“I’d kiss ye awake, but this is a library rather than an enchanted castle, and I’ve no wish to get m’ face slapped.”
Miss Armstrong did not at first reply to Dunfallon’s observation. She instead nuzzled a copy of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and sighed. The field marshal, decorating authority, diplomat-in-chief, and literary ambassadress of West Bart’s Lending had apparently been felled by that unstoppable force, holiday fatigue.
Dunfallon crouched down to be at eye level with her as she dozed upon her stool. “Miss Armstrong, are ye being coy?” She could not be coy if her good name depended upon it, of that he was certain.
She opened her eyes, and that smile started up again. The one that conveyed joy merely to behold a fellow, though confusion filled her gaze in the next moment.
“Mr. Dunn?”
“You fell asleep despite my most stirring rendition of Dingle’s tale. The tigers of West Bart’s Lending decided to let you rest. Truly we are in the season of miracles, because the little blighters whispered through the whole discussion and even thereafter when we played the map game. Your patrons know St. Giles intimately, but have little familiarity with Mayfair. Bevvy and Petty suspended bickering in honor of your slumbers too.”
She blinked, she yawned, she stretched. Miss Armstrong was apparently not one of those obnoxious people who rose all cheery and full of chatter.
“Gracious. How long have I… I still have your pocket watch.” She fished it from the folds of her skirt. Flipped it open and stared. “I slept for nearly two hours. Mr. Dunn, how could you?”
He offered her a hand, and she allowed him to assist her to her feet—another miracle. “How could I not? If you fall asleep at midday in the midst of my best rendition of tigers, then you have been deprived of sleep. Make a habit of that, and lung fever will find you, or worse.”
“Where are the children?”
“I sent them home early, due to the snow, but fear not, they got their nooning.” Dunfallon had ordered them proper beef pasties from the corner pub, baked potatoes from the chop shop, and shortbread from the bakery in aid of their continued good behavior—and their survival.
“Snow.” Miss Armstrong went to the orange window and gazed out upon a street bathed in the icy blue shadows created by fresh snow falling as an early twilight descended. “So dreary. I worry about the children in weather like this.”
“I worry about you. Do you walk home without an escort?”
“Of course. The distance is all of two streets, and I’m not some duchess to be ferried about by a coach and four.”
For the hundredth time, Dunfallon’s conscience bellowed at him that now would be a good moment to clear up that little misconception about his station in life. And for the hundredth time, his heart bellowed in response that Miss Emerald Armstrong would never again look upon him with that special smile, much less permit him to set foot in her kingdom.
“And if you were a duchess?” he asked.
She crossed to the hearth and began poking at the coals. “I’d support libraries, and look after children, and look after my duke, too, though maybe those fellows don’t need much looking after.”
“Suppose not.” Dukes were supposed to do the looking after—of their families, the Regent, the Church, the realm, the occasional armed battalion, and—on some fine day—their duchesses.
Dunfallon had snuffed the sconces around the library, save for one by the front door and another by the main desk. Miss Armstrong was thus illuminated mostly by the fire in the hearth, and the shadows gave her features a pensive cast.
“I’ve been invited to a holiday open house,” she said. “I’m genteel enough to make up numbers, and Lady Bellefonte is kind. Lord Bellefonte’s a good sort too. Her ladyship says His Grace of Don’t Fall For Him will be there.”
“I beg your pardon?” Even as he posed the question, Dunfallon knew to whom she alluded. He’d accepted Bellefonte’s invitation because his lordship was like a great mayfly, buzzing persistently on the topic of Yuletide cheer and Lady Bellefonte’s much-prized invitations.
“Dunfallon will be there,” Miss Armstrong said. “The Scottish duke, the most eligible bachelor in the realm. Has pots of money, great good looks, and a Highland castle or three. Lady Bellefonte says he also has a sense of humor, though I doubt that’s truly the case.”
She heaped half a scoop of coal on the flames and watched the fire catch on the fresh fuel.
“Why can’t a duke appreciate the occasional jest?” A jest being a very different matter from willfully deceiving a lovely woman.
“Dunfallon was the extra spare,” she said. “Lost a brother to the proverbial stupid—tragic—accident and another to consumption. His Grace was sent off to Spain to participate in that protracted tragedy, and he fought at Waterloo as well. Then he was packed off to Vienna for all the conferring and waltzing. Such a lot of duty, and one wonders… I am rambling. This happens when one’s imagination is allowed to flourish.”
What the hell, what the bedamned hell, did she wonder about His Grace of Dunfallon?
“Do you want to go to this open house?” Dunfallon asked, taking a seat on the raised hearth.
“No, but Lady Bellefonte is a devoted library patron and a friend. I should attend.”
Bloody hell. “Not if you don’t wish to.” It was again on the tip of his tongue to confess. I am Dunfallon, and I would love to see you there, when Miss Armstrong set aside the poker and sat back on a hassock.
“If a duke,” she said, “who is probably lonely, overworked, too serious for his own good, and homesick for his castle, can bestir himself to attend, I ought to as well. The tattle rags suggest Dunfallon has been hounded by the matchmakers ever since he put off mourning years ago, from the ballrooms to the house parties to the Little Season. I’ll be at the open house, if only to offer Dunfallon silent moral support and to guard the gingerbread from Lord Bellefonte’s predations. Lady Bellefonte doesn’t mind that her husband snitches, but he’s a corrupting influence on the children when they are trying especially hard to be good.”
The sensible, ducal part of Dunfallon’s mind wondered what all this sympathy for His Grace was in aid of, but another part—the purely masculine part who was homesick and tired and dreading the loss of his library privileges—was all too aware that he was alone, in fading light, with a woman whom he esteemed.
“Why should Dunfallon deserve your moral support?”
She exchanged a look with Aristotle, whose shining eyes gave his shadowed form a supernatural cast.
“I know what it is to be the butt of gossip, Mr. Dunn, to feel speculative gazes on me everywhere and unkind whispers coming from all corners. I suspect part of the reason our officers did so well in Spain is because they’d trained not on the playing fields of Eton, but in the ballrooms and on the bridle paths of Mayfair.”
“We did so well because Napoleon stretched his resources too thin, and the Spaniards excelled at guerrilla warfare. Then too, Wellington was effective at getting his army provisioned, and he was shrewd as hell in battle.” A hard rain the night before Waterloo had also worked in Wellington’s favor, and against the French trying to charge uphill across a sodden field.
“You do not express yourself as a curate, Mr. Dunn.”
“I’m not a curate.”
“Not yet, but I do wonder if you kiss like one.”
Thoughts of confession guttered like a candle in a stiff breeze of astonishment. “I beg your pardon?”
“Earlier, you said you considered waking me with a kiss—I did not dream that. But you declined to avail yourself of the opportunity.”
The fire was warm at Dunfallon’s back, and outside, darkness was falling in earnest. The library was uncharacteristically quiet, but for the crackle of the fire and a contented rumbling from the cat on the mantel.
“I don’t impose kisses on sleeping beauties. I offer them to ladies who are awake enough to appreciate and reciprocate my efforts.” There ye go again, not sounding like a curate.
“Are you offering to kiss me, Mr. Dunn?”
“My friends call me Dane.”
“My friends call me foolish. I prefer the peace and predictability of my library over getting back on the social horse, but earlier today…”
He waited while she seemed to come to some decision.
“Earlier today, I suffered the fiercest wish to be closer to you. This is doubtless more foolishness on my part.”
Of all the things she might have said… “Why?”
“Why is it foolish?”
“It’s not foolish, but why closer to me? I’m woefully blunt. In my sister’s opinion, I lack patience. I am in want of social polish, and my burr is too much in evidence when I’m annoyed or amused.” Or, apparently, sharing confidences with pretty librarians.
Miss Armstrong cradled his jaw against the warmth of her palm. “Whoever called you impatient hasn’t seen you waiting while Mary fumbles to turn yet another page, hasn’t heard you explaining to Caspar the definition of ‘species,’ and hasn’t watched you listening when Ralph states the obvious and hopes he sounds clever. You are the soul of patience when you referee endless rounds of the map game, making certain the children begin to learn their street names. You have the social agility to manage Bevins and Petty’s bickering, and your burr is perfect for rendering the growling of a tiger.”
“And these attributes you perceive in me, they attract you?”
She brushed his hair back from his brow. “They do.”
Between mentally begging her to repeat the caress and lecturing himself not to make a complicated situation worse, Dunfallon was blessed with an insight.
Miss Peasegill and her ilk could pursue only the Dunfallon tiara, because they had not bothered to acquaint themselves with the man who could offer it to them. They had not paid attention to the subtle effect of mood on his burr. They had not wondered if he liked animals or disdained to allow them into his domiciles. They had never inquired about his literary tastes.
To them, those aspects of the man were irrelevant beside the shining wealth and consequence of the duke.
To Emmie Armstrong, the ducal trappings probably wouldn’t matter all that much even if she knew of them. This conclusion caused such a lightness in Dunfallon’s heart that he knelt beside the lady’s hassock and took her hand.
“Might you kiss me, Miss Armstrong?”
“Emmie. My friends call me Emmie. If I kiss you, it has nothing to do with mistletoe, Mr. Dunn.”
“Dane. Please call me Dane.”
“Dane.”
She pressed her lips gently to his mouth, and he was lost.
In Emmie’s opinion, no institution on earth matched a good library for gratification of human needs. Libraries reverenced knowledge as cathedrals reverenced spirituality. Libraries gave physical shelter to their patrons, while library books fed the imagination, the intellect, and the heart.
Emmie had been born for the library the same way some men were born for the military or the Church, though it had taken Lord Hercules’s perfidy to bring that truth home to her.
A new truth came to Emmie on the scent of mulling spices and cloved oranges: She had also been born to kiss Dane.
He didn’t pull her hair or nibble or mash himself against her or do any of those other obnoxious things Lord Hercules had apparently believed must attend a kiss. She tasted Dane, he tasted her back, gently, respectfully. When he slid his hands into her hair, she caught a whiff of cinnamon and nutmeg, and that brought to mind the image of those hands—strong, competent—crushing spices for the children’s delectation.
His kisses, like those spices, warmed her, as did the heat of his body when he shifted closer. His arms came around her, and Emmie was enfolded in pleasure.
Such a relief, to be held, to be cherished. A burden fell away, of both loneliness and despair.
“I sometimes think,” she said, rubbing her cheek against Dane’s lapel, “that spinsters become eccentric because nobody touches them—some spinsters. They float through society like ghosts, with never a hug, never a cuddle, and they cling to their pets and their tipple because they begin to doubt themselves to be real.”
He cradled the back of her head against his palm, the fit of his body against Emmie’s a perfect delight.
“Soldiers experience the same thing. Nothing but marching, grumbling, bad rations, and fighting. No softness, no joy, unless it’s the joy of killing more of the enemy than he killed of ours. The laughter is bitter, the sleep exhausted and plagued with nightmares. I suspect the enlisted men sometimes took to brawling for the reason you allude to—to assure themselves that they were real, that they still inhabited the world of trees, sky, and bruised knuckles.”
Emmie adored that Dane’s mind ranged over myriad topics and experiences, that his thinking roamed freely in any direction, uninhibited by prejudice or propriety.
And merciful hosts, he knew how to hold a lady. “What of curates?” she asked, closing her eyes. “Do they long for human warmth?”
He resumed kissing her, and the tenor of his addresses became more passionate, though no less respectful. He invited, he suggested, he never demanded.
And that, Emmie learned, could be frustrating when she herself was tempted to demand—that his hand travel the last few inches to settle over her breast, that he shift to the side so she might explore him more intimately, that he scoop her into his arms and carry her up to the sofa in the office, there to…
To what?
“Emmie Armstrong, ye are no spinster.” He’d all but rumbled those words against her hair, his embrace preventing her from seeing his face.
“And you are no curate.”
He eased back enough that she could see his smile. “And God be thanked for that mercy. I am one kiss away from importuning you for favors I have not earned, and I don’t want to let you go.”
“Kissing agrees with you,” she said, smoothing his hair where her fingers had previously disarranged it. “You look younger, more mischievous.” And more handsome.
He shifted back to sit on the raised hearth, kissed her fingers, and took hold of her hand. “While you look like every holiday gift a grown man doesn’t admit he longs for, and yet, I can already see you back on the job, sorting, labeling, and arranging thoughts in your mental library.”
He traced a finger down the center of her forehead, and Emmie’s middle went fluttery. “I worried,” she said. “I should not have.”
“Worried?”
Perhaps libraries, when darkened and quiet, also took on some qualities of the confessional. “I worried that Lord Hercules tossed me aside not because my dowry was the smaller of the two on offer, but because of… me.”
She leaned forward, though she couldn’t quite close the space between them. Her cheeks flamed, with anger rather than humiliation.
“This lordling was in the running for your hand?” Dane asked. “And he offered for another with a larger dowry?”
She wanted to leave the tale there, which was bad enough, but this was Dane, and she owed him the rest of it.
“We were engaged, and the lawyers were working out the settlements. Engagement means…”
“That you allowed him the liberties I will spend the rest of the night dreaming of, and that you might well have conceived his child.” Dane rested his forehead against Emmie’s. “Go on.”
Hercules hadn’t even asked about the possibility of a child. “He told me we wouldn’t suit and that he was setting me free, and he would graciously allow me to put it about that I’d tossed him aside.”
“Meaning you took all the blame for his fickleness and greed.”
“And I have been hiding at West Bart’s Lending ever since. I am done with Society, with the gossip and snide whispers. I am through with all eyes latching upon me as I descend into a ballroom, knowing that everybody hopes I’ll stumble.”
He straightened. “You are prodigiously honest, Miss Armstrong, but was it truly that bad? The gossips favor fresh game, and even the most wicked scandals eventually become old news.”
In for a penny… “My own brother thinks I abandoned his dear old school chum nearly at the altar, and Lord Hercules has not set him straight. Ambrose and I haven’t spoken much since. I bide here in Town as a nominal companion to my auntie. She had no use for Lord Hercules and tells me I need to come out of self-imposed exile. I thought I’d take up traveling on the Continent in the spring, rather than face the Mayfair whirl again. Auntie can be as stubborn as Ambrose can.”
She hadn’t told anybody that last bit, about traveling. Not even Lady Bellefonte.
“You’d admit defeat because of one titled bungler?”
Emmie withdrew her hand from his. “He didn’t merely bungle, Dane. I allowed him liberties. Need I provide you a map with all the quadrants labeled? Society draws certain conclusions when an engagement is broken, and those conclusions do not redound to a lady’s credit.”
He studied her by the flickering firelight, and in the dancing shadows, Emmie saw reflected generations of Highland warriors. Fierce, shrewd, brave, and vigorous.
“That’s not the problem, is it?” he asked softly. “The problem isn’t the gossip—if you were engaged to a lordling, gossip was a fact of your life before the engagement ended. The problem is, he made you doubt yourself. Doubt your desirability and your worth.”
Emmie rose, rather than face that patient, insightful gaze.
“His lordship bragged about never reading a single book,” she said, pacing before the hearth. “Then he’d rut on me, and when he was done, he’d pat my cheek and tell me that I’d learn to please him eventually and not to worry, because he was a patient man, and even a bluestocking antidote had her charms.”
She came to a halt with her back to her audience. “He should have been trying to please me, shouldn’t he? I have yet to find the library book that deals with such matters, but I’m almost sure—after kissing you—that Hercules was the bumbler, not I.”
“‘Bumbler’ is too kind a term to describe his disregard for your feelings.” Dane spoke from immediately behind Emmie. “He is an ass, meaning no disrespect to the worthy donkeys of the world. A jackanapes, a niddering poltroon.” He added something harsh in Gaelic.
“What does that mean?”
“Coward.”
The word—a judgment when Dane uttered it—reverberated in the library’s quiet. “You think Lord Hercules is a coward?”
“And a sneak. If the truth had come out—that he’d tossed you aside for the greater fortune—do you believe the young lady in possession of that greater fortune would have had him?”
Emmie turned slowly. “She barely had a say in the matter. Lord Hercules is the son of a marquess. Her family wanted that connection.”
“If they can look that high, then they can also afford to have a care for the young man’s sense of honor. You were betrayed, Emerald Armstrong, and I can assure you, with every ounce of masculine instinct in me, nothing whatsoever is amiss with your desirability or your worth.”
His burr had become very pronounced, the r’s rolling, the t’s acquiring knifepoints. Outside, darkness had fallen, and the snow was piling up apace.
You were betrayed. Those three words articulated a wrong Emmie hadn’t been able to name, and Dane had spoken them with towering confidence in his conclusion.
“You have given me much to think about, sir.” He’d also made Emmie smile, for no reason she could name. “I don’t suppose you’d allow me to ravish you on the sofa in the office?”
She wanted to ravish him out of simple desire—she knew enough to put a name to those feelings—but also a little bit because of that doubt he’d mentioned. The doubt that plagued her every time she contemplated another social outing, the doubt that followed her to the churchyard, the same doubt that had her staring at her wardrobe and trying different styles for her hair.
“That sofa,” Dane said, “is too short if you want to ravish me properly, and no, I will not allow you to make the attempt anyway. If and when we become more intimate, we will have a comfortable bed, comestibles to keep up our strength between bouts of passion, and a clear understanding of our mutual expectations.”
Emmie wasn’t sure what all that meant, but she did grasp that Dane wasn’t scandalized. He was… He was contemplating those further intimacies and how they might best be enjoyed.
And he had a point.
Mr. Dunn, the supposed curate bound for Wales, had little in common with Dane, the passionate kisser and honorable lover. The two somehow had to be reconciled, and the hour for that exercise had not come.
“Then I suppose your ravishment will have to wait.” Emmie patted his chest.
“As will yours.”
She wanted to whoop with glee at that riposte. Instead, she kissed his cheek. “If you’ll bank the fires, I’ll lock up.”
“I locked up an hour ago. I will see you home before the snow gets any deeper. I also told the children that the library was likely to be closed tomorrow, or would at least open a couple hours late.”
“Getting airs above your station, Mr. Dunn?”
He took up the poker, studied it, and aimed a wicked smile at her. “I’m getting all manner of ideas, so please fetch your cloak, ye wee besom, lest ye drive a poor laddie daft.”
Emmie bundled up, and when Dane offered his arm on the walkway, she took it. The journey home, while short, took some effort in snow half a foot deep. Dane passed her his walking stick, which also made the going easier, and when she would have handed it back at Auntie’s front door, he insisted she keep it.
“I’ll come by the library on Wednesday morning,” he said. “You can return it to me then, and we will sort out some more complicated matters that I’m incapable of tackling just now.”
He bowed correctly over her hand—the wretch—and then went whistling on his way. Emmie watched him long enough to wonder what he’d look like in a kilt, then slipped into the house.
She’d never been a wee besom before. She preferred it to her former status as Lord Hercules’s castoff. Preferred it enormously, and she would count the hours until she and Dane could resume tackling complicated matters—or tackling each other—on Wednesday.
“What the ’ell you think you’re doing, Mr. Dunn?” The voice belonged to a pint-sized wraith in a jacket too long for his height and too thin for the elements. “I seen you in the library with Miss Armstrong, and she ain’t your missus, and you ain’t a curate, and you’d best start explaining, or I will kick you where you don’t never want to be kicked.”
Caspar emerged from the shadows between two town houses, his tone bristling with banked violence even though his teeth chattered.
“Good God, lad.” Dunfallon wrapped his scarf around that skinny neck, making sure to cover the boy’s ears. “You are a more than decent tracker. Do you always see the lady home?”
“We take turns. I take the most turns, like when it’s raining or snowing. The older boys have business to be about, and the little ’uns should stay outta the wet.”
“The older boys go begging?”
Caspar took to rearranging the scarf. “Some beg.”
Meaning some others got up to housebreaking, picking pockets, or worse. What was a boy to do when his options were crime, humiliation, or starvation?
“Come with me,” Dunfallon said, setting off at a modest pace in deference to Caspar’s shorter legs.
Caspar stayed right where he was, a dark shape against an increasingly thick curtain of gray. “I don’t go nowheres wif men who got nasty ideas.”
“You are safe with me, lad. Besides, if you are to properly berate me for taking liberties with Miss Armstrong, you’d best wait until your teeth stop chattering.”
“Be-rate. Is that like to ‘rip up at’?”
“Exactly like. Now come along, and I promise to feed you a decent supper while you castigate me. Were you waiting outside the whole time Miss Armstrong and I tarried at the library?”
“Aye. She sometimes gets to readin’ after she locks up. I sneak in the coal chute if that happens because Miss Emmie can read for hours. Then she pikes off and I have to climb out the basement window to catch her. You shouldn’t have been kissing her with the drapes open.”
In point of fact, the lady had been kissing Dunfallon. “I should not have been kissing her at all.”
“Because she thinks you’re a curate?”
“How do you know I’m not? I have the education for it.” Dunfallon asked the question out of curiosity, rather than any intent to argue. If Caspar had come to that conclusion, Emmie probably had as well.
She’s Miss Armstrong to you, laddie.
“You ain’t a curate because you don’t talk curate-ish. Petty says a curate is allus thankin’ the Lord for what can’t be helped—like the weather or a key fitting the lock it was made for. You cuss in Scottish. My mum says my da was Scottish, though I never knew ’im. Bevvy says you don’t walk like a curate, as if headin’ off to the chop shop was some kinda crusade. You don’t kiss like no curate neither.”
“Your own observation, I take it.”
“I got eyes, and you and Miss was goin’ to town right in front of the fire. This scarf smells like Christmas.”
Such longing imbued that last pronouncement. Dunfallon paused on a street corner. No wheeled traffic braved the snow and darkness, and the porch lights made only small orbs of gold in the vast gloom. London was for once still, and the quiet was profound.
Dunfallon was not about to lose sight of the boy in weather like this, but neither could he take him to the ducal residence or to his apartment at the Albany. The staff was discreet, but not that discreet. Then too, darling sister Amy had her spies among them.
“I’m not a curate. I’m a peer.”
“A fancy lord?”
“After a fashion. Miss Armstrong has no use for peers, and an innocent mistake on her part meant I could find refuge in the library, so I allowed her error to go uncorrected.”
Caspar sneezed twice and, of all things, produced a wrinkled, grubby handkerchief with which to wipe his nose.
“You’re right she don’t care for fancy lords, Your Toffship, and she got no use at all for liars.”
“In the normal course, I’m not given to mendacity.” Dunfallon chose a direction, and Caspar came along without argument.
“How you do talk, Lord Dogsbody. You thought about kissing her, and so you read us a story, and that made her think about kissing you.”
“Is that how it was?” Dunfallon had read the children a story out of necessity, not because he’d been trying to impress Emmie. “She liked my storytelling?”
“She likes all Mr. Dingle’s stories, and you made a proper job of the tigers. Me and the lads have used the tigers’ rig to make it sound like we’re a gang when it’s only three of us.”
“You growl and wave your tails in the undergrowth, then dash off a few paces and do the same again until the enemy thinks they’re outnumbered by enormous carnivores?”
“And we use different voices, like Dingle’s tiger kittens, and we sound like we’re eight fellers instead of three, and that’s a lot of fists and teeth and boots. I call to the others, ‘Get out your knives, lads, one for each hand! Benny, keep that cudgel handy! Mack, we’ll need your peashooter!’ I sound like Ma when I say it, and Ma in a temper would scare Wellington hisself. Bevvy says Miss wrote those stories for us. Petty don’t argue with him.”
“And when Petty and Bevvy don’t argue about a conclusion, it must be holy writ.” Dunfallon turned another corner, and his destination came into view.
“Miss Emmie is smart enough to have written ’em stories, and Petty and Bevvy agreed you wasn’t a curate.”
“And they were right. I’d appreciate it if you’d allow me to choose the time and place of my confession to Miss Armstrong.”
For confess, he would, and go shopping for a ring directly thereafter. One didn’t allow the next Duchess of Dunfallon to pass up her tiara over a minor misunderstanding.