Mary Elizabeth did not like herself when she lost her temper. She did not like the headache that came with anger nor the feeling of chagrin once her anger had passed. She did not know why Harry had decided to lie to her, why he was intent on putting on airs that were ridiculous and did not suit him, but she knew that she had to get off the ducal lands before she sank a blade into him. So she took the road back to the village.
It would have been faster by boat, if she’d had one, but as she had only one borrowed horse, a sweet-natured creature whose name she did not know, she took the gravel-lined road all the way to the inn that sat closest to the ducal lands on the north side of the village green. She had no rope to tie her horse with, so they brought her breakfast outside, that she might eat it under a shade tree and keep her eye on her mount. The even-tempered beast cropped the grass at his feet, happy to be out in the summer morning, for all the world as if he was content to leave the palatial stables behind and never look back.
Mary Elizabeth felt a deep and abiding desire to ride him all the way to Aberdeen, but she knew that the thought was a foolish one, so she put it aside.
She wondered what was wrong with Harry, if perhaps, along with being kin to a duke, he had wandering wits. She did not understand why he thought lying to her about something so important as his identity, even for a moment, would be a good idea. If pretending to be a duke was his idea of a joke, she didn’t like it. But Harry did not seem to be the joking kind.
She knew so little about him, about who he truly was and where he really came from. But that truth did not change the fact that she loved him.
God help her.
She had ordered two breakfasts, for she knew that he would not be far behind her. She was not sure how he did it, but he always seemed to know where she was headed before she did herself. And she was right. In less than ten minutes after she had started sipping at her breakfast tea, Harry rode up on his own mare, which wasn’t saddled either.
“My cattle will get spoiled, riding only bareback,” he said.
She felt her teeth clench as he referred to the ducal horses as if he owned them, but in deference to the peace of the morning, she said nothing. She wanted to eat her breakfast before she spoke with him again.
He seemed to sense something of her resolution, or perhaps he was just a man of few words, for Harry sat beside her and ate the oatcakes and honey that the serving woman brought. They ate in companionable silence, and Mary Elizabeth congratulated herself on her calm. She even began to think that she might be able to ask him why he was lying to her in a civil way when he reached into his waistcoat pocket and drew out a gold guinea to pay for their repast.
“For the love of God, Harry, leave off this nonsense about being a duke,” Mary Elizabeth groused. She took a deep breath and tried to hold on to her temper, even as she felt it rising.
“What do you mean?” Harry asked, as innocent as any babe.
“Tossing gold to folk as if you are the lord of the realm. I like you fine without duke in front of your name.”
Harry smiled and Mary Elizabeth looked away, keeping her gaze focused the dregs of her tea. “You like me fine, do you?”
“Aye. So there’s no need for theatrics,” she said. “As angry as I am with you, I still like you fine.”
“I know you like kissing me.”
Mary Elizabeth felt his gaze on her skin as if he were touching her. She rose to her feet and vaulted onto the back of her new horse. She nudged him with her knees, but the beast did not seem interested in running so much as he was interested in hearing what Harry had to say next. Mary Elizabeth cursed silently under her breath.
“I’m sorry you’re annoyed that I’m a duke, Mary, but it will grow on you. Give it time.”
“Bah!” Mary nudged her mount again, and this time he remembered himself and took off as if he had been shot from a canon. Harry gave pursuit on his own mare, but even when he pulled up beside her, she refused to slow down and continue their idiotic conversation.
“You think I’m lying about being a duke,” Harry said, for all the world as if it were she who had lost her mind and not he who was acting the fool.
Mary Elizabeth got down off her horse and led him to a stream that ran clear close to the road. She let her horse drink his fill, then filled her empty flask. The cool water calmed her temper as she sipped it before handing it to Harry without a word. He looked at it in surprise for a moment, then drank after her.
“I don’t want to discuss it,” Mary Elizabeth said.
“Will you discuss it with my mother?”
“I’ve not met your mother.”
Harry laughed at that, and his laughter was a warm bit of sunlight that crept up her back, up her neck, and into her hair. His laughter was as warm as the touch of his hands had been on her cheek the night before, and she shivered.
“You take tea with her every day, Mary.”
Mary Elizabeth frowned. “You mean you want me to take this nonsense to Her Worship.”
Harry’s lips quirked. “If by Her Worship you mean the duchess, I do.”
Mary Elizabeth sighed. She had no desire to shame him in front of his relations. She opened her mouth to tell him so when his lips descended on hers out of nowhere, stealing her breath. Her reason fled soon after it, and she found herself pressed against his chest, her breasts squished between them in the most pleasurable way as his hands began to roam down her waist to her backside. She reveled in the feel of his hard body against hers, a body that was getting harder by the moment. She shivered and knew for the first time why it was that foolish women threw away their virtue for a farthing. Those women had been kissed by a man like Harry.
When his hands caressed her backside in her buckskin breeches and drew her hard against him so that she could feel just how much of a man he was, cold reason returned like a wave of ocean water, drowning her foolishness and his in one great wave of fury. She jerked away from him and began to writhe, trying desperately to work herself free of his embrace.
It seemed Harry’s mind could not quite catch up with what she wanted, for his body wanted something else altogether. Mary Elizabeth’s traitorous body wanted the same thing, and she cursed him and herself roundly, this time out loud so that he might hear.
At the sound of her vehement blasphemies, Harry let her go as if she were a snake that had bitten him.
“All right, then,” she said, trying hard to rein her temper in. Her new horse could hear the fury in her voice, and he stepped closer to her, getting between her and Harry. She did not chastise him for his insolence, but let him shield her. More to the point, she let him shield Harry, for her blades were close under her hand and she was afraid she might skewer the man she loved with one of them.
“I’ll go to Her Worship and I’ll tell her the nonsense you’ve been spouting. And when she confirms that you are naught but a damned fool who plagues me with lies, we’ll talk again.”
Harry’s eyes narrowed, for it seemed she had reached the end of his good nature. “If you were a man, I’d call you out for that.”
“Don’t let that stop you.”
Harry reached for her again, but she leaped onto her horse and turned his head toward the house. “I’ll turn you over my knee before the sun has set,” Harry promised.
“The devil you will,” Mary Elizabeth responded, feeling her blood rise up at the fact that the man was still challenging her, even now, when any other man of sense would have given up his lies and backed down long ago. She would have respected him if he was not playing her false by handing her a pack of children’s tales, when she had seen the fat, old duke with her own eyes. She would have to break him of this nonsense, here and now, if she had any hope of getting decent children out of him once they were wed.
She nudged her mount and he ran, as he was born to do, but they had not gone twelve lengths before Harry had pulled up beside them, keeping pace. “My knee, Mary,” Harry growled at her. She almost laughed at his idiocy. She would have laughed had she not been so angry.
She wondered how on God’s green earth he could make her want to kiss him and kill him all in the same breath. She breathed deep and set her eyes toward home. She would settle this with the duchess first, and then she would deal with Harry.
Mary Elizabeth found that her ire did not dissipate on the ride back to the duchess’s house, as it usually did. Given even five minutes, Mary Elizabeth often lost the thread of an annoyance in the throes of something more interesting—practice with her rapier or a good knife-throwing session. But even the beauty of that summer day did not stop her from cradling her fury at Harry next to her heart. Did he think her some kind of simple fool, that she would immediately believe him to be a duke simply because he asked a stable hand or two to go along with this ruse?
And more importantly, why would he think such a ruse necessary? Did he think her the low sort of woman who would be persuaded to marry based on a man’s title and position in the world? What kind of woman would that make her if she were?
Mary Elizabeth had the answer to her question almost with her next breath: an Englishwoman.
By the time she reached the fancy house, she did not even trouble herself to take her horse to the stables and rub him down as she ought to do, but left him with a waiting footman, who clearly had no idea what to do with him. She strode into the house, and Billings let her in. For once, the butler did not raise an eyebrow at the sight of her breeches.
Harry was close on her heels, and when the staid butler followed them into the front hall, looking concerned, Harry said, “That will be all, Billings.”
“Leave off your airs, Harry, for the love of God.”
Billings looked a bit shocked at her outburst, but then, he often looked shocked when she was in the room, so she paid him no mind, but went to find the duchess. She did not have far to look, for she heard the soft sound of feminine laughter coming from the front parlor. Mary Elizabeth strode in without knocking, and Harry stayed with her.
“Your Worship, Harry and I have a matter between us that you need to settle.” Mary Elizabeth spoke without preamble, then noticed that the ladies sitting all around in their soft silks and muslins stared at her as if she were a Highland barbarian down from the mountains to kill them.
Mary Elizabeth sighed and hoped the duchess did not write to her mother about this incident. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound. She bowed to the ladies, making a decent leg, she thought, in her buckskin breeches, but the ladies in the room only tittered, as the duchess raised her quizzing glass.
“Do you, indeed, Miss Waters?”
She placed undue emphasis on the word miss, and Mary Elizabeth knew that her mother would be receiving a letter about the latest of her antics. However, she did not back down, as the damage was already done, and she still did not have her answer.
Catherine was in the room and looked as pale as death. Still, luck was with Mary Elizabeth, for it seemed to be a ladies’ tea, and her brother Alex nowhere in sight. He would have bundled her out of there, tossing his coat around her like some kind of avenging angel, as if none of these people had ever seen their own legs before, much less hers.
She saw the fat duke then, standing at attention in his finery against one wall. She turned her back on the duchess and faced him squarely.
“Your Worship,” she said to him. “I want a bit of something settled here, and you’re the man to help me. My friend has been playing at being a duke this morning, but I know that you are the laird here.”
The fat duke squinted at her, and then he blinked. He did not speak nor did he move, but a deep-puce color rose from his tight, white linen to suffuse his face. Mary Elizabeth thought for a moment that he might die of an apoplexy then and there.
It was the duchess who spoke, as it seemed the fat man had swallowed his tongue.
“That is my under butler, Miss Waters. Pemberton the Younger. I believe you have met his brother, who runs my house in Town.”
The women behind her tittered but fell silent when Harry turned a glare on them. Mary Elizabeth felt her own color rise and her stomach churn. If this fat man was some butler or other, who was the duke?
She looked at Harry, and he winked at her. She did not give him the satisfaction of acknowledging that, turning her back on him to face the duchess, her stomach sinking. “I beg your pardon, Your Worship and Pemberton,” she said. “My mistake.”
The fat under butler did not speak even then, but bowed solemnly, before tripping over the doorjamb on his way out of the room.
The duchess spoke to no one in particular. “Pemberton has a bit of trouble with doors, as he is terribly nearsighted. But he keeps the clocks in perfect time. No one has as fine a touch with watch-works as Pemberton does.”
The duchess had not yet lowered her quizzing glass and still had it trained on her. Mary Elizabeth felt a fool for mistaking a butler for a fine duke, as well as a bit chagrined for charging into the middle of a ladies’ tea like a bull run mad, but she wanted her answer and she could not wait another two hours for it. Her future was at stake.
She also hoped that the duchess might give Harry the dressing down of his life, and that she could watch.
She looked at the tea cart and saw that those well-dressed women had not touched the chocolate cream cakes on it. She wanted one of those as well.
“I wonder if we might speak alone,” Mary Elizabeth said.
It was not the duchess who cleared the room but Harry. He spoke only once, using a particularly arch tone, as if it were these ladies and not she who had offended him. “Leave us,” he said, as if they were all his servants and as if he lived to be served.
Before Mary Elizabeth could take him to task for rudeness, the women rose en masse and filed out of the room. Catherine was the last to go. She cast one glance at Harry as she might at a marauding lion, but came close enough to him to kiss Mary Elizabeth’s cheek.
Catherine did not speak but squeezed her hand in silent sympathy before she left. Mary Elizabeth was not sure she needed sympathy, but she welcomed Catherine’s sweet gesture all the same.
Since playing lord of the manner seemed to amuse Harry, Mary Elizabeth did not give him the satisfaction of correcting him this time but let his false airs stand. Especially since they had been so effective in clearing the room.
She turned instead to the duchess, only to find that august lady’s sights set on him. “Harry, what are you playing at, behaving with such a lack of decorum among the ladies?”
“They’ll love me for it,” Harry said.
Mary Elizabeth rolled her eyes, and the duchess harrumphed.
“It’s my house, Mother.”
“And those are your guests,” the duchess replied, dropping her quizzing glass. It fell against her large bosom, dangling from its gold chain. Mary Elizabeth listened to their words and started to feel sick.
Harry was not paying her any mind at all, but had gone over to the tea tray and poured himself a cup. “Not for much longer, I hope.”
“Another week, you blasted boy. Put that cold tea down. I’ll ring for a fresh pot.”
She did not bother to rise to go to the bell pull next to the fireplace, but instead rang a little silver bell that sat in pride of place on the tea tray. Billings appeared within the moment, as if by magic, carrying a new teapot wrapped in a cozy.
Harry thanked him, then poured for himself first, and then a second cup with cream and two sugars for Mary. He handed her a cup and a plate with two chocolate cream cakes on it. She sat down with them both and thanked him automatically. Her stomach was beginning to roil in earnest.
“Your Worship,” Mary Elizabeth said at last, “is this man your son?”
The duchess blinked once, for all the world as if Mary Elizabeth had asked something extraordinary. But the old lady rallied almost at once. Taking a sip of tea that Harry had just freshened, the duchess said, “Why, of course he is.”