The Accidental Duchess Read online

  His fingers moved, and when the fire crackled in the grate behind us, I felt the resulting shower of sparks in my stomach. An odd, strangled little noise came out of my throat. Our gazes met again. His eyes were dark and wild; my own looked oddly unfocused. His hair was falling over his forehead. And he was watching me watch him.

  His hand cupped my breast, and this time, I moaned. He closed his eyes for a second, and I could feel him draw in a long breath. I knew it wasn’t ladylike, or anything that was proper, but I was helpless not to; I leaned back against him, and let my head fall back on his chest. He shuddered, behind me.

  I was behaving like the veriest wanton—pushing my body against him, watching his hand on my breast. And I simply didn’t care. I pressed back harder. He held my gaze and that hand hardly moved as we both watched it, yet its very presence seemed to make me boneless.

  He turned me around then, and pulled me roughly into his arms so I was up against the heavenly, terrifying, length of him. “Oh God, Gwen,” he said, and the timbre, the roughness of his voice, seemed to actually touch my skin. He covered my mouth with his, hard this time.

  “Bertie,” I said, against his mouth, and I could hear that my voice held the same urgency as his had.

  And then he let go of me and abruptly took a step back.

  I blinked, wanting to say, No! Please! Don’t stop now. My arms went out instinctively, to pull him back, but something in his face made my hands fall to my sides as well.

  “What did you say?” His face was taut.

  I tried not to let my puzzlement show as I reached around in the recesses of my drugged mind, trying to figure out what had upset him, and to recall what I had said, even. What on earth had I said? “Bertie?” I ventured, frowning up at him. “Bertie?” Not the most original thing to say in the situation, I supposed, but it had at the time seemed a fitting enough response to Oh God, Gwen.

  I tried to read the expression in his eyes. Could it be that I had been too seduced by the surprising ease between us, and by the … well, seduction? Did he prefer that I address him by his title even when we were private? That would be the usual way of things, it was true, but still, it rankled me that I had been in his arms losing myself in the most shocking manner, and he was quibbling over forms of address. The silence stretched on between us. “Do you prefer Milburn?” I asked, finally. “Or Lord Bertie?”

  “Not when we are private,” he said. “Of course not.”

  I hoped I didn’t look as befuddled as I felt. Not Bertie, not Milburn. What, then? I’d had a few nicknames for him in our youth, but in our current circumstances, both Puddle-Drawers and Spawn of Satan seemed singularly unsuitable.

  He took my hand, and answered my unvoiced question. “When it’s us, just us—” he gestured around at the intimate room—“do you think you could call me Harry, or Cambourne at the least?”

  Which was, well, to put it bluntly, one of the most—no, the most—bizarre request I’d ever heard. I disengaged my hand from his. “You would like to be called Harry,” I said. “I see”—although I did not see. “But why?”

  “Gwen,” he said in reasonable enough tones, “surely no man wants to be called by his brother’s name in an … intimate situation?”

  I took a step back as I began to absorb what he had said.

  “It is necessary elsewhere, but surely not here, like this—”

  I simply could not believe what I was hearing. “You,” I managed to say. “You are …” And that was as much as my mind seemed able to come up with.

  “Gwen?” He looked confused as he took a step toward me.

  I took a corresponding step back. “You—You’re Cambourne?” I was finally able to articulate.

  He looked wary. “Yes.”

  “But you can’t be Cambourne. I would have—” And then I stopped, and stared at him. He was watching me carefully. Would I really have known? And then, just like that, with an almost audible click of my brain, everything, the entire day, slid into place and I understood.

  And I could see, reflected on his face, the exact moment that he read my thoughts. “Oh my Lord,” he said, bleakly. “You didn’t know! They didn’t tell you.”

  I just stared. “No.”

  “You thought I was Milburn! You really thought I was Milburn?” There was something in his tone that made me understand that he thought if he said it enough times, he might believe it. One of us might believe it.

  I nodded as I looked, despite myself, at the pile of discarded hairpins on the windowsill. I had behaved like a light-skirt with Milburn’s brother! I closed my eyes for a moment.

  And I suspect he was having much the same thought, because when I opened my eyes, he took a step back. “All this time,” he said, sounding stricken, “all this time you thought I was Milburn? Bertie? When we—”

  He dropped to a chair and put his head in his hands. I stood, still rooted to the spot by the window. “I thought you knew,” he said, looking down at the carpet. “I thought you had agreed.”

  He looked so utterly miserable that I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. But somehow the fact that I had been more or less panting in his arms a few moments ago was adding an edge of an entirely different emotion. “Agreed? Knew? That you—that you are Cambourne?” I said.

  He nodded. “That I was only pretending to be Mil-burn.”

  “But why would I—And you believed that I would allow—” I closed my eyes again. First of all, I was not entirely certain that I wanted to know what he believed. And quite honestly, I suppose I was hoping that when I opened them again this would turn out to be some type of delusion. He stayed silent while I tried to sort my words and wished he’d disappear. A fresh wave of humiliation washed over me. There was simply no getting around it: I had behaved like a common whore in his arms. “You certainly weren’t pretending to seduce me,” I said, at last.

  “No.” His voice was quiet. He was extremely still. “Forgive me. At the time it had not occurred to me that you were unwilling.”

  I laughed. I was bordering on hysterics, and I knew it. “Yes, I can see that,” I said, disliking the way my own voice was rising. “Because under the impression that you were my husband and this was my wedding night, I behaved far too willingly?” And then, I started to cry. I wiped the tears away on the back of my hand.

  He stood, and put out a hand. “Gwen,” he said, in let’sbe reasonable tones, but I was having none of it. I was starting to sob in earnest.

  I could see my reflection mirrored in the window. Tears were running unchecked down my face. My skin was blotchy. My eyes were red, my nose, redder. I turned and faced him. His dark hair was still disarranged, falling across his arrogant forehead. His improbably blue eyes were dark under straight brows, and his jaw was very square at the moment. He looked every inch the duke that he would some day be. And it hit me with the force of a blow: How on earth had I ever thought he was Milburn? How stupid could a person be?

  I suppose it would be reasonable, at this point, were you to wonder how I could have ended up being quite so stupid. But understanding the situation requires going back a little way.

  This was never, you must know, a love match. Milburn and I had been promised to each other likely since the week I was born. Milburn, who is Lord Bertie, and Harry, who is, as I have mentioned, the Earl of Cambourne and future Duke of Winfell, grew up at Marshfields, principal seat to the Dukes of Winfell since the days of Queen Elizabeth. Give or take a year. And I was raised next door at Hildcote.

  As my hapless brothers, Richard and James, ran tame with Milburn and Cambourne, so did I. Lord knows, over the years I’d seen a vast succession of nursemaids and governesses, and then later tutors and schoolmasters bamboozled by their tricks—among which, switching identities held pride of place. But for most of my life, I had possessed the unfailing ability to tell them apart. A lot of good this lifelong ability had done me, however, since it had obviously failed me at that crucial moment when I had stood at the altar and sworn faithfully in
front of God and some three hundred witnesses to love, honor, and obey the wrong man.

  And now, a new, even worse thought hit me. “Does Milburn know about this?” I demanded.

  He moved a step closer, almost as you would approach a horse you were trying to gentle.

  “Don’t touch me! This is a joke, isn’t it? One of your vile little twin practical jokes. Seduce your brother’s wife? Oh God.”

  “Gwen,” he said, very quietly, “I realize that you’ve had a shock, but surely you cannot believe what you just said?”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” I whispered.

  “Perhaps, then, I can enlighten you.”

  “No!” It might have been childish, but I had no desire to hear him. “Please leave me.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Oh yes, you can.”

  “I see.” He studied me unhurriedly. “I had thought better of you,” he said lightly, and I was stung.

  “But … Milburn …” Does he care? was what I badly wanted to ask, but was afraid to hear the answer. At the thought that he very well might not, my tears started afresh. “Where is he?”

  He stood for a moment, his back still to me, and took a breath. “I do not know,” he said, as he turned to me. His face was carefully neutral.

  I eyed him. How could he not know? “But we—us—I am truly married to you?”

  “Yes,” he said, with no trace of hesitation.

  “Not to Milburn.”

  “No.”

  “But how could that be? It is not as though you have the same name, after all, for all that they are similar….” I stared at him, and he was silent, I suppose allowing me to work it out. “It was your name!” I said, almost lost in wonder at my own stupidity. “Reverend Twigge said your name and I never even noticed?”

  He nodded.

  “Edmund Harold Bertram is you,” I said, more to myself than to him. “And Edward Henry Bernard is Milburn, and still, they called him Bertie. I knew that, of course. But somehow I just …” I trailed off and looked at him. “Didn’t notice, I suppose. And you thought—you thought I had agreed to this?”

  He nodded. “I’m afraid so, Gwen,” he said, very quietly.

  “We can have it annulled, though?” I asked, and understood all too well the meaning when he hesitated. “Leave,” I said to him. “I only want you to leave.”

  Don’t misunderstand. I knew I was being unreasonable. I also knew that I had larger problems, but at the moment I simply could not get over my humiliation, both at his deception and my own behavior. My practically flinging myself at a man might have been excusable, if slightly overwarm, for my wedding night. My doing the same with the wrong man, was not.

  “Gwen—” he began, and I cut him off.

  “Not tonight. Just leave.”

  “Are you certain that’s what you want?”

  I nodded, despite the fact that I wasn’t.

  He looked at me, and I was uncomfortably aware of a hard-edged will beneath the surface. He seemed to me, though, to have decided to keep it submerged, because he took a deep breath and capitulated. “Right,” he said, beginning to move toward the door with obvious reluctance.

  And now, here we are, at my lowest moment: As he started to walk away, it occurred to me. My dress was unbuttoned. I had no maid and there was no question of me being able to button it myself. I had no choice. “Cambourne?”

  “Yes?” He turned from the door.

  “My, um …” I gestured at my back. “I cannot.”

  He crossed back to me. I could not for the life of me understand why the Earl of Cambourne, future Duke of Winfell, would have married me under false pretenses.

  But I also was too humiliated and too stubborn to allow him to explain himself. Unattractive, I know, but regrettably true. As his nimble fingers closed my buttons, I began to sob again. “Were you pretending to want me, too?” I shouldn’t have asked, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  His hands still lingered on the last button as he turned me toward him. “No,” he said, and then he kissed me. Hard.

  There was no question at this point but that I was not going to be seduced by his kiss. Not even a little. But—and here is the absolute nadir of the humiliation part—my body wanted him still. And enough, even, to overrule my mind. As his mouth closed on mine, my knees seemed to disintegrate along with my will, and that hot, shaking excitement in my stomach that had so recently been stirred within me for the first time, started again. My arms, of their own volition, went to him.

  After a moment, though, he lifted his head and stood looking down at me. I thought he might say something.

  I waited a moment and hoped I wasn’t panting. He didn’t speak. But then, he hardly needed to. My response to his kiss had said plenty. “How could you?” I asked, trying to banish the light-headedness in favor of righteous indignation.

  But his tone was equable. “Perhaps you’d best ask your parents. In the meantime, I’ll have a maid sent up to help you.” And then he left, striding out of our suite and closing the door very deliberately behind him in a manner that led me to believe that he was restraining himself from giving it a really good, satisfying kick.

  2

  In which I was married

  I dare say, I know precisely what you are thinking:

  How could this have happened? How on earth could she have ended up in that suite and almost in the bed of the wrong man? Is she the idiot she claims not to be, after all?

  Well, this is how.

  Two years of soldiering had changed Milburn was my perfectly reasonable thought upon sighting him. I was, at the time, standing in the vestibule of the church looking down the aisle, and he was standing straight and tall and surprisingly solemn in front of the altar.

  It had not been my intention, certainly, not to lay eyes upon Milburn until the ceremony. But then, it had not been my intention to be marrying him this year at all. I mean, I always knew I would be marrying him some day. But the moment, to my mind, had not yet arrived. He was off soldiering (which seemed a fairly unlikely career for him, but never mind) and I was spending some time in London enjoying myself. Or, at least, I had been, right up until the Unfortunate Incident on the Stainsteads’ terrace six months previous.

  It was a lazy June evening, and their ballroom, lit with what seemed like a thousand tapers, was sweltering. There was a crush of overperfumed, underbathed bodies, and so, when Lord Trafford offered to take me out to the terrace for some air, in place of the quadrille I had promised him, I accepted. I should have known better.

  I was three-and-twenty, and had strolled my share of secluded gardens and terraces. And even been kissed a few times. Rather sweetly once or twice by Milburn, in fact. But that’s neither here nor there. In Trafford’s case, when he launched himself upon me, pressing his wet mouth over mine, I was taken aback enough to sag against the wall, which is when we were spotted by Mother’s mortal enemy, Mrs. Haworth.

  Despite her dislike for my mother, the old harridan promised not to breathe a word. A promise she adhered to most firmly, except for the two or three hundred of her closest friends to whom she happened to accidentally impart the news. Needless to say, next thing I knew, the wedding was being planned. We had to wait six months (but not a day more), Mother had decreed, to prove to Society that it was not a necessary wedding, and then do the thing with great pomp and circumstance. To that end, Father bade Milburn return from wherever he was in time for the nuptials, and Milburn sent a return missive agreeing.

  I was not unduly alarmed by the fact that this was followed neither by further correspondence nor an immediate appearance. I knew Milburn well enough to know that he would cut his arrival as close as possible. I was also enough of a realist to anticipate that his first days at home would be entirely occupied with heartfelt reunions with his tailor, haberdasher, bootmaker, pomade merchant, vintner, snuff blender, club members, and racing cronies.

  But I was hardly looking for loverlike devotion from him. Milburn,
I had long accepted, was Milburn. And what lay between us was indisputably quiet rather than passionate. While I never had difficulty accepting that we would wed, my pulse had never exactly quickened at the thought of him. I wasn’t much bothered by that fact, though. I mean, I hadn’t much experience at pulse quickening—except courtesy of the odd Minerva Press volume, and it was comfortable, being promised to him.

  Other girls I knew dreamed of grand passions, and a few did make love matches. An awful lot, though, seemed to end up shackled to some horrible old man or some young care-for-naught in order to shore up their fathers’ pockets. Seen from that perspective, marriage to Milburn didn’t seem undesirable in the least.

  He was a trifle lazy, perhaps, in his conversation and his demeanor. And it was true that he could always be relied upon to be not quite on time. If a really good lark was thought up, for example, or some splendid waistcoat fabric arrived at his tailor’s, he might decide it imperative that he attend to that exigency, possibly forgetting to cancel previously made plans. But that was just Milburn, and I had no difficulty accepting that he would be my husband. And as my days before the wedding were well occupied, I hardly had time to refine upon his continued absence.

  So there I stood, on my wedding day, clutching my father’s arm. My eyes fixed on Milburn, and my breath unaccountably seemed to stick behind my ribs. “Are we going, Gwendolyn?” Father had asked gruffly at the very moment I was realizing that I was having difficulty exhaling. “Today?”

  There was a sea of expectant faces turned toward me. My dearest friends, Cecy, Lady Barings, and Myrtia Conyngham had taken up their places, and my brothers stood next to Milburn. I wondered for the merest fragment of a second where Cambourne was. Alas, how easy it is to see irony in hindsight. At the time, however, this did not so much as touch off the slightest frisson of alarm.