Page 48 of A Duke in Disguise
It was too dark in the shop to read, so he tucked the paper into his coat pocket. “Thank you.” He brushed his lips across her forehead. She knew him well enough to understand that he had, despite his attempts to be reasonable, experienced Nate’s leaving as an abandonment, and she was doing what she could to mitigate that.
“When will I see you next? Will you keep coming back to me?” she asked.
His first instinct was to tell her that of course he would, that he wanted nothing more. But this wasn’t only about his desires; he needed to know that she wanted this as much as he did. “Are you asking me to?”
“Yes,” she said, after only the smallest hesitation. “I... hell, Ash, I think I need you.” Her gaze was fixed at some point over his shoulder, as if the words had cost her a lot. And, knowing her, they probably had.
He drew her closer to him. “I love you, Plum. I don’t know how to stop coming back to you and even if I did I wouldn’t want to. Marry me.”
“You’re deluded.” She pulled away to arm’s length, her face pale and outraged in the moonlight. “You and Portia both. And your aunt. One, you’d be a pariah.” She ticked it off on her fingers. “Two, my skin crawls at the idea of having a title. Three, I would rather eat worms than live in that house.”
He tugged her back to him. “One, if Portia Allenby and my aunt are already contemplating our marriage, then I don’t think we’d be utterly friendless. Two, so does mine but I’m bearing up. Three, we could live elsewhere.”
“We could carry on like this,” she countered, gesturing between them.
He wanted to argue the point, but knew that the outcome of this discussion didn’t matter. “Look, I want to marry you, Verity. It’s the thing I want most in this life. But if you don’t want to marry, then we won’t. I’ll take you on any terms you offer. Weekly visits. Monthly visits. I just need to know that you’re a part of my life.”
“Really?” She sounded surprised, but happy. “Even if I fell pregnant?”
The prospect of having an illegitimate child filled him with something twisted and shameful. But he knew that it wasn’t an insurmountable problem. “We would care for any child we had under any circumstances,” he said. “I trust you, and you trust me. We’d make it right.” Because that was the truth. No matter what, marriage or no marriage, children or no children, negotiating a life together required a lot of blind faith in the goodwill of the person beside you.
Her only answer was to kiss him in return.
Chapter Eighteen
“Anything you do will reflect on him,” Portia said, dropping an armful of dresses onto Verity’s sofa. “If your names aren’t already connected, they will be after this. You must dress the part.”
“What part?” Verity asked.?
“Don’t be obtuse.”?Portia said, frustrated. “People will be assessing you as a potential duchess. If you’re suitable, they’ll say little. If you’re unsuitable, they’ll have a lot to say. Even if you only intend to be his lover, I?can tell you that a mistress of a well-known man comes under similar scrutiny.?I’m not suggesting you array yourself in peacock feathers and a sable coat. You could wear?Amelia’s brown velvet pelisse and promenade gown, or?we could take in my dove gray sarsnet round dress with the black pelisse. Both are discreet but visibly costly.?In fact, you ought to take both ensembles, and keep them, because you’ll need to look above reproach every time you leave your house.”
Verity clenched her teeth. There would be other places where she had to give way, bits of herself that would be eroded by the force of this thing Ash had brought upon them. But for Ash, she’d do it. She’d do that and more and somehow she’d be glad for the chance to help him. “Fine,” she said. “I can do that.”
“Another thing, Verity dear,” Portia said, her words careful and measured. “If I could have married Ned, I would have.” Verity was startled to hear Portia refer to her late lover as anything other than Lord Pembroke. “In a heartbeat. You’ll make your own choice, but if I had had the chance to marry Ned, I wouldn’t have whistled it down the wind, not for the world.”
Verity tried on the brown velvet gown and let Portia tame her hair with a pair of tortoiseshell combs. She drew the line only at a pair of pearl earbobs that pinched dreadfully.
“Brave girl,” Portia said, surveying her one last time before leaving. “It’s hard to let a little bit of yourself go.”
Equipped with a wedge of cheese and a brand-new copy of the latest volume from the author ofWaverley, Verity curled up on the sofa. But the novel failed to hold her interest. She didn’t want to read about doomed highlanders or failed rebellions. She rooted around in her pocket for a much folded and creased issue of theExaminer; she had been carrying it around for days on the theory that she might finally get around to reading in it a poem that everyone from Portia’s girls to the lads in the shop had been talking about. But when she thumbed through the pages, she found that she could read the words, see that they assembled into something beautiful, but they meant nothing for her. What use did she have for the sculptors of crumbling statues, dead kings, or travelers—all of them men, all of them gone, all of them with their heads lodged firmly up their backsides. The poem seemed to rebuke the hubris of leaders without realizing that it, too, fed into that cycle of pride in which men celebrated the deeds of other men, generation after generation. When Verity thought of a toppled monarchy, the statue of a tyrant half-buried in sand, she felt none of the melancholy that the poet seemed to want his reader to feel; instead she was filled with hope that maybe this tyranny, too, would pass, that maybe she would live to see a world in which the deeds of men were not the only measure of accomplishment.
She took off her spectacles and abandoned her reading. She thought of her mother and Lady Caroline, both of their existences shaped by the whims and demands of the men they depended on. She thought of Portia, who had fought hard for a degree of independence, only to wager the lion’s share of her savings on finding men to provide for her daughters. She thought of nearly every letter written to theLadies’ Register, all asking variations of the same question: how was a woman to live her own life when she was dependent on the men nearest to her. Verity herself had jealously guarded her independence, refusing help lest it spill over into control.
She thought of Ash, and the way they felt for one another. It was the height of madness to love someone and be loved in return, and to throw that away as if it didn’t matter. But they had both done it—he by leaving her, her by going to him with what must have seemed a tepid offer of friendship. They were now cobbling together some sort of understanding, but she still didn’t know if the final result would be anything either of them could live with. And yet, for Ash, she thought she could live with almost anything that let them be together.
She dropped theExaminerand reached for the small hand mirror that Portia had left beside the sofa. Inspecting her appearance at arm’s length, she expected to be alienated by what she saw, she expected to feel like she was participating in some kind of mummery. But all she saw was herself, rendered acceptable for Ash’s world. She could do that. She would do that.
It was a dangerous thing, this being in love.
“You look pretty,” said a voice in the doorway. “Is that my dress? It suits you better.”
“Amelia!” Verity nearly dropped the mirror. “How did you get in here?”
“I sort of sailed past your shopman and he didn’t know what to do. He was hardly going to tackle me. I’ll apologize on my way out.”
“If you’re looking for your mother, she left an hour ago.”
“If I were looking for my mother, I could have remained at home. I waited until she was closeted with the cook before slipping out. It’s you I wanted to see.” The girl twisted her hands in her fur muff and Verity raised an eyebrow. “It’s about the book. I need to know—have you printed it?”
