Page 17 of The Duke Decides

He’d insisted he be her lover, and she’d readily agreed. In fact, it took no more than a kiss before she was lifting her skirts herself.

Was she that desperate to be touched?

No, she realized sometime toward the end of day one, when she was showing the girls helping in the laundry how to fold linen sheets. She was not desperate for the touch of a man.

She’d been desperate for him.

The knowledge shadowed her all of the second day as she made her rounds from the kitchens to the stores, to the gardens and the cellar, checking Agatha’s tallies of their supplies. She’d been cozened like a dairymaid. She’d been confused by his scent, clean and bright-smelling. She’d been seduced by the look of him, like a god taking human flesh, tall and lean and long-limbed and as graceful as an archer.

She’d known him for her blackmailer when he first approached her. She’d been certain. That low, gravely voice, a husky register. The shivers that skated over her neck and back. The way her breasts tingled near him. The way he brought her alive.

She’d known he was dangerous. Yet he’d said the code she and the Duchess had arranged, the rhyme from the folk song, and she’d put aside the warning in her brain to give herself over to the pull of her senses.

She’d fallen into his arm for a waltz, and oh, waltzing was so lovely. In his arms, the dance was like skimming through clouds, drifting on a delicious breeze.

And the ball itself. Rutland House had played a part in her seduction. How long had it been since she’d attended a real party? How long since she’d worn a luscious gown or jewels, and a man had looked at her with appreciation?

So long that she’d lost herself in the fantasy that she could have these things. Gowns. Dancing slippers. Masquerades. A man who danced like he’d stepped down from the heavens. A lover with clean breath and a gentle strength who—dear God.

The memory swamped her, made her weak at the knees. Louisa put out a hand to brace herself against the passage leading to the hall, where all her girls and staff were assembling for dinner. She’d known rapture, complete and utterly devastating pleasure, for the first and only time in her life.

And she would never know it again.

She forced herself to walk into the hall where every soul who depended on her was lined up to partake of their modest meal. All her sweet, lively, innocent girls, raised to be conscious of the good manners that would bind them to a secure place in the world and the virtue that would shield them against want or shame. Here too sat the Sisters who had promised to give up their worldly goods, worldly cares, and worldly desires in order to devote themselves to their work.

Louisa stood before them, leading them in the recitation of grace, with her lower body still aching with the echo of ecstasy, still sore from accepting a man when it had been so, so long. And she knew her blackmailer was right.

She didn’t deserve any of this. She was a liar, a criminal, and now a wanton. She had no right to wear this cap and the title of Matron, and all the respect it afforded. She had come to the Sisters of Benevolence on a lie, and now she was lying again, pretending to be a decent woman as she supervised the workings of a Hospital, the emblem of order and authority, when she was really a strumpet who was weeping inside because she would never again be in his arms.

She should simply resign. Go far away. Perhaps change her name again, and find some career that would bury her in obscurity. Governess to a Scottish lord who lived in the furthest reaches of the Highlands. Companion to a crotchety widow who spent her time traveling from spa to spa, taking the waters.

But something kept her firmly in place. Perhaps that bit of fight in her that had risen to the challenge her. She didn’t want to slink away in defeat so easily, not until she’d been well and truly bested, run into the ground.

And also—though she did no more than allow the thought as a whisper in the back of her head—if she left, she would never see him again.

On the third day, when she had received no visitor demanding to buy her land nor any note from Lord Vérité warning her to receive his agent, she wondered if tossing up her skirts had been enough to satisfy him, and he had moved on to other targets.

And then he appeared in her rooms.

She was sitting in the Matron’s parlor, the small, neat room where she saw visitors on the Matron’s business: those wishing to arrange to hire or apprentice a girl, those wishing to deposit a daughter, or, less often but most gratefully received, those wishing to make a financial contribution.

Louisa kept the room tidy and bare of ornamentation, for the funds of the Hospital were better spent on food for the souls they sheltered, clothing for growing children, and fees for apprenticeships to a respectable trade. The most curious decoration was a crossed pair of sabers mounted on the wall. They’d been installed there by a previous Matron, and stories varied about their provenance. Louisa kept them because the elegant weapons reminded her to be bold, and because the unusual wall ornament provided a source of amusement and conversation for her guests.

Right now, her partner in conversation was the former Marchioness of Westmeath, garbed in a day gown of striped silk with enormous leg-of-mutton sleeves and a silk bonnet that framed her face like a halo.

“I am so glad you thought to come to the Benevolence Hospital,” Louisa said. “Lady—er, how should I address you?”

The Marchioness had, shockingly, divorced her husband a few years earlier, on the grounds of his persistent adultery as well as cruelty towards her. Louisa had heard the gossip, as it was impossible to escape. Once they had been a couple deeply in love, though he had reportedly refused to give up his mistress upon his marriage. The couple separated after the birth of their daughter; reconciled; then separated again after the death of their infant son, and after a long and expensive court battle, the Marquess had won custody of their daughter, thus depriving his Marchioness of her roles as both wife and mother.

She had landed on her feet, Louisa saw. The Marquess had gone on to further routs of fornication and dissipation, but the former Marchioness was making friends in high places. Of the two of them—Louisa could not help make the comparison, sitting close as she was—the Marchioness was the better woman. She had endured cruelty, emotional abandonment, and physical violence, and she had used the law courts to defend herself.

Louisa had started a fire and done murder.

“You may call me Lady Emily,” the Marchioness said with a small smile. “Since I believe you and I might become friends.”

She was a handsome woman of about two score years, not much older than Louisa. In Louisa’s other life, they would have been possible intimates, relative social equals who suffered in similar ways in their marriage.

Louisa, too, could have had a husband who publicly philandered, verbally abused her, and denied her access to her children. But she had made another choice.