The Duke she Desires Read online

  Lavinia suspected this was because to men like Peter, unused to adversity, to have one thing go wrong was to have it all go awry. Men like him were not equipped to cope very well with life’s hardships. They had not been trained in how to continue on when things got tough. Normally when they had a problem, a servant was there to solve it.

  Peter had Stevens, James, Hannah, and Cook to look after him, clothe him, wait on him, and feed him. All his needs were met and seen to. But when his body failed him, when he had a corporeal complaint, they could do nothing. Peter had to believe in himself to make a recovery, and if he didn’t do that, he would languish in his bed forever more.

  But I won’t let that happen, Lavinia knew. She was determined to have him up and walking again.

  After all, if he could feel pain, then he could feel movement, too. His body was still able to send messages from his muscles to his brain. His legs remembered how to move, how to walk. Peter just needed to be reminded that he could do it, that a leg wound wasn’t the end of the world.

  Lavinia needed to sit down and talk with him, to find out why up until now he had been so resistant to recovering. Of course, this was the far harder task. Males in general, and dukes in particular, were not apt to share their vulnerabilities with anyone, especially women. For all that she tried to coax out his feelings, about his leg, about life after the war, Lavinia had gleaned little.

  But she took heart that the duke’s mood in general had improved. The servants only slightly flinched when his name was mentioned below-stairs, and Stevens had reported that the Cook had stopped crying into her stew every night, since His Grace was now eating meals consisting of things other than the philistine offerings of broth and bread he had requested previously.

  Lavinia suspected the comestible deprivation was a symptom of whatever was troubling him, and while this, like the rest of his mind, was still a mystery to her, she had managed to convince him that the only way he would heal was with plenty of hearty food.

  “I always thought clear broths and bread were meant for the sick,” he had told her the day before, when she was pressing a second piece of gammon on him.

  “Yes, but that is when you are with fever or cough. Gentlemen like you, who are healthy and trying to regain strength, need to eat foods that aids in those endeavors. And clear broths and bread will not give you the strength your legs need to move again. They will only cause you to waste away,” she said, looking pointedly at the duke, whose jawbone was so sharp that she suspected it could cut glass if given the chance.

  She and Cook had therefore devised a fattening, strengthening diet regimen of meats, starches, and ale, all of which would give the duke’s body the nutrients it needed to rebuild. Lavinia was hoping to see a gain in his girth and strength within the week. After so long living off next to no food, she was certain his body would delight at the reintroduction of solid meat and vegetables, and absorb as much of it as possible.

  And indeed, only two days in, the duke was already looking healthier. When she left him earlier that day in the library, he was dressed and reading about the history of Rome with a smile on his face and a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits at his side.

  This joyful mood must have deteriorated some time in the last hour, however, for no sooner did Lavinia return from a trip to the apothecary than she was greeted by the echoes of screams heard from above.

  “What in God’s name is going on?” she asked, removing her shawl and draping it on a hook by the door.

  “It’s his lordship and his betrothed, Miss,” one of the footmen whispered to her. He and a few of the maids were standing at the bottom of the stairs looking upward, clearly trying to discern what was going on.

  “Get away from there and get back to work! It’s none of your business, you three,” Hannah, the head of the household said, shooing the servants away.

  Hannah seemed, at first introduction, to be a formidable woman who was a stranger to the smile, but Lavinia had learned that with kindness and a little shared whiskey, the woman grinned and gossiped with the best of them.

  Now, she crooked her finger at Lavinia, beckoning her into the small study where she kept the lists of groceries, salaries, and such information that kept the household staff in working order.

  “It’s his fiancée up there,” Hannah said, leaning on her desk and crossing her arms over her chest. “They’ve been yelling for a good three hours. She’s mad he’s being treated by a woman physician. Last I heard, the duke was yelling back that none of the men she sent had worked, so he was going for a different approach.”

  Lavinia winced in sympathy for Lady Magdalene. “Ooh, what a horrible thing to say. Why do men never learn how to properly argue? Don’t they know the woman is nearly always right?”

  “It’s one of their fatal flaws,” Hannah said, shaking her head as a screech sounded from above. “I expect we’ll be hearing a slammed door soon, and then the sound of his lordship yelling for Stevens to bring him to his chambers. You’re going to have your work cut out for you, make no mistake about that,” Hannah said looking at Lavinia with pity.

  As predicted, Lady Magdalene gave a screech that would have woken the dead. It was so loud Lavinia’s ears were ringing, and she had to cover them as she left Hannah’s room and went to the kitchen. The duke’s shouts, first to Lady Magdalene, and then to Stevens, accompanied Lavinia as she went about making herself a cup of tea. She made one for the duke as well, slipping a few teaspoons of sugar into the drink. Sometimes it was a devil to get the tea to His Grace without him flinging the cup across the room, but Lavinia was hopeful that she, if no one else, could talk sense into him.

  He seemed to trust her, or had that morning. Now, her membership in the same gender as the lady who had prompted such agitation in him might not work in her favor. He might try to lump her in with Lady Magdalene and scream at her too, but Lavinia hoped not. And if he did, she could always tie him to the bed. Her father always promoted the importance of an alternative course of action, especially with unpredictable patients. And it appeared that the Duke of Kingwood was nothing if not unpredictable. For better, and for worse.

  Chapter Seven

  Peter heard the door open behind him, but he did not turn around. Whoever it was would soon glean from his silence and the lack of greeting that he wanted to be left alone. Normally, he would ensure this understanding with the aid of a few select yelled words, perhaps an expletive or two, but he was too tired to do that.

  Arguing with Lady Magdalene had sapped all the energy from him, rendering him unable to do little else beyond stare into the fire in front of him. As he sat there, he had begun to contemplate the correlation between the relief he felt and just how awful a person he must be to rejoice in the dissolution of his engagement.

  Truly terrible, he had just decided, when a small and distinctly feminine voice sounded behind him, accompanied by the click of a door shutting and the subtle rustle of skirts moving.

  “Your Grace?”

  Miss Bell. Of course she would come in here at the exact time when he wished to be alone. That woman had a knack for pressing him, for agitating him. Usually, he bore it willingly, knowing that she was trying to heal him. But right now, sitting quietly in front of the fire in his lonesome was not a medical matter. Rather, it was a personal one, and not something he wanted to share with his physician.

  This, however, seemed to be of no consequence to the woman, who he could hear making her way toward him with small, light-footed steps. She came into view at his right side, a teacup in one hand and a plate of biscuits in the other.

  “Might I join you?” she asked, not waiting for his response before taking a seat in the chair at his side. She set the plate of biscuits down on the table between them, then gestured with the teacup.

  “I’ve brought you a fortifying brew. It sounded as though you might need it, or at the very least, your voice might,” she said with a raised eyebrow that Peter knew was supposed to communicate humor. At the moment, however,
he was not feeling particularly able to appreciate jests. But, rather than offering a biting remark that would send her away, he instead simply turned back to the fire.

  I am finished with harsh words for the moment.

  Because your voice is so sore, you’re incapable of yelling any, he added, then betrayed his own instincts by looking longingly at the cup of tea at his side. There was steam coming off the top, and the smell of freshly steeped leaves, the slight bitterness tampered by a subtle sweetness Peter knew came from precisely two teaspoons of sugar.

  He had always been of the opinion that true gentlemen did not take their tea with sugar; they did not need a veil of sweetness to cover up the acrid nature of life, nor that of tea. But Miss Bell had shortly rid him of such a notion, for she made the most intoxicating sweet brews which she pushed on him multiple times a day, and which he accepted willingly.

  Perhaps it was that Peter needed a bit of sweetness in his life, or perhaps it was simply that he could not say no to Lavinia Bell, but either way, he reached over and took the tea and saucer into his hands before raising the cup to his lips.

  The first sip was magnificent, a balm to his wounded soul; the hot liquid travelled down his throat and began to mend all the breaks within him. All the sadness, the despair, the confusion and strange relief of the last hour disappeared as he continued to drink.

  The cup was empty by the time he pulled it away from his lips, and he set it back down gingerly on the table before taking a biscuit, his seventh of the morning. He had rapidly gone from no indulgences at all to multiple sweet treats and the like each day. While this might have distressed him before, he had noticed a less severe look to his jawline this morning.

  The food was clearly putting meat back on his frail bones, and for that reason alone, he would not refuse it. He was tired of being a rail-thin, emaciated thing. He’d thought it his lot in life after the war, but Miss Bell was making him see that he could one day be the man he was before. Altered, perhaps, due to injury of the mind and body, but strong nonetheless. The strength was what he missed most.

  “How are you?” Miss Bell asked, and Peter could see out of the corner of his eye that her eyes were cast down toward her hands, assessing the state of her cuticles.

  He knew, however, that her nails were of no concern to her. She was simply trying to put him at ease by looking away when she asked a question which, despite its simplicity and its brevity, was meant to get to the very soul of him.

  And Peter happily played straight into her hand, suddenly feeling the need to lay his feelings bare to someone, but most especially to this woman. This woman who seemed to understand, if not his mind, then at the very least his body better than anyone else he knew.

  “I am upset. And also relieved, and tired, and confused,” he said before taking a bite of the biscuit. He closed his eyes at the rich, buttery taste. It was Cook’s special shortbread biscuits, of which he had tasted a great many in the last few days, but somehow, none had approached the perfection that was now settling in his mouth.

  This is a biscuit fit for the gods.

  Peter fell back into its sugary embrace, almost forgetting that Miss Bell was still in the room for a moment as the treat slowly melted away on his tongue.

  He was reminded of her presence a moment later, however, when she cleared her throat and readjusted her position, resulting in a rustle of fabric as she moved. She was wearing yet another horrible dress, Peter saw now. A brown thing that did nothing to highlight the gold of her hair or eyes, or the freckles on her face. It was a drab brown, but while it was indeed hideous, on her, it also had a certain charm. Everything about her was deuced charming, and that was part of the problem.

  “I assume all these feelings are the result of your altercation with Lady Magdalene?” she asked.

  “You heard us?” Peter said hesitantly. He knew that he and Lady Magdalene had been rather loud, no doubt resulting in half the household hearing the harsh words they shared, but he had not even thought of Miss Bell hearing him acting that way. For some reason, it distressed him, to know that she had borne witness to him speaking in such a disrespectful fashion to the lady who, up until half an hour ago, he had been planning to spend the rest of his life with.

  “I believe the whole house heard the two of you, Your Grace,” she said.

  Peter winced, thinking back on all the words that he and Lady Magdalene had exchanged, most of them in anger and many of them in a raised voice that, he realized now, could probably be heard clear across London. He’d known Lady Magdalene to be a spirited sort, but he’d never seen her quite so dramatic before.

  A good thing I won’t have to deal with such dramatics for the rest of my life.

  While it was convenient to have a betrothed like Lady Magdalene Stewart, Peter was feeling a good dose of relief now that their partnership had been torn asunder. There were other emotions that had been stirred up as well, but relief was the most potent of them all.

  “Am I wrong in thinking that your engagement is no more?” Miss Bell continued.

  “You are not. We have severed ties, as it were,” he said, and then the whole story poured out of him. It was more words than Peter had spoken to anyone in a very, very long time, but it felt so good to be unflinchingly honest with someone. It felt good, too, to explain his feelings about marriage, life, and Lady Magdalene in particular.

  To do so to a woman like Miss Lavinia Bell, who Peter knew, albeit begrudgingly, was the most intelligent female of his acquaintance, was a boon, for she more than anyone else would be able to tell him how to heal from such a break.

  “I simply couldn’t stand it anymore,” he started with a shake of his head.

  “Stand what?” Miss Bell asked.

  “The physicians’ visits. The unfailing hope in her eyes. Her commitment to fixing me, to making me into the man I was before the… before the war. I tried to tell her when I first came home to leave me, but she thought me delusional with pain. And then the physicians started. From all over the continent and the kingdom, physicians came to look at me like I was some circus spectacle. Lady Magdalene was sure that one of them would be able to restore me to my former glory,” Peter told Miss Bell, rolling his eyes at the memory.

  “And did you not want to be restored?”

  Peter looked sharply over at her. “Of course I did! But I knew it was impossible! I had a lame leg and one that refused to move. There was nothing to be done.”

  “And yet you seem to have moved on from that conclusion since I entered your house. Haven’t you?”

  Peter saw a spark of challenge in her eyes. She had argued him into a corner, and rather quickly, too.

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “But something must have changed, to make you believe that you were capable of recovery,” she pressed.

  “Well, I suppose—”

  “So. What changed?” she asked, raising her eyebrows, making it plain she would not let him get away without an answer.

  “Well,” Peter began, then realized that he had begun his last three sentences that way. He was already vulnerable; he did not want to make himself seem foolish, too.

  Starting again, he said, “You changed my mind. All those physicians Lady Magdalene sent for made me feel so… weak. They proposed these months-long treatment plans with all these tonics and poultices and it all sounded absolutely agonizing. And they were so willing to let me refuse! One word from me and they practically ran away.

  “Except for the last one,” he added. “Like you, he told me it was a nervous distemper. He said that I had apparently made up my injury because of some illness of the mind, and that therefore only I could cure myself.”

  At this, Miss Bell laughed. “Oh dear, he sounds positively frightful.”

  “Indeed, he was,” Peter agreed.

  “But how am I so different from them? I, too, devised a treatment regiment, albeit with only hearty food as the medicine and stretches and exercises instead of poultices.”

 
“Ah, but you did not back down when I resisted. You gave me what for. You stood up to me. And I suppose that was exactly what I needed. You reminded me of the traits in myself I’ve been missing since the…since the…” he stuttered, unable to say “the siege.” He hadn’t been able to say the word since returning home. It was as though his mouth abruptly stopped working the moment the word entered into his mind.

  “The siege, you mean?” she said, the word rolling off her tongue with frustrating ease.

  “Yes. Exactly. That. I haven’t been myself since then. I’d had this great idea in my mind of the kind of gentleman I would be, the kind of duke I would be, once I returned. I would have honor to back up my title, I would have something special about me beyond an accident of birth that gave me all this,” he said, waving his hand to indicate their grand surroundings. “I would finally be able to be proud of myself.”

  “Have you not been proud of yourself before?” she asked, looking surprised.

  “No, of course not,” Peter scoffed. “What is there to be proud of? I didn’t earn this dukedom. I didn’t earn this land, this house, or any of the others I own. I didn’t even earn my reputation. All I’ve done is continued in exactly the same vein as those gentlemen who came before me. But none of them were in the Army. None of them risked their lives for the good of their country. I was going to do that, and set myself apart. But then, after the…” again, the word stopped him, but this time he ploughed on, simply skipping over it. “I returned home, lame and having hardly helped anyone.”

  “That is not true,” Miss Bell said, and Peter saw that she was staring at him with purpose, her eyes serious as they fixed on his.

  “You helped capture Fort McKinley, and you helped win that siege. Were it not for your efforts with the cannon, Britain would not have gained nearly the advantage it has thus far. You are a hero, Your Grace. Please, remember that.”