Page 43 of A Duke in Disguise
“You apologized to me for calling me a lady.” She dissolved into laughter, resting her forehead against the door beside him, her shoulders shaking with mirth.
“It was remiss of me for even suggesting such a thing,” he intoned gravely. “It’s as if I learned nothing from you or Nate.”
“So how are you?” she asked, resting her cheek on the door so she faced him. He turned towards her, and their mouths were inches away.
He studied her appearance. She wore no hat and at least twenty percent of her hair had abandoned all pretenses to being involved in anything like a coiffure. Beneath her cloak she had on what he recognized as the frock she wore to clean the soot from the fireplace. He did not know whether it was his imagination or whether her mode of dress had become more resolutely chaotic in the weeks since he had left Holywell Street, but he was certain he had never seen a more welcome sight. However, he was soon to be Lord Montagu, she was a pamphleteer and publisher of illicit novels, and when he looked upon her he ought to see that there could be no future between them. But he wanted to take hold of her wrist and never let it go, wanted to keep her in this house that would soon, appallingly, belong to him.
“I shouldn’t have left you the way I did,” he said.
“True, but that doesn’t answer my question.”
“How am I?” He shrugged and pushed himself away from the wall. “I wish I knew. I miss you and seeing you here is...” Confusing? Wrong? “I’ll never regret seeing you, Plum, but it would have been easier to make a clean break of it. Why did you come?” He heard the weariness in his own voice.
She reached towards him then pulled back her hand. “I wanted to tell you that I’m still your friend. What I told you still holds. We’re friends, with or without the rest of it.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. I don’t want to hear it. I’m in love with you. I don’t want your friendship. It would only remind me of what we aren’t. Yourfriendship—” he spat the word “—would make me miserable. And goddammit, Verity, I’m incensed that it wouldn’t make you miserable too.”
“Then why the hell did you take me into your bed if you knew it would have to end?”
“I fooled myself into thinking it wouldn’t,” he admitted, furious with himself. “And, when I was being halfway rational, I thought I’d be able to part with you the way I’ve parted with everyone. I thought I’d be able to move on.”
“And what in heaven’s name did you think would happen to me? Did you think I’d just kiss you goodbye and forget that I had fallen in love with you?”
They stared at one another, the weight of her words hanging in the air between them. “I didn’t expect you to love me back,” he said finally.
“Then you’re more prodigiously stupid than I had thought.” And with that she stormed from the house, leaving Ash alone.
Chapter Sixteen
Verity closed the shop for the rest of the day so she could be furious in peace. She was curled on the sofa, sulkily drinking tea and breaking a piece of toast into angry little crumbs when Nan knocked on the door.
“There’s a lady downstairs,” the older woman said, handing Verity a calling card as if it were a holy relic.
“Mrs. Allenby?” Verity asked, perplexed as to why Portia would leave a card. Then she looked at the name on the ivory rectangle. “Good heavens, that’s Ash’s aunt. Show her up, will you?” She patted her hair, but it was a lost cause, so she jabbed some pins in it and hoped for the best.
“Lady Caroline,” Verity said when the older woman entered the study. Seeing her in this room, where Ash had been such a familiar presence, Verity could see their resemblance to an almost eerie degree. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“It occurred to me that we’ve met twice now.” She glanced around the room in a way that could not help but take in the worn carpet and cracked windowpane. “But under less than ideal circumstances for getting to know one another.”
This was true, but Verity was at a loss as to why Lady Caroline would want to know her. “Indeed, ma’am,” she said, gesturing at the sofa for her guest while she herself sat on the chair.
“I’ve heard so much about you.”
“You have?”
A flicker of a wry smile darted across Lady Caroline’s mouth. “You can’t imagine that my nephew has been silent where you are concerned. You would be amazed at how often the conversation drifts in such a direction that he finds it necessary to mention what you would think or what you would do.”
With a wave of irritation, Verity understood that Ash’s aunt had come to warn her off. If so, she could spare herself the trouble.
“I’m a devoted reader of your new magazine,” Lady Caroline said. “Do people truly send you those letters or do you make them up?”
Whatever Verity had expected from Lady Caroline, it had not been a conversation about the management of a ladies’ magazine. “I made the first letter up. Actually, Ash made it up.” She remembered that morning in her study with Nate and Ash, when they had all laughed and been momentarily carefree. “But in the other issues I answered letters that have been sent in. We get heaps of them,” she said, not bothering to conceal her pride.
“This morning, I was so pleased to discover the December issue on the breakfast table with my tea. But your answer to the letters...” She folded her gloves in her lap. “It was not your usual manner of advising correspondents.”
That had been her response to the ladies with unfortunate marriages. “My first draft was a three-page screed on reforming the divorce laws.”
A small smile flickered at the edges of Lady Caroline’s mouth. “But what you actually wrote was quite... well, this is an inexcusably personal question but did you have my nephew in mind when you wrote of the great hope of love weathering obstacles?”
