How To Seduce A Duke

Chapter 17

The carriage driver had stopped for fresh horses several times during the long night, making it impossible for Mary to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time.

She had tried leaning her head against the leather squabs, but the constant jostling of the carriage as its wheels hit holes in the packed surface of the road-in addition to the fact that whenever she’d opened her eyes Rogan had been watching her-had kept her awake.

By nearly four in the morn, Mary had had enough. She begged Rogan to temporarily stop their chase in Baldock to rest and take their breakfast.

To her surprise, he did not resist the idea at all but rather proclaimed it a wonderful suggestion.

The only problem with the notion was that The White Horse Inn was completely filled. In fact, had Rogan not had sufficient coin to bribe another guest, who had risen early to catch a mail coach, to relinquish his room to them, there would not have been a room at all.

As it was, Rogan informed her that they would have to share a bed.

Mary was far too tired to argue, so she tucked the book of maladies and remedies under her arm, just in case she suddenly had need of either, and followed the glow of the candle the innkeeper had given Rogan up the dark staircase and into a small bedchamber.

Rogan settled the chamber lamp on a night table beside the bed and immediately began to remove his clothing.

“Um, Rogan.” Her words came out thin and strangled. “I know you do not see a need for bedclothes, but might you wear something to bed? I realize that we are husband and wife, but with any good fortune at all, tomorrow we shall no longer be so joined.”

“Very well, my darling,” Rogan laughed. “You needn’t fear. I shall remain clothed.” He glanced at the book of maladies cradled in her arms. “And though this is our wedding night, you are safe from any advances in this bed.”

“Oh, I know that,” she replied with feigned innocence. She set the book down and slid beneath the coverlet. “This is a bed. Not a carriage, after all.”

Rogan laughed and climbed into bed beside her.

She didn’t know when it had happened, or why, but there was an ease between them. A comfort she had not noticed before. But she felt it now and could not deny it.

Within minutes, though she was lying in a narrow bed with the one man who made her heart beat like a fresh team at full gallop, to her surprise, Mary felt herself falling asleep.

Three hours later, the sun streamed through the threadbare curtain stretched across the window.

Mary stood in the sunlight and held a hand mirror before her face. She grimaced into the looking glass. “Red. It’s completely red.”

Rogan rubbed his eyes as he awoke, and blinked up at her. “What is red?”

“This.” She whirled and pointed at her chin. “Your Grace, I take back my words. I am damaged. Just look at what you’ve done.”

He propped himself up on his elbow and squinted up at her. “How on earth did that happen?” Then his eyes widened and he rubbed the coarse black stubble upon his own chin. “Oh.”

“Your beard. It obviously scraped my chin when you were kissing me last night in the carriage.”

“I beg your pardon, darling, but I believe I was attempting to stop you from kissing me.”

“Not when this happened.” Mary held the mirror up again and peered into it with a sigh. “I remember quite clearly.”

“As do I.” Rogan smiled wickedly and climbed out of bed. He approached her, then lowered his mouth and placed a chaste kiss upon her reddened chin.

She smiled, then playfully shook her finger at him. “Back away, Blackstone. My chin is already quite red enough.”

Rogan tucked in his shirt, then caught her hand holding the mirror and raised it up before him so he could tie his neckcloth properly.

Or, at least as well as a gentleman unaccustomed to dressing himself could possibly do.

He had just finished when Mary caught the scent of frying rashers. Her stomach growled. “Shall we take breakfast before boarding the carriage?”

“Absolutely.” There was a glint of humor in his tone. “I shall need all the strength I can muster if I am to spend another day in the carriage with you.”

With a grin playing at her lips, Mary picked up her book, cape, and reticule, and watched Rogan as he shrugged his coat over his broad shoulders and picked up her valise.

She sighed quietly, willing away the wicked thoughts burgeoning in her mind. Such a gloriously formed man.

Rogan opened the door for Mary. As she turned her head to look at him when she passed through the doorway, her preoccupation with him hardly went unnoticed.

Mary walked straight into a gentleman who had picked that moment to pass their room.

“Oh, I do beg your pardon, madam,” he began, as he backed out of Mary’s path.

“The fault was mine, sir,” she interrupted. “Please do forgive m-me-” Mary felt the blood siphon from her face. “Mr. Archer!”

“Good morn, Vicar,” Rogan said, perfectly poised and bursting with confidence. “Just the gentleman we had hoped to see this day.”

Rogan stepped in front of Mary, who, it seemed, could not draw forth another word.

“Saints be praised, Your Grace!” The vicar hurriedly bowed. “What splendid coincidence, meeting you and Her Grace on the road.” He glanced at Mary and belatedly bowed to her.

“Not a coincidence at all. We tracked you through the night, inquiring whenever we stopped for fresh horses as to whether you’d passed that way or not.”

“Did you now?” The vicar glanced nervously behind him, down the passage.

“You are crushing your hat, sir,” Mary noted.

And so he was. Mr. Archer was wringing his hat as tightly as if it had been soaked all night in a washtub. His face glowed like a beacon, and a sprinkling of sweat dotted his forehead.

A heavy woman, nearly twice the weight of the vicar, shuffled up the passage toward them. “I’m coming. I’m coming, my dear.”

Rogan swept her with a curious gaze.

When the woman reached the vicar, she gave him a nudge. “Thank you for waiting for me.” She gave Rogan an appreciative glance but paid no attention to Mary. “Won’t you introduce me to your friend, Archie?”

The vicar could not quite hide the apprehension in his eyes. “Your Grace, Your Grace,” he nodded his head to both Rogan and Mary, “may I present my sister, Heloise.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” the woman chuckled. “Yes, I am his sister.” The neckline of her frock was fashioned daringly low and barely covered her breasts. Hardly appropriate for a vicar’s sister.

Rogan felt Mary’s hand on his shoulder, and he turned to see her eyes clouded with suspicion. “Sister?” she mouthed.

No, Rogan didn’t believe it either. But Mr. Archer’s true reason for traveling to Scotland was not his concern. “Dear sir, may we join you in the dining room? We urgently need to speak with you.”

The vicar grew visibly more agitated. “Oh, yes, well…we are in a dreadful hurry.”

“Sir, a great wrong has been done.” It was then that Rogan noticed the vicar’s unseemly garb. His coat was rich-blue kerseymere, and the waistcoat beneath, why, he’d be deuced if it wasn’t constructed of fine jonquil yellow silk embroidered with a line of hearts and diamonds.

Hardly the somber attire of a man of the Church of England.

Rogan drew his eyebrows close and studied Mr. Archer.

The vicar managed a tremulous smile. He glanced across at Mary, as if searching for a respite from Rogan’s concentrated notice. “Dear me, Your Grace, have you been injured on the journey?”

“Injured?” Mary repeated.

“He means your chin, Sweeting. It’s all scraped up and hot.” The vicar’s sister tapped her own with the tip of her index finger. Then she grinned and looked at Mr. Archer. “No, she hasn’t been hurt, dear brother.” She turned her notice back to Mary. “Have you, Your Grace?”

Mary looked mortified.

Rogan stepped between her and the offending woman. “Mr. Archer,” he said more sternly than he intended, “I will speak with you.”

The vicar expelled a loud sigh. He dropped his hat to the wood plank floor and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and began to groan.

“Mr. Archer.”

“Very well, I knew this would happen. I did.” He lowered his hands and scooped his rumpled felt hat from the floor. “Come with me. I have everything in my case.” He turned and started back down the passage.

Rogan looked at the woman, who started off instead in the direction of the staircase.

“Your business doesn’t concern me,” she called back to them. “I am famished and can smell the rashers and buttered toast from here.”

“This way, Your Grace,” the vicar said resignedly as he gestured to the door at the end of the passage. “I know what you’ve come for.”

Rogan slipped his arm protectively around Mary’s waist and led her to the vicar’s chamber.

When they entered through the open door, Mr. Archer was rummaging through a leather case. He withdrew a sheet of paper and handed it to Rogan.

“Here’s the license. I’d burn that if I were you.” He returned to the case and extracted a leather volume from it.

Muttering to himself all the while, Mr. Archer flipped through the lined and numbered pages until he found the one containing their entry. He took a small knife to the book and made to cut the page from the register.

“You can’t do that,” Mary gasped. “Destruction of a register is punishable by death!”

“Ah, learned woman.” Mr. Archer delivered the vellum page to Rogan. “And yes, you are correct. Had this been an actual register of a license of marriage, I could have been hanged.” He snapped the book in his hand closed. “But as it is, it’s only my household accounts register.”

“I-I do not understand.” Mary turned and searched Rogan’s eyes for an answer.

As Rogan fought to retain his composure and tamp down his raging urge to tear Mr. Archer limb from limb, he told Mary the insane truth of the matter. “It seems our Mr. Archer here is not truly a vicar.”

“Then we”-Mary’s voice broke almost painfully-“…we were never married.”

Rogan’s gaze shot to her eyes the moment he heard the regret and pain she had not been able to strain from her words.

She should have been happy, jubilant, joyous that she and Rogan had not been wed after all. But she felt none of these things.

Instead, she felt hollow. Tears trembled on her lashes. “I-I need to sit down.”

Rogan helped her to the plank chair near the doorway. Then he turned on Mr. Archer. “How did this happen? Who arranged for this?”

He grabbed the false vicar by the throat and slammed him against the wall. “Tell me now.”

Mr. Archer’s eyes bulged in their sockets, and a smothered whimper burst from his open mouth.

“Rogan, no!” Mary cried. “Please, let him speak.”

Rogan yanked back his hand as quickly as if he’d been burned.

Hastening his hands to his throat, Mr. Archer slid down the wall and sat on the floor, legs spread. “I-I told Lotharian it was madness. But he was sure it would w-work.” He looked across the room at Mary then. “And, judging by the lady’s pink chin, well, he might have been right.”

Rogan took a step forward. “What do you mean? You’d best explain yourself, Archer.”

The duke was a formidable man, but seething with barely-restrained anger, as he was now, he was clearly terrifying the man trembling on the floor.

“I owed Lotharian a good deal of money. C-couldn’t pay him off. So when he approached me at the fete with a proposition that would wipe my slate, well, I could not refuse.”

“What was his proposition?” Rogan’s face was a scowling mask of rage. “What was it?”

“He needed someone to pose as a vicar. To perform a false wedding…if everything went as planned. He knew I could do it. I had studied at my uncle’s side-he was a clergyman-as a young man, until…well, until my true nature exposed itself. I lost some parish tithings…to my weakness, gambling. Well that was the end of my training, such that it was.”

Mary came to her feet and came to stand beside Rogan. She slipped her hand around his balled fist and caressed it, easing the tension he held there until he relaxed his fingers and interlaced them with hers. “Why did Lotharian wish to arrange this false wedding? What possible reason could he have?”

“You mustn’t know Lotharian well.” Archer exhaled. “He is a gambler of the first rank. He cannot lose. He can read a person so well that he can predict his actions in any given situation. And he predicted yours, Miss Royle, as well as yours, Your Grace.”

“What was his prediction?” Rogan’s hand tightened around Mary’s.

“He knew you wore blinders. You were so damned angry with each other that you could not imagine the possibility that your perceptions of one another were completely wrong. That your passionate dislike of each other masked true passion itself. That you were meant to be together.”

Mary felt heat rising into her cheeks. She could not look up at Rogan, though she was longing to know if he felt as she did.

Lotharian had been right. Wicked man that he evidently was, he’d guessed correctly.

“But why the wedding? By Lotharian’s measure of our natures, Miss Royle and I would have realized our so-called passion eventually.”

“I don’t know. You must quiz him on that. All I know is that the false wedding was not so important as your pursuit of me on the Great North Road.”

“I don’t understand. The value of our pursuit was that we learned we were never married,” Mary retorted.

“No, the time you spent together, alone, united in purpose, was the value Lotharian envisioned. Time enough to see the other clearly. Time to realize that love is not only possible but…inevitable.”

She heard Rogan’s breath hitch in his throat. She didn’t know what to say or do.

They both stood silently for several moments before Rogan started for the doorway, pulling Mary along with him.

“We’re heading back to London. Now.”

The carriage tore down the road, sending clouds of earth spiraling out behind it.

Mary sat rigid and still in the corner. “You didn’t know either.” Her words were merely an observation, but Rogan seemed to hear them as a question.

“I should think that quite evident. Had you not prevented it, I might have pounded Archer senseless.”

“It wasn’t his fault.”

“No, it was Lotharian’s, and I will remember that fact.” He exhaled a long breath, then inclined himself forward to look into her eyes. “I am sorry for all of this, Mary.”

“You are sorry?” She regarded him quizzically. “You are in no way to blame for this.”

“None of this would have happened had I restrained myself.” There was something flickering in his eyes, and she knew he had more to say. “Had I not been so taken with you that night, allowed my passion to overtake my logic, perhaps I would not have been willing to do anything to make you mine.”

Mary sat mutely and stared at him.

“Lotharian was right, at least about my feelings for you. I never hated you. I desired you. I did from the moment I first saw you…in the garden. I just could not admit it to myself.”

Hearing his words, her heart fluttered wildly in her chest. “I never hated you either. I…” Mary could not admit anything else.

In truth, she knew that what had happened in the carriage had been her fault. Her desires, her passions, her wanton dreams come to life by her own doings.

But it was all too much to confess.

And so she sought to lighten the conversation. “However, I did think you to be a wicked rake.”

For a moment, his eyes brightened. “And you were not wrong.” But then his gaze became serious again. “But I am no longer that man.”

Mary considered him for a moment. “No, I don’t think that you are.”

Rogan reached out and placed a hand on her arm. “So there is no reason we should not marry.”

“Except one.”

Rogan furrowed his eyebrows. “What is that?”

“Love.”

Mary’s sisters were not at home when she arrived at Berkeley Square that evening. She was bone-weary and drained, and so the solitude suited her very well.

Mrs. Polkshank served her a cold dinner in her bedchamber. Though she’d barely eaten all day, she only picked at it.

When Mary was finished eating, she sank into the steaming bath Cherie had drawn for her.

Raising her left hand from the soapy water, she watched the liquid slowly trickle down her fingers and over the gold ring Rogan had placed there.

She tugged on the ring. She’d have to give it back to Rogan in the morning. She tried twisting it, but her fingers had swelled in the hot water and the ring would not be removed.

A raw and primitive sadness washed over her.

She would have agreed to marry Rogan when he’d asked in the carriage. Would not have needed to think at all about it.

All he’d had to say was that he loved her.

But he hadn’t.

The aching in her heart evolved into a sick, painful gnawing.

A sob overtook her, and she allowed herself to weep aloud, rocking back and forth in the hipbath.

Cherie rushed into the chamber, wrapped a towel around Mary, and led her toward bed.

When Cherie doused the candles, Mary curled to her side, pulled the coverlet high around her, and buried her face in her pillow.

Then something occurred to her, and she sat straight up in bed.

Rogan had not confessed his love for her.

“But nor have I.”