Who Wants to Marry a Duke Read online

  “Miss Olivia Norley.”

  She said it primly, which he found delightful, though he was a bit disappointed she wasn’t a lustful married woman.

  Then she stopped outside an open door. “Anyway, here we are. Shall we go in?”

  “If you wish, Miss Norley. This is your endeavor, after all.”

  “Right.” She marched inside without a single swish in her step.

  He followed, suppressing the urge to laugh at her purposeful manner. At least she had the good sense to situate them at the far end of the room, where they wouldn’t readily be seen by anyone passing by.

  She set the glass of champagne on a table that also held a lit candelabra, then opened her reticule and pulled out a small box. It proved to contain quite a few vials.

  “Good God, what is all that?” he asked.

  “Smelling salts and cosmetics for Mama, since she has no room in her own reticule for them.” She opened a vial and tapped it until a white powder filled her palm. “This is bicarbonate of soda. It’s good for indigestion.”

  “And removing wine stains, apparently.”

  “Exactly.”

  She smiled up at him, and he caught his breath. Her smile transformed her from a pretty woman to a breathtaking goddess. As she moved the candelabra closer, he could see that her eyes were the warm green of jade. She had a sumptuous mouth, peach-tinged cheeks, and a nose that tipped up ever so slightly. He found all of it charming.

  “Forgive me,” she said, seeming oblivious to his staring, “but I must put my hand beneath your waistcoat in order to clean the stain properly.”

  “Would you rather I removed my waistcoat entirely?” he asked, knowing that the request was inappropriate and wondering how she would respond.

  She brightened. “Oh, yes! That would make it much easier.”

  Clearly she wasn’t put off at all by his lack of propriety, which he found amusing. He shucked off his coat, then unbuttoned and removed his waistcoat before handing it to her. After placing her handkerchief beneath the waistcoat, she went right to work on the spots, first dousing them with the champagne and then covering the diluted stains with the white powder she called bicarbonate of soda. The spots foamed up, taking him by surprise.

  She held out her hand. “Give me your handkerchief, if you please.” After he did so, she used the clean parts to blot up the foam.

  To his amazement, he could hardly see the stain anymore. It looked as if he’d merely spilled some water on his waistcoat. “Where did you learn to do that?” Thorn asked.

  She took his waistcoat over to the fireplace and waved it back and forth in the heat from the fire, ensuring that even the water would evaporate. “From my uncle. He’s a chemist.”

  What an odd family. No doubt she’d amassed all sorts of cleaning formulas from her relation. According to Gwyn, women were expected to know such domestic things even if they didn’t perform the cleaning tasks themselves.

  Miss Norley came toward him with his waistcoat. “There. That should get you through the evening at least. Although you should have your servants give it a proper cleaning as soon as you get home.”

  “I will keep that in mind,” he said, attempting to match her serious tone. Taking the waistcoat from her, he put it on. “How can I repay you? Perhaps with some eye of newt and toe of frog to fill out your vials?”

  “Why would I want those? They would be of no use to me whatsoever.”

  Clearly she’d never read Macbeth. Or if she had, she’d forgotten the toil and trouble scene with the witches.

  Chuckling, he buttoned up his waistcoat. “Then perhaps I’ll ask you for a dance.”

  A look of sheer horror crossed her face. “Don’t you dare! I’m the worst dancer in Christendom. And since young ladies aren’t allowed to turn gentlemen down—”

  “What? I don’t know that rule. Though it does explain why everyone always accepts my invitations to dance.” He winked at her. “And here I thought it was because of my irresistible charm and dashing good looks.”

  “Everyone accepts because you’re a duke, sir. So please don’t ask me to dance, or I’ll end up making a fool of us both. You wouldn’t like it, I assure you.”

  He shook his head. “You’re an unusual woman, Miss Norley. I’ll give you that.”

  When he pulled a bit of his cravat out at the top, she frowned. “Oh, dear. You have spots there, too. I should—”

  “No need. If you will just rearrange the folds of the cravat to hide the spots, no one will be the wiser. I’d do it myself, but there’s no mirror in here.”

  “Right.” She began to tug here and tuck there, reminding him of his initial suspicion of why she’d brought him in here in the first place.

  “You do that very well,” he said. “You must have practiced at it.”

  “My uncle has no valet, so I sometimes have to do the honors if he’s expecting a guest.”

  “Admit it, Miss Norley. You did not lead me in here solely to clean my waistcoat and reorder the folds of my cravat.”

  Her gaze shot to his. “I don’t know what you mean. Why else would I do it?”

  Smiling down at her, he cupped her face in his hands. “So we could indulge ourselves. Like this.”

  He kissed her gently, and she drew back, her eyes going wide. “Oh, my.”

  A chuckle escaped him. “Oh, my, indeed,” he murmured, then kissed her again.

  This time her hands caught his waist, and she leaned up to meet his lips more fully. Ah yes. Sweet as cherries, those lips. But bold, too, as if she’d done this before.

  Not that he cared if she had. It had probably made her into the delicious armful of woman she was, one he could happily kiss all night. Her wonderfully warm mouth tasted of champagne, which he discovered when he ventured to deepen the kiss, and she opened it to his tongue. After a moment she tangled hers with his, and his blood rose.

  Oh, hell. She made him want to throw caution to the winds and do more than kiss her, but he dared not. So he settled for exploring every inch of her mouth, finding all the lovely secret places of it. With a moan, she wrapped her arms about his waist, firing his need even more.

  God, she smelled delicious, like tropical hothouse flowers. He wanted to sink into her scent as one sank into a hot bath.

  He ran a hand down one shoulder to beneath her arm and along her ribs. Why not? He had just begun to wonder if he did dare to cover one of those ample breasts with his hand when another voice thundered in the room.

  “Olivia Jane Norley! What the devil do you think you’re doing?”

  Olivia jerked free of him, looking a bit disoriented, not to mention disheveled. His stomach roiled. He’d been well and truly caught. He feared he knew exactly what that meant.

  He turned to face an elegantly dressed matron whom he could only assume was Olivia’s stepmother. How had she found them if Olivia had truly been hiding from her as she’d said? And the woman was accompanied by a few friends, too. Witnesses. That was bad. Very, very bad.

  In a flash he remembered where he’d heard the name Norley. Baron Norley was supposedly a member of Grey’s club, which Thorn had visited a few times while trying to decide if he wished to join. That meant Miss Norley was the Honorable Miss Norley, probably in search of a husband and simply more clever at it than the other young ladies at this affair.

  “This is not how it looks, Mama,” Miss Norley began. “His Grace spilled negus on his waistcoat, and I was cleaning it up.”

  Lady Norley’s friends laughed at the very idea.

  Lady Norley did not. “Olivia, please step into the hall. I need a private word with the duke.”

  “But—”

  “Now, young lady.”

  Miss Norley’s shoulders drooped as she left the room. With a word, Lady Norley banished her friends to the hall as well. Then he and the woman were alone.

  “Lady Norley—” he began.

  “I expect to see you at our town house first thing in the morning, with an offer of marriage in hand
.”

  Marriage! God help him.

  He attempted to climb out of the hole he’d so unwisely fallen into. “There’s no need for such precipitate behavior. I only just met your stepdaughter tonight, and although she is a nice girl—”

  “Yes, she is a nice girl and barely eighteen. I will not allow her reputation to be damaged one jot because of your . . . animal desires.”

  Striving to look the part of a duke, he drew himself up and put ice in his voice. “It was just a friendly kiss.”

  “That you removed your coat to engage in.”

  Bloody hell. He’d forgotten he was standing here in his shirtsleeves. That was damning, and he’d done it to himself.

  Remembering Grey’s warnings, he scowled. More likely, Miss Norley had done it to catch him, and her stepmother had been lying in wait to finish the deal. That possibility infuriated him.

  His anger must have shone in his face, for Lady Norley neared him and lowered her voice. “In case you’re considering not showing up to offer marriage in the morning, you’ll force me to make publicly known a certain secret about your family I’ve kept to myself all these years.”

  A chill swept over him. “You don’t even know my family. What secrets could you possibly have heard about them?”

  “Actually, I knew your parents quite well years ago. Your mother and I came out together, and your father was a friend of my family’s. That’s why I happen to know exactly where he was headed when he had his fatal carriage accident.”

  That caught him off guard. “He was going to London,” Thorn said warily. “That’s no great secret.”

  “Yes. But he was going there to see his mistress.”

  For one horrible moment, the bottom dropped out of his world. “What?”

  “He had a mistress before he met your mother, and he never gave her up.”

  Thorn wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Grey’s’s father had possessed a mistress, but his own? It wasn’t possible.

  He tried to remember if his mother had ever said what had provoked his father’s sudden trip to London from Berkshire, but nothing came to mind. What Mother had said was that she and Father had been mad for each other. According to her, their marriage had been the only love match from among her three husbands. Either his father had never had a mistress . . . or he’d hidden the fact so well that his mother had never suspected it.

  There was a third possibility—that Mother had known and all this time had been lying to him and Gwyn about the state of her marriage to their father. God, he couldn’t even bear to consider that. Because it meant that the great romantic love Mother had always spoken of so passionately to him and Gwyn was a sham.

  That was assuming Lady Norley spoke the truth. As the woman must know, there was no way to confirm or disprove the “secret” she was using as blackmail, not with his mother abroad. As it was, it took months for his correspondence to reach Berlin.

  But even if it were a lie, the baroness could still spread the tale. She might even know enough to give it the trappings of truth. And he refused to let this she-devil hurt his mother by doing so. Having such gossip bandied about in the papers would wound Mother deeply, once it did make it to the embassy. Nor would it help the career of his stepfather, the British ambassador to Prussia.

  “Do we understand each other, Your Grace?” Lady Norley asked, not an ounce of indecision or fear in her voice. She had him in a corner, and she knew it.

  He said, with all the nonchalance he could muster, “I’ll be there in the morning.”

  * * *

  Olivia sat stiffly on the drawing room settee the next day while her stepmother fussed with her curls. “Once you marry His Grace, I shall have to instruct your new maid about the proper way to arrange your hair.”

  “If I marry His Grace,” Olivia said woodenly.

  “Not that again.” Her stepmother pinched Olivia’s cheeks. “Of course you’ll marry him. He’s handsome and wealthy. You can’t go wrong. You must have thought so, too, given the clever way you got him off to yourself.”

  “I wasn’t . . . I didn’t expect that we would be . . .”

  Her stepmother raised an eyebrow.

  Olivia sighed. She probably shouldn’t admit that she hadn’t expected to be caught alone with him. “What does Papa say?” She hadn’t seen him last night, since he’d already headed off to his club.

  Her stepmother waved her hand. “You know your father—too busy with his own affairs to care about ours. But he did promise that once you accept the duke’s offer, he would entertain that selfsame offer himself. To that end, he is staying in his study until the duke has finished with you.”

  After Olivia’s mother had died when Olivia was eight, Papa had withdrawn from her life, leaving the care of her to nursemaids and governesses while he indulged in gentlemanly pursuits . . . like drinking, gambling, and going to his club. Sometimes she suspected he’d only married her stepmother so he wouldn’t have to deal with his daughter.

  His awkward, chemistry-loving, no-nonsense oddity of a daughter.

  “Are you both that eager to get rid of me?” Olivia asked, hoping she hid her hurt well.

  To her gratification, her stepmother looked truly shocked by the question. “Get rid of you? Don’t be silly, my dear. We just want to see you marry well. And once you do, you and I can have so much fun shopping and riding out on Rotten Row and paying calls to all the best people.”

  Leave it to Mama to choose entertainments that Olivia didn’t remotely find “fun.” “You’re assuming that the duke will actually make an offer.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry about that.” Her stepmother’s tone had turned steely. “He will offer for you.”

  She seemed oddly sure of it. Not for the first time since last night, Olivia wondered how Mama had persuaded him to agree. Or was he simply that much of a gentleman?

  Somehow she doubted that, having seen his face as he’d stormed from the library last night. He hadn’t even stopped to bid her good-bye. That had wounded her, but she couldn’t think about it right now. She had to figure out what she would say if he did offer.

  It was a hard choice. After all, he was the first man ever to kiss her on the mouth. It had been shocking. Delicious. Utterly unexpected. She’d always thought kissing on the lips sounded unpleasant, but she’d enjoyed it. A lot. It still gave her swirly sensations in her stomach. Who could have guessed?

  And when he’d slipped his tongue inside her mouth . . . Oh, Lord, she’d felt entirely out of her depth. He’d slid his tongue in and out, so slyly and pleasurably that it had enticed her to do the same with hers.

  That had seemed to startle him, but not for long. With a groan, he’d caught her about the waist and pulled her up against him. It had been wildly exciting. She supposed most ladies would call it romantic, but she didn’t know about that. She wasn’t sure what “romantic” was, exactly, having never really experienced it for herself.

  The clock sounded the hour, and she jumped. Now was the time when everyone paid calls. Not that anyone ever called on her. Olivia wasn’t good at offering pleasantries or making small talk about the weather, so she didn’t draw scores of admirers like some of the other ladies. It had never bothered her. Indeed, the daily ritual of waiting for callers was just something she had to get through so she could go to her uncle’s and help him with his experiments.

  Part of her hoped the duke didn’t show up at all. Then she wouldn’t have to decide what her answer should be. She’d been weighing both sides all night, and still hadn’t made up her mind.

  On the one hand, he was very handsome and apparently found her attractive enough to kiss. He was good at the kissing, too, though she had nothing to compare it to. And there was another point in his favor—if she married him, she need never make small talk again. He didn’t strike her as a small talk sort of person. That was certainly an advantage.

  On the other hand, she doubted that His Grace would allow her to run her own chemistry experiments or to hel
p with her uncle’s. A man of his consequence would expect an obedient, domestic sort of wife, and she wasn’t that. Why, she wasn’t even sure how she felt about bearing children.

  And a small, foolish part of her—the part that had read fairy tales as a girl—wanted affection, even love, in her marriage. But that seemed a bit much to hope for from Thornstock.

  The knocker sounded on the door downstairs, and she tensed. Several minutes later, the Duke of Thornstock was announced.

  As he entered, she and her stepmother rose and curtsied. His Grace looked positively grim, which reinforced her fear that Mama had somehow forced him into offering.

  That impression was only confirmed when he stood staring at her as if seeing right through her. “Good morning, Miss Norley. You look well.”

  “As do you, Your Grace.” Heavens, but he did. His straight, dark brown hair had a reddish sheen, and his eyes were so light a blue they were nearly translucent.

  He glanced at her stepmother, then back at her. “Miss Norley, I hope you will do me the honor of becoming my wife.”

  She froze. He couldn’t have been more abrupt. For the first time in her life, she wished there had been a wee bit more small talk. “Why?”

  That seemed to catch him off guard. Then he narrowed that ice-blue gaze of his on her. “Because last night I damaged your reputation irrevocably. And marriage is the usual recourse for that.”

  Of course it was. Yet something wasn’t right here. Surely a duke could wriggle his way out of marriage to a virtual nobody, yet he stood there looking like a thief being dragged to the gallows.

  She had no desire to be his executioner. If she must marry, it wouldn’t be to save her reputation. And it certainly wouldn’t be to a man who obviously now despised her. “Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind and generous offer. But I regret that I must decline it.”

  “Olivia!” Mama said.

  Olivia scarcely heard her, too intent on watching his reaction. She’d expected relief, but the only emotion replacing his cold arrogance was hot anger.

  What right did he have to be angry? She’d saved him from being forced to marry her. He could at least be grateful.

  Her stepmother tried to smooth things over. “What my stepdaughter meant to say was—”