Any Duchess Will Do

The naughty books.

She plucked a volume from the shelf, built a fire in the grate, and settled in.

An hour or so later she was immersed in a scandalous encounter—a dairymaid’s lover had his hands under her skirts and was questing determinedly higher—when the library door swung open with a whoosh of freezing air.

She startled, whipping her head up. Her attention was ripped from the story roughly, unevenly—like a sheet of pasted paper torn loose. Little scraps of lewdness clung to her. She was blushing so fiercely she worried her cheeks would glow in the dark.

Thank goodness the intruder wasn’t the duchess or a servant.

Only Griff.

But she couldn’t call him “only Griff.” He could never be “only” anything. The intruder was life-altering, heart-muddling, oft-maddening Griff.

And she didn’t know what they’d make of each other, after all that happened yesterday.

He tossed her a brief, dark look. She couldn’t tell whether he was glad to see her or the reverse. “You’re awake at this hour?” he said.

She closed her finger in her book, holding the page. “I wake early every morning. I’m a farm girl at heart. Can’t sleep past five, it seems.”

As he shrugged out of his coat and draped it over the back of a chair, she recognized it as the same one he’d been wearing when she’d seen him last. His jaw was unshaven. He was still hatless as well. And he looked every bit as miserable as when he’d left her at the front gates of the foundling home, squalling babe in arms.

However he’d spent his night, the activity hadn’t succeeded in cheering him.

“Are you just coming in?” she asked, hoping she didn’t sound too managing or . . . well, wifely.

He nodded.

What a stark illustration of the differences between them. This hour meant early rising for her, but late homecoming for him. The two of them were literally night and day.

But even night and day had to cross paths sometime.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

His answering sigh was a slow, weary rasp. “Simms, I honestly don’t even know.”

“Oh.” She swallowed. “Well, I’m glad you’re here now.”

Wordlessly, he crossed to his desk and rolled up his uncuffed shirtsleeves. He lit two candles, sat down and regarded the broken clockwork he’d left waiting the other night.

“I hope your evening was more exciting than mine,” she said lightly. “After dinner, your mother set me reading aloud from Scripture to improve my diction. I was told to read only the H words. Hath, holy, heresy. Rather a bore.” She lifted the book in her hand and reopened to her current page. “Now that I’ve found the naughty books, the exercise seems much more interesting. Hard as hornbeam. Heaving hillocks of bounteous flesh.”

When that failed to coax a smile from him, she set the book aside and curled up in the chair. Propping her chin on her knees, she regarded him through the veil of lingering dark.

Something was very, very wrong. In a word (in an H word, no less—they seemed all the words she could think of now) he looked horrible. Haunted, too—even more so than he had the first night.

And part of her suspected he needed to be held.

She wasn’t sure how to initiate anything of that sort. To make the attempt seemed unwise, for many reasons. But there was one thing she could do for him—a skill learned through years of practice.

She rose from her chair, crossed to the bar in the corner and poured him a drink.

“When I started working at the tavern years ago, Mr. Fosbury told me I prattled on too much.” She watched the amber liquid swirl into a glass. As she recapped the decanter, she made her voice gruff in imitation. “ ‘Pauline,’ he said to me, ‘you have to learn to tell the difference between men who come in wanting a chat, and men who just want to be let alone.’ ”

After crossing the carpet in slow, careful steps, she set the drink on the desktop just inches from Griff’s elbow. He didn’t look at it, nor at her. He rubbed the fatigue from his face and peered at the broken clock. As if he could stare at the thing hard enough that the gears would leap into motion of their own accord. Perhaps begin churning time in reverse.

“I took his advice,” she went on, “learned to mind my conversations. But I also learned Mr. Fosbury had something wrong. There were men who wanted a chat and those who didn’t.” Gathering her courage, she laid a hand to Griff’s shoulder. “But none of them wanted to be alone.”

He drew a deep breath. His strong, linen-clad shoulder rose and fell beneath her palm.

She silently counted to five, as slowly as her skittering nerves would allow.

Nothing.

Well, then. She’d given him a chance. Nodding to herself, she lifted her hand and turned away. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“Don’t.”

The hoarse command froze her in place.

He swiveled his chair so that they faced one another, reached to take her by the waist, and drew her close between his sprawled legs.

Then he leaned forward—slowly, inexorably—until his forehead met her belly.

“Don’t,” he told her navel. “Don’t leave.”

Overwhelmed with some unnamable emotion, she stroked her fingers through his thick, dark hair. “I won’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I . . . I know.”

They remained that way for several moments. Touching. Breathing. Warming each other in the dark. Gratitude swelled in her heart. She hadn’t let herself realize how worried she’d been for him. Not until this moment, when he was home safe. With her.

“How is she?” he murmured.

Something told her he didn’t mean the duchess. “The babe?”

She felt his nod of confirmation chafe against her belly.

“The babe was a he, actually. And he’s fine. I took him in to the matrons. They dressed him in clean swaddling, filled his belly with milk. He’ll have been named and christened by now, I expect.”

“I hope he fared better than Hubert with that naming part.”

She smiled and stroked his hair again.

“I shouldn’t have left you. I just . . .” He huffed out a breath.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. It was obvious the whole place set you on edge. Many a big, strong man has been sent into a panic by a wailing infant.”

He lifted his head and gave her a searching look.

And her silly, girlish brain picked that moment to decide he was the handsomest man she’d ever seen. Probably because he was the only man to ever look at her this way. Holding her together with his strong, sculpted arms while his heated gaze turned her to slag.

“Can we return to the conversation we were having just before all that?” she whispered. “We were standing at the gate. You were saying how much you liked me, asking for a truce. And I . . .” She grazed a light touch over his cheek. “I was about to apologize for this.”

“Don’t. I deserved the punches and then some. For most of my life I’ve been a first-rate jackass. For the past year I’ve been trying to be less of one. But I don’t think I’m succeeding. I’ve merely graduated from first-rate jackass to flagship bastard.”

“I don’t know about that.” She tamed a lock of his hair. “You’ve had your moments this week. Saved me from falling not once, but twice. You were perfect with my sister. And I suspect that when you offered me this post, you thought you were doing it to rescue me.”

Now she wasn’t sure.

Now she wondered if she was here to rescue him.

He said, “At any rate, I owe you an apology for everything today. Including the water goblets.”

She laughed a little. “It truly was nothing. Just a silly tavern trick.”

“I have embarrassing party tricks, too.”

“Do you?”

“Oh, yes.” He released her, reclining in his chair. “I can pleasure two women with both hands tied behind my back. Blindfolded.”

“How boastful you are.”

“Boasting would imply I’m proud of it. I’m not boasting.”

Oh God. The look on his face told her he wasn’t. The images now filling Pauline’s mind made her a little bit queasy.

And very, very curious.

“I found the naughty books,” she said. “I have questions.”

“Oh, Lord.” He rubbed both hands over his face. “No, Simms. No.”

“But you’re the only person I can ask. And you owe me for the water goblets.”

He dropped his hands. “Very well. You have questions? Here are some answers. ’Yes,’ ‘No,’ and ‘Only with ample lubrication.’ Apply them to your questions as you like.”

She reached out and gave him a playful smack on the shoulder. “It’s just that the books make it sound so ridiculous. All this pulsing and divine throbbing and unparalleled ecstasy and cataclysmic smelting of two souls into one.”

“Cataclysmic ‘smelting’? What book said that?”

“Never mind the smelting,” she said. “But the rest of it. The unparalleled ecstasy part. Is it . . . is it really supposed to be that way?”

He sighed. “That particular question is best answered by experience.”

“But that’s just it, you see. I’ve had experience.” She cringed. “A little bit of it. And it was nothing like that. No ecstasy whatsoever. Nor even any flutterings. That’s why I was wondering if the books tell lies, or . . . or if it was just me.”

“Simms.” He rose from his chair and looked her in the eye.

It was killing her not to look away, but his expression made it clear he wouldn’t answer otherwise. So she slid from the edge of the desk, met him toe-to-toe, and held his gaze directly.

Then waited, miserable.

“It wasn’t you,” he said.

In Griff’s head alarm bells were sounding by the hundreds. He shouldn’t have this conversation. Hell, he shouldn’t even be here with her alone. But he needed to be with someone right now. And by God, she needed to hear this.

“It wasn’t you,” he said again.

“So the books do exaggerate,” she said.

“I’m not saying that, either.”

Her nose crinkled. “I’m so confused.”

“That’s because there are no simple answers. Can it be divine bliss? Yes. Can it be a dismal trial? Yes. It’s like conversation. With the wrong person, it can feel forced, perfunctory. Boring as hell. But sometimes you find someone with whom the discussion just flows. You never run out of ideas. There’s no awkwardness in honesty. You surprise each other and yourselves.”

“But how do you find that person without . . . conversing all over town?”

Griff gave a dry laugh. “What a question. Find the answer and bottle it, and you’ll have the most successful shop in England. I might even queue up myself.”

He had “conversed” with many women in his life, and he wasn’t proud of it. Oh, he had been proud of it once, and the women themselves had few complaints. But he’d come to realize it was a cold thing, when the best you could say of a bed partner wasn’t “I love you” or even “I’m fond of you,” but merely “I despise you a bit less than I despise myself.”

But he meant what he’d said at the foundling home gates. He liked this woman. He could talk with her, as he hadn’t talked with anyone in ages. And any man who’d let her go was a goddamned fool.

He reached for her, framing her sweet face. He traced her bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. “I don’t have many answers, but I can tell you this much. It wasn’t you.”

He approached her, feeling the darkness compress and heat up between them.