The Golden Lord

“And so we should remain here together awhile longer?”

She nodded vigorously, relieved he’d understood despite her dithering.

“Even if this must seem a, ah, compromising situation for a young lady like yourself?” he asked, more bemused than scandalized. “Swaddled only in bedclothes, your feet quite bare, alone in the moonlight with a wicked old rogue like me?”

She made a little puff of indignation. “I never said you were wicked, or old, or a rogue!”

He laughed, and roguishly, too. “I’ll admit I’m gratified by that, even though I shouldn’t be. You know there are others who would judge me with far less sympathy in these circumstances.”

“I wouldn’t. Besides, who else will ever know?” she asked, sweeping one arm, draped with a coverlet wing, to encompass the rest of the sleeping household. “Who is there to see us, Your Grace, or even to miss us when—oh, please, you are not married, are you?”

“I?” he asked, a question to her question and no answer at all. “Why?”

“Because I should like to know, Your Grace,” she explained. “Not because I have any designs upon you, but because while being your guest is one thing, being the guest of you and your lady wife would be quite another altogether.”

“Ah,” he said. “So you would expect her to have come inspected you by now?”

“Well, yes.” Jenny smiled wryly. “I don’t believe any wife worth her salt would lump me into the same category as a stray puppy.”

“And here we had a straw-filled basket and a dish of warm milk all ready for you in the stable, right beside Jetty and Gus!” He chuckled, but the smile didn’t last and even in the moonlight she could see the fresh wariness in his expression. “But tell me. Why does my being wed seem so damned inevitable?”

“Because of who you are, Your Grace,” she answered promptly, with another little curtsy for emphasis. “You’re not like common folk, free to marry or not as we please. Dukes must marry their duchesses, to produce the next generation of heirs to your lands and titles and goodness knows what else.”

“But I’m not married,” he protested. “Never have, nor likely ever shall.”

“No, Your Grace?” she asked curiously. “How…how remarkable.”

Of course Rob would judge it not only remarkable but remarkably lucky. It was always easier to win the confidence and trust of a lonely bachelor, to gull him without a wife to ask suspicious questions about where his money was going. That was the situation here, as Rob would see at once, and one he and Jenny had worked often before.

And yet for Jenny it wasn’t the same at all. How could she lump this duke into the same hamper with the other fusty old bachelors with bad teeth and ill-fitting wigs that she and Rob had known?

“‘Remarkable’?” he repeated, still guarded. “You consider it so remarkable that I have never inflicted myself upon some poor woman in matrimony?”

“No,” she said. “Rather I think it remarkable that no woman has inflicted herself upon you. Surely you must have a trail of broken hearts to your credit.”

“I can assure you there’s not a one,” he said, his wariness fading, as if she hadn’t said what he’d been dreading after all. “You flatter me to believe otherwise, miss, but if you knew me better, you’d realize that I’m hardly the great prize you seem to think.”

She frowned. Of course he was a prize. He was a duke.

“But let us speak of you, instead,” he continued. “Are you some fortunate man’s wife?”

“Oh, no,” she answered promptly, her thoughts still on the question of prizes. “I’m most certainly not married.”

He paused, letting her answer hang between them for so long that now she was the uneasy one.

“You’ve remembered that much more, then? Enough to make you sure there’s no worried husband scouring the countryside for you?”

“There’s not—there can’t be—because I would know,” she said softly, and as she did, she realized how much she meant it, too. “If I loved a man enough to marry him, nothing would make me forget him.”

“That’s a rashly romantic thing to say,” he scoffed. “If you’ve been struck hard enough to have forgotten the name you’ve had since birth, how could you possibly remember your lover’s, instead? Here, give me your left hand.”

Before she could refuse, he’d claimed it for himself, holding her fingers up into the moonlight.

“There now, that’s more logical proof,” he said. “No wedding ring.”

She pulled her hand free, rubbing the empty finger where he’d touched it. “My ring could have been stolen by Gypsies.”

“Then thieves would have taken the gold hoops from your ears, as well,” he countered. “Besides, a ring worn day and night, such as a wedding ring, would have left its mark upon your finger.”

Gemini, he was quick at this sort of banter, quick as Rob! “All that proves is what I said before. That even if my head cannot say for certain if I’ve a husband or not, my heart—my soul!—would never forget.”

He wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled something foul. “Rubbish,” he declared. “Only poets and over-wrought young girls believe that.”

“Then you do not believe in love, Your Grace?”

He sighed with world-weary resignation. “I believe that men and women can find a thousand ways to amuse one another in bed and out of it, and call it love,” he said. “And I believe in the useful partnership of marriage for producing children, if it brings reasonable happiness and contentment to both the husband and the wife. But as for Cupid’s darts and boundless souls and all the rest of the established claptrap—no, I do not believe in that, for it doesn’t exist.”

She frowned, perplexed. The duke was claiming to be exactly the opposite of her brother, who could fall in love with a donkey if she fluttered her lashes at him. “Then you have never been in love for yourself, Your Grace, have you?”

“I have generally tried to govern myself by reason,” he said with a solemnity at odds with his disheveled hair and unbuttoned shirt. “I’ve always tried to avoid being ruled by my passions.”

“If you can say that, Your Grace, then you simply haven’t met the special one who’ll convince you otherwise,” she suggested. “I know that must be the case with me. I have yet to find any gentleman that pleases me enough to love. But I shall. I know it.”

“Ah, and so we are back where we began,” he said softly, his half smile now unexpectedly bittersweet. “Here we are, with your heart able to recollect more than your head.”

“I suppose we are, Your Grace.” She drew the coverlet more tightly around her shoulders. Ordinarily she would have laughed and tipped her head to one side in the well-practiced way that gentlemen found so charming.

Yet this time didn’t feel ordinary. Perhaps it was only the bruise on her forehead, or perhaps it was the moonlight addling her wits and making her see things in his expression that weren’t truly there. This time, just this once, she wished she didn’t have to do what she’d practiced. She longed to be able to explain what he said, to ask if that bittersweet half smile meant that he, too, still longed to find the love that didn’t seem to exist.

But he was the grand Duke of Strachen, while she was no more than an invented girl named Corinthia, not even real. Her sole purpose in being here in this house—and only from purest luck at that—was to be pleasing enough that the duke would think kindly toward whatever scheme Rob would decide to invent. Tonight’s moonlight would never matter as much as the money—a loan, an investment, or a gift—that Rob would coax from the duke’s pocket, especially not after she and Rob vanished one morning, off into the next set of false names and identities.

No, better to smile than to dream, and far, far better to keep her wits sharp and keen than to go longing for something that couldn’t be changed. The moment she began thinking with her heart, instead of her head was the same moment the luck would end, and she and Rob would find themselves taken up and tried as common criminals, with transportation or the gallows as their final reward.

That is, if Rob ever did return to find her….

“You are cold,” the duke was saying with concern. “You’re shivering.”

“No, Your Grace,” she said quickly, forcing her smile to be winning even as she began inching back toward her window. If she’d shivered, it had been from the reminder of the gallows and her fears for Rob, not a common chill, and certainly not from anything that he could remedy. “Only…only more weary than I first thought.”

He took a step toward her, his hand gallantly outstretched to offer support. “Then let me guide you back to your rooms. There are, you know, easier paths than hopping through the window.”

“The window does well enough for me, Your Grace.” Tonight she was the one running away, not him, but it was the wisest course—the only course, really—before she blundered and said or did something that couldn’t be undone. Far better to retreat now, until morning, when she could meet him with a clear head in the bright, unmagical light of day.

Lightly she pulled herself up onto the windowsill before he could stop her, the coverlet billowing around her bare legs.

“You were right before, Your Grace,” she said breathlessly. “We should say good evening now and part. Good night, and pleasant dreams. Good night!”

Chapter Four