggested, his fingers sliding slowly over the smooth white skin of her neck, coming to rest over her shoulder, his thumb making caressing movements just over the swell of her breast.

She could not prevent her shiver, and again his lips lifted into that suggestive smile. “Think very carefully about what you want. And about what you are willing to give up. I think Richard would have ? hard time adjusting to the rough-and-tumble of school. So many do, you know. I even heard of a child who hanged himself. Too sensitive, they said, but if Richard had brothers… Perhaps a tutor might be the solution, if there were other children.”

Mary said nothing, her eyes held with deliberate courage on his, unprotesting of his hand’s caress. He smiled again, at whatever was revealed in her rigid features.

“Be sure you bank the fire, Mary.” he said. His hand squeezed her shoulder, the pressure painful with the brute strength of his fingers. He stepped beyond her, stopping only to pick up the crystal decanter of port. Unmoving, she listened to his footsteps fade down the hall, to the room he had shared with Abigail.

Only when she heard the door close did she allow her body to sag, almost gasping for air as would an exhausted runner. She moved slowly to the fire, but instead of tending to the task he had assigned, she watched the golden flames blur and disappear behind her tears. She blinked, determined to clear the unfamiliar moisture.

Her hand trembled like an old woman’s when she put it against the small mantel. Suddenly, though she had never wavered in the path she had chosen, or been forced by fate to choose, her proud head bent, her forehead allowed to rest against the back of the hand that gripped the narrow mantel.

Her father had often promised that one was never given more than there was courage to bear, but for the first time Mary Winters wondered if the strength of her resolve and the level of her endurance would suffice.

The cold disturbed her, so she turned, trying to find the familiar warmth of the piled quilts. The fire must have gone out, she thought drowsily, her fingers searching for the bedclothes that somehow had become so disarranged as to leave her shivering, uncovered to the winter’s draft.

She was not yet awake, so when her fingers encountered the unexpected solidness of a body above her, she screamed.

She was dreaming, she thought. Only a nightmare. Like Traywick’s hands, huge red spiders fluttering over her body in the darkness. And then his hand moved upward, pushing against the bunched material of her cotton rail, thrusting his knee between the two of hers, his hand under her gown, cold against the bed-warmed skin of her thigh. She was awake now, awake enough to think that she must not scream again. It would frighten Richard, sleeping in the nursery next door.

“No,” she said, pushing downward against those blunt fingers with both her hands. She held her knees together, one pressed tightly on either side of his, but then she could do nothing about his mouth, descending over her breast. His lips fastened over her nipple and, reacting to that invasion, she turned her body, fighting against his massiveness, against his sheer bulk. She felt his mouth lose contact, and the hope that small victory gave her added strength to her will. He must not, she thought. He must not.

With his free hand, he caught her wrists and wrenched them above her head. The hand that was under her gown, tracing coldly over her thigh, continued inexorably to its destination.

“No,” she said again.

“Hush, Mary,” he whispered, his lips on her cheek. She could smell the sweet-sick odor of the wine on his breath, hot and fetid against her skin.

“No,” she begged, her slender body bucking under his weight, trying to push him off.

“You’ll wake the child,” he warned hoarsely. His mouth found hers, and he pushed his tongue inside, the soured taste of wine sickening. His tongue was too large, too strong, like the body that strained above her. It was choking her. Moving inside as the spider hand was moving now against her lower body, his fingers painfully digging into the soft flesh of her thighs. Not a caress, but a punishment. And she thought of the bruises that had always marked Abigail’s frail body.

Unbidden and unwanted, as weakening as the realization of how little control she had over what was happening, came the image of Nick Stanton’s fingers drifting with sensuous grace across her body. This was not love making. This was assault, and Mary knew suddenly that if she agreed to what he urged, no matter whether anyone else ever knew, she, at least, would always know the desecration of those vows she had made. Till death us do part…

She bit the tongue that pushed vilely against hers, bit hard and tasted his blood, and felt the bile rise in her throat as the blessed air rushed in where there had been only the hot stench of his breath.

“No,” she said aloud. Fighting more strongly, determined now that he should not take what was not his. “Get off,” she ordered. Her right wrist suddenly came free from his hold, the pain of her teeth perhaps having surprised him enough that he loosened his grip. She put her palm flat against his chest and pushed, and then her legs came up, knees struggling to get under his weight, trying to throw him off her.

The blow that smashed against her mouth and nose was casual, not delivered in anger, but as unthinking as if one were swatting at a summer’s fly, brushing aside something that dared to annoy. His strength was enough, however, that her face went numb with the force of it, and she tasted blood again, her own, her lips cut against her teeth. There was no pain, not yet, only shock, and unthinkingly she cried out. She had never been hit in her life, not even as a child. The unexpectedness of it was more painful than the physical force.