Elizabeth crossed her arms. A study in annoyance at his presence? His telling? All of it? "I've been the recipient of attention from many ladies."
"How dreadful for you," she declared, her expression deadpan. Just then, her glasses slipped down the bridge of her nose.
Crispin stilled. They were the wire rims she'd donned when last he'd seen her nearly ten years ago. The fact that she still wore the same pair was an inconsequential detail. Or it should have been.
He frowned. And yet it was not. It was a material telling about Elizabeth and the state of her affairs these past years.
Noting his attention, Elizabeth pushed her glasses back into place and jutted her chin at a defiant angle.
As for the first time since he'd entered the room, Crispin took in those details, which had escaped him until now: the heinous gray skirts that hung, shapeless, on her slender frame. The painfully severe chignon that could never tame those crimped red curls. She should be attired in garments fit for one of near royalty, as she, in fact, was. The idea that she'd gone all these years without, choosing a life of work over a life with him, stuck odd in his chest.
They, after all, had been friends, and this was the life she'd sought instead. She'd always been prouder than most--including him. Including anyone he'd ever known in his thirty years.
He cleared his throat. "As I was saying--"
"Your bride problem."
"I only ever had one bride problem," he muttered. And it had been this fearless minx before him.
Understanding lit Elizabeth's eyes. "I see."
Crispin puzzled his brow. "You do?" Of course. With her head in a book for as long as he'd known her, she'd always been clever enough to see everything.
The first eagerness he'd caught in her expressive moss-green gaze flared to life. She sailed over in a whir of loud, rustling skirts. "You require an annulment." A smile, one that still dimpled her cheeks and lit her eyes and turned her lips up, transformed her from the ordinary girl of his past to someone... quite... enthralling. He stared back, transfixed by the sparkle in the glittering green depths of her eyes. "Do you have papers for me to sign?"
Reality seeped back in. "What?" He raced through his mind for whatever last words had been spoken before he'd noted the entrancing color of her intelligent eyes.
"Papers." Her smile slipped, and he mourned that fleeting light. "For the annulment?" Hope threaded those three words and stuck in a pride he hadn't realized he had.
"You think I want an annulment?"
"You don't?" She answered another of his questions with one of her own.
"I don't."
She looked so crestfallen that, if he weren't so offended, he would have laughed outright. "But then you can marry whomever you wish," she persisted.
"I understand the implications of a church-granted annulment," he said with false drollness. Crispin made a show of studying her. "You'll do just fine."
Splotches of color tinged her cheekbones again.
Her mouth moved.
Before she found the right words and skewered him, Crispin hurried on with his reason for being here.
"I'll need you to return to London... as my wife."
Chapter 3
He'd found her.
How, after all these years?
Or perhaps he knew long, long ago and was content to let you live here?
Something in that pinched at Elizabeth's heart. A silly, nonsensical hurt.
As a creature of reason and logic, she'd recognized the power afforded him. As heir to one of the oldest titles in the kingdom, he possessed both the resources and capabilities to find her in whatever corner of England she chose to hide.
But now, after all this time apart, he'd actually wanted to find her.
A marriage conceived by him had, in the moment, seemed like a solution to each of their individual problems. But that was the folly of youth. They'd thought of the immediacy of their circumstances and the benefits in that very instant... but hadn't truly considered... the after.
Until it had been too late.
"It was a mistake marrying her. I know that."
Hating the hurt of that echoed in her memory all these years later, Elizabeth fought it back and adopted the same veneer of aloofness she'd mastered at Mrs. Belden's.
Now, he required her to return to London with him, on a matter that by his accounts had nothing to do with an... heir. Of its own volition, her gaze went to the towering, figure. One broad shoulder propped negligently against the wall did nothing to diminish the power of his frame. Nearly six inches taller and two stone in muscle greater when they'd last met, he bore only the faintest trace of the lanky, wiry friend of her youth.
From her place at the center of the parlor, Elizabeth forced her spine straight, a futile bid to make herself taller. An impossible feat. Even more impossible around this bear of a man.
Crispin sent one dark brow slashing up over a sapphire eye that twinkled. "Nothing to say?" He flashed a dangerously enticing half-grin that dimpled his left cheek. "That's not like you, Elizabeth."
No, it wasn't. She'd once been garrulous and free with her words, particularly around this man. Mrs. Belden's Finishing School, however, watered down a woman's temperament. "You don't know me," she said calmly, smoothing her palms over her skirts. The reminder effectively quashed his smile, restoring a ducal veneer of ice. Not anymore. "And my name is Mrs. Terry." She tacked on that important afterthought.
He shoved himself from that wall and stalked forward with steps to rival the sleek panther who'd been part of his late father's menagerie. The primitive glide of his steps sent a lone butterfly fluttering in her belly and spiraling throughout her being. "I would have never ventured you'd gone off and used that, of all names."
Fighting for control, Elizabeth slid behind the ivory sofa, placing it between them as a weak, but necessary, barrier. "There is nothing wrong with the name Terry," she said tautly, hating that he continued to knock her off-balance. It was why it was easier to fight him on a "name" than on his intentions for her. How dare he upend her fragile, but once stable, existence and remain so infuriatingly calm through it?
Crispin stopped at the opposite end of the sofa. He lowered his hands to the scalloped mahogany trim. "No," he concurred. "Your mother's previous name was Terry. You were always Brightly."
It's a splendid name for a girl with your wits, Elizabeth. Another whisper of a memory about a friend who'd once found a gangly, awkward girl in the country as special as she'd found him.
They, however, had together gone and destroyed that special bond. She was as much to blame as he was. "What do you want, Your Grace?" she asked quietly, calling forth the distinguished rank as a reminder about the barrier that existed between them. Except, it was a warning given too late. They'd traveled a path that could not simply be undone...
He straightened. "Tsk, tsk. As we're husband and wife, I never took us for a couple who'd refer to each other by our titles and surnames."
She shook her head. "We're not husband and wife." Elizabeth lifted a finger. "Not truly." To him, she'd only ever been his best chum Elizabeth. Only, I yearned for something more... "A marriage is brought to completion through sexual intercourse." A garbled choking built in his throat. His disquiet helped Elizabeth find her footing. "And given there's never been any penetration of your peni--"
Crispin shot a hand out. His gloveless palm covered her mouth, muffling the remainder of that word. His ears an impressive shade of red, he glanced at the door then back over to Elizabeth. "Enough."
"What?" He'd become a duke in every way, then. It was an image that didn't fit with the rogue written about in the gossip columns that ultimately found their way to Surrey. But then, that transformation, too, had been inevitable. Dukes might be rogues with their mistresses, but invariably they became stuffy bores for the rest of the world. She and Crispin together had jested about it long ago, and through his laughter, Crispin had vowed to never follow that path to pomposity. For reasons she
couldn't understand, she mourned that change. "It's an opinion that goes back to Boccaccio. A marriage without consummation is no marriage. It's a universal acceptance across all cultures."
He snorted. "That was a story set forth in ancient Greece, hardly modern England."
Damn him for being as clever as he'd been all those years earlier. Powerful peers weren't supposed to know obscure writings on the sacrament of marriage. "Modern England," she corrected, refusing to back down, "still states coitus determines the validity of a union. And the truth remains,"--she patted the back of her head in a bid at nonchalance--"we've not shared so much as a kiss." But I wanted to. I wanted him to want me in all the ways a man desires a woman. Hers had been foolish, hopeless musings of a girl who'd had the misfortune of falling in love with the last person she ought.
"That's not true, love," he dangled, flicking the tip of her nose the way he might a younger sibling. That only sent her frustration up a notch.
"I'd hardly consider a kiss between two children anything significant." That sloppiest of kisses had come when she was a girl embarking on a quest for knowledge about the "human kiss" with him, a like-minded scholar of six and ten.
"And yet..." He stalked around the sofa with sleek steps. "You recall it all these years later." Crispin hooded his gaze, the long, thick, black lashes she'd envied as a girl sweeping down. Only, there had never been anything primal in the way he'd stared at her before.
I said too much. "H-hardly for any reasons that matter," she squeaked, cursing her loose tongue. She forced her feet to remain rooted to the floor as he stopped before her.
Barely a handbreadth of space divided them, the true divide between them far greater than any physical distance. He lowered his lips close to her ear. "Have a care, Elizabeth." The scent of him, a dry, earthy oak moss, was intoxicating and so different from the lemon and bergamot he'd once favored. It highlighted how very much they were strangers to each other now... in every way.
Her body, however, had no discretion. Elizabeth's belly fluttered. "A... a care?"
"With all this talk of kissing and the marital bed, I might begin to think you're eager for me to, at long last, consummate our vows," he whispered, his breath tickling the sensitive skin of her right lobe, knocking the air from her lungs.
Elizabeth knew with the same confidence she did every last lesson she'd delivered in this finishing school that a kiss from this man before her would bear no hint of the clumsy, wet joining of their youth. That Crispin, the Duke of Huntington, was a man who'd wield those lips with skill where seduction would ultimately prevail.
Another smile ghosted his lips, a knowing one that brought the world rushing back to clarity in a rush of noise and motion.
With a gasp, she abruptly backed away. "Of course I don't want to f-fornicate with you." She despised the slight tremble of that one word that made a liar of her. For she did, even all these years later, wonder what it would be like to know Crispin Ferguson's embrace, not as an experiment, but as a like yearning shared between a woman and a man.
"Fornicate, Elizabeth?" he drawled, that damned dimple in his cheek indicating he was enjoying this entirely too much. "Never tell me your stuffy views on making love are a product of the illustrious Mrs. Belden."
Making love...
Her mouth went dry, her tongue heavy.
She and Crispin had spoken on anything and everything, but never this, never words that conjured forbidden acts and passionate meetings. His rogue's grin deepened.
Elizabeth tightened her jaw. He was very much the rake Society painted him in the gossip sheets. "Do not be silly. Mrs. Belden does not permit discourse on..." A twinkle glinted in his eyes. "You're teasing me."
"Indeed," he replied, infuriatingly smug. His casual drawl doused whatever madness had momentarily gripped her.
"Say what it is that brought you here," she demanded, tired of his games and the back-and-forth debate that was going nowhere. "I've students to instruct." Angry, mocking, miserable students who despised her for what she was--a dragon come to crush their spirits. Unlike him, a former fellow and scholar instructing young boys at Oxford on scientific matters of import.
"I trust your distinguished headmistress will be quite forgiving of our stealing a handful of minutes," he pointed out.
Yes, the ruthless proprietress of this place loved no one and nothing, except the approval of the peerage. She'd order the building turned upside down if it would ease a ducal frown into a smile.
"I don't care whether she is or is not. I care about the young women who are missing their lessons." Young girls were certainly better off doing... anything but what they'd previously been attending to in this room. Guilt needled her.
"Very well." Crispin straightened, his bicep muscles rippling the fabric of his wool riding jacket. "I want you to return to London... as my wife." He flashed a cool smile. "That is, after all, what you are."
Elizabeth opened her mouth and closed it several times. This time, no words came spilling out. Annulment. Divorce. Outrage. All had been responses or words she'd expected from Crispin's lips, but certainly not... return to London as my wife. It was impossible. Her heart did a funny leap, and she hated herself for that reaction. After all, the rule of reason said that if something didn't make sense, there was a reason for it. He didn't wish to be married to her. He'd never truly wished it. She eyed him suspiciously. "Why do you want me to return with you?"
"It is essential that Polite Society sees I am married, that you are real, and then?" He flicked a stare around the classroom. "You may go back to living your own life."
How very perfunctory he was. A duke passing judgment on this place and the life she'd made for herself. In this instance, she couldn't sort out which stung more. "I... see," she said, unable to keep the bitterness from creeping in.
He'd never wished to marry her.
Not truly.
He was your friend, Elizabeth, and you betrayed him. You put your own needs and desires above his...
Yes, their marriage had been based only on charity and friendship.
"May we speak?" Crispin motioned to the settee, as comfortable as one who owned that ivory seating. "Please?"
Please.
That was why, as a girl and then a young woman, he'd forever been her friend. He'd not been one of those nasty boys to revel in the power bestowed upon him as a ducal heir. He had not been one who'd commanded or accepted the world as his due. And now, all these years later, as a duke who could order all but the sun for his pleasures, he'd not changed. And how much easier it would have been had that not been the case. Clenching her fists, Elizabeth slid onto the edge of the seat.
Crispin took the aged King Louis chair opposite her, his powerful frame making the seat small. Grabbing the sides of it, he positioned himself so they faced each other. "As I was previously saying, since my father's passing, I've found myself..." He grimaced.
"Sought after by ladies everywhere?" she drolly supplied. As a young man, he'd earned the sighs of every girl in the village. Yet, he'd preferred her company above all others'. Even now it filled her heart with a silly giddiness. The Oxfordshire Oddity the village folk had called her. Until her relationship with Crispin had silenced them.
Crispin tugged at an immaculate, crisp, white cravat. "Hardly everywhere," he mumbled, just as modest now. "And not for any reasons that matter." Were he the smug, self-important lord just a step below royalty, it would be so very easy to resent him. What must it be like for him now, a specimen of masculine perfection to rival a Da Vinci statue and in possession of one of the most venerable titles?
You're the only one, Elizabeth, who doesn't see a future duke. You are the only one who sees me.
Unbidden, her gaze fixed on the sapphire signet ring upon his left littlest finger. The coat of arms marked his influence and lineage that went back to William the Conqueror.
Despite his noble roots, he'd craved her friendship as much as she'd yearned for his. When no one had wanted a thing to do with
the unusual, bespectacled girl whose casual village-side discourse consisted of talk about a mare's estrous cycle, he'd delivered an equally eccentric bit of knowledge.
It's why they'd been a perfect match--as friends.
Until they'd not been. They'd gone and ruined something that had been too good, too precious to alter.
"I know it was a mistake, but it is done... and it cannot be undone."
Her throat worked painfully.
"Elizabeth?" he asked quietly, interrupting her miserable musings.
She cleared her throat. "Forgive me. Continue."
"I've recently come forward with the truth about my marital state."
The direct, logical person he'd once been would have done so in the bluntest way possible. "Never tell me you took out a page in the London Times?" she asked, finding her footing once more.
His rugged cheeks went red.
Despite the shock of seeing him and the madness of this moment, she couldn't stop the snorting laugh that burst from her lips. She made a futile attempt to bury it behind her hand. "You did."
"I didn't issue a public notice," he groused, his color rising. "Rather, I carefully dropped the information to Lady Jersey."
One of the leading ladies of the ton, the older matron would have sung such a juicy morsel to anyone and everyone with ears that functioned.
His calling forth that revered hostess also served as a reminder of the great divide between them. "Even a mother desiring a duke for her daughter would balk at bigamy," she drawled. "Therefore, I trust my assistance is not truly required." Elizabeth made to rise.
"Elizabeth..." Crispin rested a hand on her knee, and her breath lodged in her lungs. "It is not that..." His words trailed off. Together, their gazes went to his hand upon her. The shock of his fingertips burned through the scratchy wool fabric of her dragon's skirts, his hand heavy and hot in a way that her body had never felt, his touch having the intended consequence of staying her movements--but not for the reasons he thought.
Some wave of dark, indiscernible emotion glinted in his dark blue eyes. His fingers tightened reflexively upon her knee, a clenching and unclenching of those long digits that crunched the fabric of her dress, searing her through her skirts.
Elizabeth swallowed hard.