Authors: Patricia Cabot

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

Portrait of My Heart (6 page)

BOOK: Portrait of My Heart

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No. Maggie’s heart was pounding so hard, she could feel every beat in her temples. No, the thought of that was much, much too frightening. The thought of this man, who for all
intents and purposes she hardly knew, disrobing in front of her—the thought of him touching her even more intimately than he was now—the thought of how she’d react to both the sight of his nakedness and those touches—was simply too much for Maggie. He’d accused her of being afraid: Damned right she was afraid. More afraid than she’d ever been in her whole life. More
alive
than she’d ever been in her whole life … and because of that, afraid.

Fear won out over desire. And with the fear came the indignation, at last. How dare he? How dare he? He might be used to rolling about in the hay whenever the fancy seized him, but he was a man. Not just a man, but a duke. He could rut on whomever he pleased and never have a thought for the consequences.

She, on the other hand, had never even been kissed before today. How dare he try to take advantage of her inexperience, of her relative naivete about the ways of the world?

Having channeled the sexual feelings he’d stirred up within her into a fine, solid rage, Maggie hefted twin handfuls of Jeremy’s hair and tried with all her might to strain his head away. “Get … off … me,” she hissed between gritted teeth.

To her utter astonishment, Jeremy lifted his head, looked her right in the eye, and said, unsteadily, “Oh, no. You had your fun while we were growing up. It’s my turn now, Mags.” Then he lunged once more for her lips.

Maggie didn’t have to think twice. She reacted as instinctively as she had before, when she’d let her mouth fall open beneath his. Only this time, her action was fueled by anger, not passion. Releasing the handfuls of hair she held, Maggie drew back her right fist and sent it, with all the force she could muster, in the direction of his nose, which, he’d explained to her once, five years or so before, was the ideal place to strike a man, since nasal cartilage was very fine, and breaking it wouldn’t cause undue bruising to the knuckles.

Unfortunately, due to the constrictive embrace in which he held her, she misaimed, and nearly lacerated her fist on his teeth. Nevertheless, the blow had the desired effect: His grip on her loosened at once, and Maggie leapt to her feet,
dancing out of his reach and waving her sore knuckles in the air.

“What the—” Jeremy reached up to dab at his throbbing mouth. When he brought his hand down again, he saw a drop of blood on it from where her fist had driven his upper lip into his teeth. The blow hadn’t hurt—much—but it had certainly surprised him quite a bit. He lifted his incredulous gaze to her face. “Maggie!” he cried, perfectly astonished. “What did you do
that
for?”

Maggie, wondering if she hadn’t dislocated one of her fingers, said testily, “I told you to let me go.” She glared down at her already swelling knuckles. What was she going to do now? She’d broken her hand on the Duke of Rawlings’s teeth. How was she going to explain
that
to her mother?

“Yes, but …” Jeremy gazed down at the blood on his own knuckles, his expression still one of utter disbelief. “You hit me, Mags.”

She shot him an aggravated glance from where she stood in a puddle of bright sunlight. “Oh, what?” she demanded, managing to sound more saucy than she actually felt. “You think just because you’re a duke, you can get away with mauling anyone you choose? Well, think again, you conceited git. I told you to stop, and I meant it.” She noticed the trickle of blood at the side of his mouth with no small satisfaction. Her heart had finally begun to beat at something like its normal pace, and she was relieved to find that the mysterious yearnings which he’d stirred up inside of her had receded—at least for the moment.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you, Mags,” Jeremy pointed out gently. He had, Maggie saw, a strange expression on his face, one she’d never seen him wear before in all the years she had known him. What she didn’t know was that this was an expression
no
one
had ever seen the Duke of Rawlings wear before: This was the first time Jeremy had ever had occasion to wear it. This was the first time, after all, he’d ever been rebuffed by a woman.

“I know,” Maggie said, her anger still hot as a fire iron, “precisely what you were trying to do. And you had just
better think twice about ever trying it again, Jeremy Rawlings, or I promise you, you’ll get more of the same.”

Jeremy could not quite believe what he was hearing. Here was the finest piece of womanhood he’d seen in a good long while—never mind that she happened to be someone he’d known for nearly half his life—and she
wouldn’t
have him.
Nothing like this had ever occurred in the whole of Jeremy’s long and inarguably varied sexual experience. No woman had ever rejected him before. Never. It simply had never happened.

He didn’t know what to think. It couldn’t possibly be because she wasn’t attracted to him. There’d been desire in her kiss. He couldn’t have mistaken that. So why had she stopped him?

Well, there was the fact that she’d been brought up, he supposed, to believe that one had to be married, or at least engaged, before one allowed a man to do the kinds of things Jeremy had been doing to her quite without the benefit of matrimony. But that hadn’t stopped any number of young society misses from quite happily allowing him to do those things last season, when he’d been in London. Why had it stopped Maggie?

He looked at her as she stood in the sunlight, a hectic flush on her cheeks, her chest rising and falling rapidly as she attempted to catch her breath—further proof that she was not indifferent toward him. He admired the way the gap in the bodice of her dress widened each time she inhaled … .

Which was the first thing his uncle Edward noticed too when he strode into the stables a second later.

“Jeremy!” Edward thundered. The starlings in the rafters let out startled cries and took flight almost as one as his voice boomed through the quiet, sun-dappled building. And they weren’t the only things Jeremy’s uncle startled. Maggie yelped and, blushing scarlet, folded her arms quickly over her half-exposed breasts.

“What,” Edward demanded furiously, “in hell is going on in here?”

“Good God, Uncle Edward,” Jeremy drawled from the hay bale upon which he still lounged. “Must you always
time your entrances so ill? Maggie and I were just getting to know one another again.”

“Margaret.” She jumped at the balefulness in Lord Edward’s voice. He sounded angrier than Maggie had ever heard him, including the time that he’d caught her and Jeremy tying firecrackers to the back of the vicar’s brougham. “Get back to your mother.
Now
.”

“Yes, my lord.” Maggie needed no more urging. Without another word, she spun round and fled—or tried to. She was stopped dead in her tracks when someone reached out and seized one of the metal hoops of her crinoline through the material at the back of her skirt. Letting out a soft
oof
as the ribbons that kept her crinoline tied around her waist cut into her midriff, she flicked an accusing gaze over her shoulder. But Jeremy wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at his uncle.

“There’s no need to send Maggie scampering back to her mother,” the duke—for that’s exactly what the imperiousness of Jeremy’s voice put Maggie in mind of—said. “
She
wasn’t doing anything wrong. If you’re going to be angry with someone, be angry with me, but Maggie’s completely innocent—”

“Oh, I’m perfectly aware of Maggie’s innocence,” Lord Edward said. Maggie’s trepidation grew as the older man began shrugging out of his coat—Lord Edward, whom she’d never seen with so much as a hair out of place, was disrobing in a stable! “It’s
you
I’m preparing to thrash until there isn’t a shred of flesh left on your body. But if you’d like Maggie to watch while I do so, she’s perfectly welcome to …”

Maggie let out a squeak of alarm and, yanking her crinoline hoop out of Jeremy’s grasp, turned and ran for all she was worth.

Chapter 5

Watching Maggie’s booted feet fly as she disappeared into the sunshine outside the stable doors, Jeremy frowned. “You needn’t have frightened her witless, you know,” he said, irritably, to his uncle.

“Oh, no,” Edward said, concentrating on the shirt cuffs he was carefully rolling up. “You were doing that admirably yourself.”

“Me?”
Jeremy looked offended. “I wasn’t frightening her.”

“Weren’t you?” Edward, his shirtsleeves pushed up over his elbows, loosened his cravat. “Then why are you bleeding at the mouth?”

Jeremy lifted a hand to his lip, having long since forgotten the cut there. “Oh, that.” He chuckled. “Can you believe that? I taught her that right cross, you know. I can’t say I ever expected her to use it on
me
.”

“Didn’t you?” Edward glared at him. “What did you think she was going to do, Jerry? Swoon in your arms?”

“Well,” he said. “They usually do. In fact, this is the first time one didn’t. Haven’t quite figured out why yet, but—”

Edward looked grim. “Haven’t you? Try this one: You may have reached the age of majority, Jerry, but Maggie Herbert is still a child.”

“Oh, please,” Jeremy said disgustedly. “She’s nearly seventeen. My mother gave birth to me at seventeen.”

Edward, though he looked a little surprised at Jeremy’s reference to his mother, of whom he spoke rarely, if at all, said only, “Maggie Herbert is the daughter of a knight. Her father is your financial advisor and my friend—” Jeremy rolled his eyes at that, since he’d often overheard his uncle complaining about Sir Arthur’s somewhat trying personality, but Edward continued, “She is here as a guest of my wife, which means she is visiting Rawlings Manor under
your
protection, and you had the gall—no, excuse me, the
stupidity
—to attempt to seduce her, in a stable, no less, as if she were some barmaid you happened to meet one night while you were out carousing with your friends—”

“That isn’t true,” Jeremy said, with wounded dignity. “I would never attempt to seduce a barmaid in a stable. At the very least, I would demand that she take me to a room with a bed before I so much as laid a hand on her—”

He saw the fist coming. He had to have seen it coming. But to Edward’s amazement, his nephew didn’t duck, or in any way try to avoid the blow. His knuckles met Jeremy’s jaw with a solid
thunk,
and Jeremy went down, falling back upon the pile of hay bales.

Shaking his hand, which throbbed from the force of the blow—it had been a while since Edward had last participated in a brawl; members of the House of Lords were generally discouraged from fisticuffs—he said, with a good deal of indignation, “I’m sorry I had to do that. But, by God, Jerry—”

“I know.” Jeremy, hay sticking up from his mop of unruly black hair, sat up, carefully stroking his twice-bruised jawbone. “I know. I deserved it.”

“That and more,” Edward said severely. “You’ll ride over to Herbert Park tonight and apologize, to both Maggie—if she’ll see you, which I doubt—and to her parents. You’ll leave for the Continent first thing tomorrow morning.” Crossing over to where Jeremy sat, Edward held out a hand to help the younger man to his feet. “The sooner you’re out of the country,” he said, grunting as he lifted Jeremy’s considerable weight, “the sooner we’ll all be able to put this wretched incident behind us.”

On his feet again, Jeremy began swatting at the pieces of straw that clung to his trousers. “And then when will the wedding be? Six months? Do you think I’ll still have to wait six months before coming back, to be on the safe side? Because of Pierce, I mean?”

Edward, who was flexing his throbbing hand experimentally, as if uncertain whether or not he might have broken a knuckle, grew still, and cast his nephew a sharp glance. “What wedding?” he asked suspiciously.

“The wedding,” Jeremy said, pulling a piece of straw from his hair. “You know. Mine and Maggie’s.”

Edward stared. “You asked Maggie Herbert to marry you?”

“Well, no,” Jeremy said. He let out an uncomfortable laugh. “Of course not! No man
wants
to marry, does he?” The laughter died as abruptly as it had begun, and Jeremy asked nervously, “But aren’t you going to make me marry her? You know, since you caught us, uh, how shall I put it? In
flagrante delicto
?”

“Pleased as I am to learn that you acquired some Latin, anyway, during your sojourn at Oxford,” Edward said carefully, “I must confess that no, I never had any intention of forcing you to marry Maggie Herbert.”

To Edward’s utter astonishment, his nephew actually looked disappointed. “But Uncle,” he said. “I’ve seriously compromised her. I would think—”

“All I saw was that the front of her dress was undone,” Edward interrupted. He raised his still-throbbing fist meaningfully. “Are you telling me that you really did seduce her?”

Jeremy eyed the fist. “Well,” he said. “No. But I would have, if she hadn’t tried to knock my head off. And you hadn’t walked in, of course.”

“All the more reason to send you off to France,” Edward said complacently. He lowered his arm. “You can seduce all the French girls you like. Just stay away from the English ones, especially Maggie Herbert. Now go and get yourself cleaned up. Your aunt was asking about you. That’s why I came looking for you in the first place.”

Edward went to the stall door across which he’d laid his coat and cravat. When he turned around again, he found Jeremy standing before him, his jaw looking red and swollen, his gray eyes stormy with anger.

“Why not?” he demanded, in a low, gravelly voice his uncle didn’t recognize.

Taken aback, Edward said, “I beg your pardon?”

“Why not Maggie?” Both of Jeremy’s hands, his uncle noted cautiously, were curled into fists at his sides. “You don’t think she’d make a good duchess? You don’t think she’s good enough for me?”

Calmly, Edward began shrugging into his coat. “On the contrary,” he said, his kindly tone in direct contrast with the harsh words he uttered. “Maggie would make a splendid duchess. It’s
you
, my boy, who isn’t good enough for
her
.”

A muscle in Jeremy’s cheek leapt, just once. “Because of who my mother was?” he demanded sharply.

Edward let out a bark of humorless laughter. “Good God, no. This hasn’t a thing to do with the fact that your mother was a whore.” When Jeremy didn’t flinch at the word, Edward went on, feeling slightly more respect for the younger man. “No, you don’t deserve Maggie—or any other decent sort of woman—because you’re nothing but a ne’er-do-well.”

Jeremy blinked at him. “A
what
?”

“Jerry, I’m surprised at you.” Edward shook his head as if greatly disappointed in his nephew … but inwardly, he was smiling. “Haven’t you ever noticed how dedicated your aunt Pegeen is to all those charities and foundations she donates to in your name? Why, there are a dozen orphans tearing up the rose beds in the garden this very instant, because Pegeen is hosting some kind of picnic for them.” When Jeremy looked blank, Edward rolled his eyes. “She raised you from a baby, Jerry. Hasn’t
anything
she taught you sunk in? Your aunt has devoted her life to making this world a better place, for children, for women, for the poor. That’s what you ought to be doing.”

“Philanthropic works?” Jeremy asked, the distaste he felt
at the thought of involving himself in such activities evident in his expression.

“Not necessarily,” Edward said impatiently. “But you’ve got to
make
something out of the life you’ve been given.”

“Why should I have to?” Jeremy inquired belligerently. “I’m a duke.”

“It’s because you’re a duke that it’s even more essential that you make something of yourself. You’ve got to show that you’re worthy of the title. You can’t simply spend your entire life fighting duels and seducing young women—”

“Why not?” Jeremy demanded. “When you were my age, that’s all you did.”

“Yes,” Edward said. He raised an index finger. He didn’t mean to look pedantic. He simply couldn’t help it. “Yes, you’re right, I did. I was like you. I thought my only obligation in life was to enjoy myself. But you see, Jeremy, when I met your aunt, I learned how very wrong I’d been. Because if winning a particular woman is important to you, you can’t simply try to seduce her in a stable and expect her parents to force her to marry you—”

“That isn’t precisely what I set out to do,” Jeremy grumbled, flushing a little.

“—and you can’t expect any woman worth winning to be impressed with you simply because you’re in possession of a title. No, you’ve got to make yourself at least appear to be worth her while … and quite frankly, the man I was when I met your aunt wasn’t worth anything, except a few hundred pounds a month in tailoring bills, which she quickly pointed out to me. But I changed, you see, Jerry. I made something of myself. I found something I did and did well—arguing—and I turned it into an occupation. Now I argue, quite effectively, for the betterment—I believe, any way—of the people of England. That’s what you’ve got to do, Jerry. You’ve got to find out what you do well, and then do it.
That’s
when you’ll find a girl like Maggie and—”

“I don’t want a girl
like
Maggie,” Jeremy snapped. “I want
her
.”

Edward raised his eyebrows. It wasn’t that he was surprised, particularly. After all, Maggie Herbert was one of the
only women in Jeremy’s acquaintance who hadn’t the slightest interest in becoming a duchess. It was just that Edward wasn’t sure that Jeremy was aware that that might be exactly where his attraction to her lay. “Well,” Edward said. “Regardless. You’ve got to find something—”

“The only thing I can do,” Jeremy said firmly, “is fight.”

Edward nodded. “Well, yes, you’ve certainly shown a certain aptitude for that. Certainly a scholar’s life hasn’t held any appeal for you, and I doubt politics is exactly your cup of—”

“I can fight,” Jeremy said, again. He didn’t seem to be listening to his uncle anymore. In fact, he turned his back on him, and quickly paced a few yards through the straw. “I’m best at fencing, but I can shoot, as well. Also, I’m good on a horse.”

“Right,” Edward said slowly. “And those are admirable qualities. But—”

Jeremy stopped pacing a few feet away from the door to King’s stall. Edward saw his shoulders go back, and his head come up. “That’s it,” Jeremy said, apparently to his horse, since his back was to his uncle. “I shall go into the cavalry.”

It was a statement, not a question. Edward said, “Well, now, let’s see if we can examine—”

“There’s nothing to examine,” Jeremy interrupted matter-of-factly. He turned to face his uncle. “I need an occupation. The army’s as good as any. It isn’t possible to purchase commissions anymore, so I shall have to earn the rank of officer. That’s just as well. It’s more impressive to earn something than to buy it.”

Edward began to experience a growing sense of unease. “Yes, but Jeremy, the army is really more for, er, second sons, young men who don’t expect to inherit a title or property and don’t care to go into the church. Dukes generally don’t—”

“I shall join the Horse Guards,” Jeremy said. Edward wasn’t certain if he hadn’t heard him, or was simply ignoring him. Jeremy began pacing again, excitedly this time. “I shall ask to be stationed in India. That’s the most dangerous place we have armies stationed right now, isn’t it? Too bad there
isn’t a war on. I should have quite liked a war. Well, perhaps I can start one.” He headed, without another word, for the stable doors.

“Jeremy,” Edward called after him.

Jeremy turned, as if surprised his uncle was still there. “Yes?”

“You aren’t—you aren’t serious, are you?” Edward cleared his throat. “You can’t really mean that you intend to join Her Majesty’s army, can you?”

“Well, Uncle,” Jeremy said with a grin. “I’m a duke, am I not? I can do anything I like.”

BOOK: Portrait of My Heart

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