Chapter 7

As soon as the door shut behind the ladies, Ben tugged at his cravat so violently his hair went wild, whipping over his eyes.

"You're ruining the effect!" Norton slumped into the chair his wife had so recently vacated.

"She's not here to see it."

"You don't act like you want her to marry you."

Ben didn't want to marry her. Couldn't say that, though. "Despite what that blasted Guide says, there's more than one way to court a lady. Besides, why are all of you following the duke about when he's never conducted a successful courtship?"

Norton pinched his nose, closed his eyes. "He's a keen, analytical mind. And there's precious little other practical advice on the matter. We're simply supposed to know how to do it. We don't. I don't. You clearly do not. What else are we supposed to do?"

Ben sank into a seat across from Norton. "Feels like a great bloody experiment. With us as the subjects."

"But I need it to work."

"Don't see why."

"Would you like to exist in a miserable marriage?" Norton grumbled.

Ben yanked at his cravat again, succeeded in pulling loose an end of it. "You want to court your wife?"

Norton stared out the window, arms limp on the arms of his chair. "Have to, don't I? Or else—"

"Misery."

"Precisely. Stop messing with the cravat. You'll tangle it."

"Too late for that." Ben had somehow conjured a tight knot before his throat. "You didn't have to follow me about the last twenty-four hours like I'm some damn child who can't be trusted to take care of himself."

"Clearly you can't be trusted." Norton rose and ambled toward a cupboard in the corner of the room. He opened it up and pulled forth a bottle half-filled with amber liquid. "Brandy?"

"Can't be trusted? Just because I don't preen like a peacock?" Ben grunted. "Yes, brandy."

"Can't be trusted because you don't take the clear steps to obtain that which you desire. You just sulk about wishing someone would pick you up when you're a burnt, mangled tart, last batch of the day, and you do nothing to make yourself appealing."

"Are you calling me a tart?" Ben's eyes narrowed.

"Yes. In a metaphorical sense." He poured a few fingers each in two crystal glasses and returned to his chair, handing off a glass to Ben before he sat.

"You and Clearford are addled. Here I am stuffed into clothes so tight I can barely move, and did Lady Prudence fall into my arms?" He grunted. "No matter how attractive I make my tart, she would boot me out the front door if she had the power to do so. Toss me to the dog because he's been a good boy. Why they hell are we using the metaphor?"

"Because it's about pleasing others so they wish to have you. That's what this"—he waved at Ben's naked face—"is all about. Tell me, did you really detect no difference at all in her demeanor toward you?" Norton sipped his brandy.

Ben scratched his chin. "I wouldn't say that." She'd seemed shocked, her eyes larger than he'd ever seen them as her gaze flitted up and down his form before finally settling just south of his eyes. On his lips. Or perhaps she'd been mesmerized by his smooth cheeks and jaw. Surely that, because a well-bred duke's sister would not stare overly long at a man's lips.

But this duke's sister had secrets. So perhaps this duke's sister did.

"Who are these other women?" Ben asked. They'd been staring at him like he was a piece of meat, and they hadn't eaten in a fortnight. Like he was the last tart baked by an expert chef. Like he was a buxom tavern wench, and they were the randy farm boys. Everyone had treated him differently, looked at him differently, since he'd chopped off his hair, shaved his beard, scrubbed off the ink. He was the same damn man. Just like a well-made tart tasted the same no matter what it looked like.

Everyone else was ridiculous. Mad.

But perhaps Norton had the right of it, though, because Prudence had looked at him anew as well. If the new clothes led to new developments, it wouldn't be a waste of time.

"They are Cora's friends," Norton answered.

"Friends? Not her mother's friends? They appear… more mature."

"Cora asked specifically for those women to stay with her for the next few weeks. So, I cannot think they are her mother's friends."

"You know precious little about your wife."

"She wasn't going to be my wife a month ago."

Ben raised his glass in concession. "They don't want our company."

Norton finished off his brandy and snapped the glass onto a nearby table. "Doesn't matter. They are not here for us. They are here for her. And you are here for Lady Prudence."

"Your point?"

"What are you doing here with me?"

Ben shot the rest of the brandy down his throat and placed his glass beside Norton's. "Damn right. I'll be going, then."

"Do you have a plan?"

Ben stopped just before the door, ran his hands down the length of his body. "This is the plan, remember?"

"You can't just shave and think that will win the woman."

"Then why did I shave?" Ben growled.

"To catch her attention. Now you must keep it."

"When did you become a bloody expert?"

Norton grabbed his empty glass as he stood and refilled it at the cupboard. "I'm far from it. But I have the Guide, and I trust that will help."

"You trust Clearford, and I'll trust…"

Norton grinned over the rim of his glass. "Trust what?"

"Shove it." Ben stormed into the hall. Which way had she gone? He stood still, held his breath, heard faint voices down the hall. He followed them to the very end where double doors sat tall and closed. He pressed an ear against the crack between them, and the voices became easier to discern. A tiny bit. The tones were furtive. Only a few words came through with crisp clarity.

"—books, but…"

"We should go back to London. We'll…"

"Hyde Park? Too dangerous. But—"

"Then what?"

"Shh."

"This was supposed to be—"

"… locked doors."

He straightened. Locked doors? He gave the handle a try. Didn't budge. What in hell were they up to?

Silence inside the room.

He knocked. Perhaps banged was a more accurate description.

Still, they clung to their silence, like the besieged awaiting their fate behind a weak castle door.

He knocked again, this time with less force.

"Ye-es?" a voice said. Lady Norton's.

"I was wondering if I could have a word with Lady Prudence."

"I'm occupied!" the duke's sister said. Well, yelled.

Ben tried the handle again, though he knew it would produce no different results.

"We're busy!" Five female voices clamored together.

"I'm not." Ben crossed his arms over his chest and planted his feet. "I've got all day. Several days. How long is this little house party?"

Silence again, punctuated by little audible grunts and gasps, the constant chatter of furtive whispering then, "No!"

That voice belonging to Prudence. Ben chuckled, waited.

More whispers and grumbling.

Then silence.

Then the doors flung open, and there she was, a forced smile pulling her lips tight. "Shall we take a walk through the gardens?"

"Yes." He held out a crooked arm.

She blinked at it. No, not at it, at him, somewhere north of his arm, at his—

"Hell." He tugged at the tangle of a knot at his throat. "Forgot about that."

"Did you encounter a wolf in the hall? Did you fight it?"

"No. We are walking. Are we not, Lady Prudence?" He held out his arm.

She took it after a slight hesitation, and he all but dragged her back to the parlor. Norton had left, and Ben pulled her through the doors, into the garden he'd been admiring before they'd arrived to gawp at his transformation.

"Did you encounter a snake, then?" she asked. "A big one that wound around your throat and—"

"No." He tugged her onto a path which meandered through some trees.

She shook him loose. "If you won't delight me with the tale of what happened to your cravat, perhaps you can tell me what you brought me out here for."

His tongue felt as tangled as his cravat. He tugged at the linen, made it worse.

"Stop." She swung in front of him, and if her word had not alerted him before her body moved, he would have crashed right into her. She peered up at him, her hands hesitant as they rose between their bodies. "Let me?"

He scowled. What did she mean? But when her fingers brushed against the mess of his neck neckcloth, he knew.

"Yes." His voice surprisingly gruff, rough in his own throat. A woman had never neatened his cravat before. Felt odd to have someone so tiny so close, untying the strip of linen that covered his throat. Uncovering him. The air washed his hot skin as her knuckles brushed his chin.

"Stubble already. Did you shave this morning?"

He nodded, and there again, that brush of his chin against her hands, undoing the work the wind did to cool his throat.

She wound the cravat back up again, tied a serviceable knot, and stepped away, placing her hands on her hips and tilting her head as she studied her work. "Not as intricate as you had before, but better than the mess you made of it. And in such a short time." She tsked.

"You like pointing out where I make messes. My neckcloth. My schedule."

She shivered. "Do not remind me of that abomination. Tell me, what meetings are you missing currently which you've entirely forgotten existed until now?"

He swallowed a curse. There was one. Two? He had forgotten. Damn. "None. I made sure everything was taken care of before leaving London."

"You're lying." She patted his cravat before starting down the shadow-dappled lane once more.

He caught up. "How did you know?"

"Your eyes tell the truth when your lips do not." Her gaze flashed to his lips. "Why have you done this, Mr. Bailey? The cut hair and shaved chin, the new clothes?"

She could read truth in his eyes, apparently. No use lying. About this. "For you."

A hitch in her step. Her cheeks flushed in an instant. "W-why are you here?"

His turn to round her, to stop her in her tracks. She could not meet his gaze, so he placed his knuckles beneath her chin and lifted it. Still, she would not look at him. The changeable eyes above her rosy cheeks searched for something to land on, anywhere but him. Did he fluster her?

He liked her flustered. He didn't mean to do it. His thumb moved without a single conscious command, swiping across her lower lip.

Her gaze snapped to his. Finally. And her knees buckled.

But he caught her, held her tight and upright against his body as her arms wrapped around his neck. Her breaths came hard and fast, and her eyes darkened. Her lips, usually thinned in disapproval, softened. Pink and velvet. Impossible to look away.

Yes. Yes, he liked her flustered very much.

"Like that, my lady?" he clung to her, keeping her upright.

She clung to him, too, unbreathing, eyelashes fluttering. "I…" A gurgle strangling whatever words she'd meant to say.

This gentleman thing came with power.

"Shall I kiss you?" he asked.

She melted against him. Hell. She'd let his lips ravage hers this very moment.

But that moment didn't last.

She snapped upright and out of his arms, pacing away from him and smoothing her hands down her skirts. A large, brown stain marred one side of her gown. How… unusually untidy of her.

"Did you get into an altercation with a teapot, Lady Prudence?" he asked with a chuckle. "I find it difficult to believe that for once you are more rumpled than I."

She whirled around to face him, waving her hand at his face. "I dislike all this."

He stalked toward her. "I was teasing. I did not mean to offend."

"Not that."

What then? Ah. "The touches. You dislike it when I embrace you. Because you like it, perhaps? More than you wish to."

"No." She stiffened her arm in front of her, muscles rigid, palm flat, a wall to stop his progress toward her. "The change in your appearance. Because I thought you did not care what others thought of you. I thought you beyond such peacock preening. Yet here you are." Her arm dropped heavy to her side. "Looking like that. It's a disappointment if you must know." Her shoulders slumped as she turned from him and continued down the path. Her pace sad and heavy.

His own heart, curious thing, stuttered, unsure how to beat in such extraordinary circumstances. He'd disappointed her. By shaving. He rubbed his chest over that organ, trying to soothe it, but it grew impatient. And Lady Prudence grew farther away. And Ben's limbs jittered along with his heart.

Until he ran to catch up with her. He grasped her arm to tug her to a soft stop, to frown down into her scowling face. "Beards grow back, Lady Prudence." He laughed. Mostly because he didn't know what else to do. Couldn't name that feeling coursing like a rapid current through his body, tangling and untangling every inch of him. "I was just trying to please you."

She lifted her chin, a defiant little thing. The chin and her. He expected her to rip her arm from his hold, but she did not, and she wore no spencer or shawl to cover the long, slender length of her arm, the elegant crook at its bend. But he wore gloves. So even though he wondered, oddly, what texture and temperature her skin would yield beneath his fingertips—velvety or silken, warm or cool—he did not know. Damn those gloves.

What an odd thing to think, to feel.

Would be odder still to rip them off right now, toss them to the ground, wrap his fingers round that soft-looking arm once more.

"If you wish to know how to please a woman," she said, lifting that pointy little chin impossibly higher, "you should ask her."

He hitched the corner of his mouth up before speaking, hoping he might set her at ease. But any movement of his mouth seemed to push her closer to falling off an edge. She blinked and turned from him, and before she could bolt, he folded her arm with his own and pulled her to his side, set them both strolling together down the path.

"You set my mind at ease, Lady Prudence. Had I known you admired any part of me, I would not have changed all of it. Seems I don't have to try so hard to win you."

She huffed. "Why do you even want to win me?"

Answering that would take some delicacy. He had to walk a tightrope between appeasing her and not making her fall in love. At the end of all this, he couldn't be the reason her heart lay in pieces.

He took a deep breath, remembered, for some odd reason, the giant family portrait in the duke's study. "Because I think we could be friends."

"What makes you think that?"

In the portrait, she'd hovered on the edge. All the other women crowded to one side, the duke and his heir standing tall above them. And Prudence balancing the lot of them to one side, sitting with her legs curled beneath her, tall and straight and not looking directly at the artist. Almost a bloody afterthought.

"We've much in common," he said.

"Such as?" Her arm in his embrace stiffened.

"We both feel like outsiders sometimes." A risk, that. He couldn't assume her position in the painting meant anything other than the artist's sense of the ideal composition of so many people. But he'd watched her skirt the edges of ballrooms, sneak off into the shadows. He'd seen her hovering silent but observant around the edges of her gathered flock of sisters. They turned to her occasionally, and she did not demand more attention than that. But that did not mean she was idle. Always moving, Lady Prudence, always bright-eyed and busy. "Maybe we both feel like we have something to prove."

Her steps hitched, and she swallowed hard.

"You don't have to prove anything to me, Lady Prudence," he said.

She stopped and tugged on his arm to stop him, too. When he looked down, she reached up, a flash of courage in her eyes. They seemed dark green in the dappled shadows cast by the branches above them. But all sense of color and surrounding snapped out of existence when her fingertips brushed against his jaw. On purpose. No gloves. Up the hard edge to his ear, then down to his chin. Her fingers lingered there, and the edge of her fingernails brushed against the light dusting of newly grown hair there.

"Nor do you have anything to prove to me, Mr. Bailey." Her gaze dropped to his cravat. She patted it, then she unfolded from his light hold, dragging her arm away from his, and set down the path away from him.

And bloody hell, if she'd been a losing general, he'd have followed her into a battle that surely meant death. He trotted after her, and when his brain caught up to the fact, he didn't really care.

"Where did you learn to tie a cravat?" he asked when he caught up with her. Because he could not say, you're the only human in existence to think me better off in beard and ink stains, and that right there makes me feel more different from any haircut ever can.

Hell. He needed some distance from her. He didn't want distance from her.

What the hell was wrong with him?

She tilted her face to the sky with the purest little grin. "My sisters and I used to put on little plays, home theatricals, and after Samuel grew too old, he refused to participate. Well, that left us without a man, you see. And we had to have princes and gentlemen and such. So, I asked my papa to teach me how to tie a cravat."

"He sent you to his valet?"

She shook her head. "He learned from his valet and then he taught me. I was in charge of tying the cravat of any sister who needed it."

He wanted her to tie his cravats. Every one of them.

Hell. Another inexplicable, rogue thought. Was he ill? The air at Norton Hall was clearly unhealthy for him, driving him mad. He needed the smog of London to think clearly.

He clasped his hands together behind his back so he did not reach for her, and he asked another question, so he did not give his other thoughts to the air, to her. "What parts did you play? In the theatricals?"

"None. I organized the costumes and scripts and helped my sisters learn the lines. I was in charge of staging, too, and inviting the audience to attend."

"Ah. You organized everything from behind the scenes."

"Yes." Pride in her voice, wistfulness, too.

"Did you ever wish to act? To play a starring role? To have someone else tie your cravat?"

A hesitation clear as the sun above. But then she answered. Quietly. "No. Of course not."

He didn't believe it for one bloody second. He wanted to push, to find the truth. But—hell—he had other truths to discover. And while she was opening up to him so pliantly…

"You prefer operating behind the scenes," he said.

"Yes."

"Just as you do with Lady Norton."

She froze. "With Lady Norton? What do you mean?"

Ah, Prevaricating Prudence. What a horrid little liar she was. She was on her guard now, though. He could push no further. "Nothing. I mean nothing. Just that you seem rather set on ensuring her little house party here is something of a success."

"Oh. Yes." Relief flooded her lungs with air. "It is my fault she's in this position, after all."

He snorted. "It's not. You didn't compromise her. She did that. So did Norton."

"I was the one who suggested we wear the same costume. I thought up wearing the black veil to hide my hair. So we'd look even more alike. And I'm the one Norton was looking for in the gardens."

"You're too smart to believe such drivel." She gasped, affronted. Good. He wagged a finger at her, then sauntered farther away from her down the path, throwing his voice over his shoulder for her to catch. "You didn't yank Lady Norton's bodice down. And you did not let Lord Norton yank down that bodice. He could have stopped, and she could have stopped him. Looked to me like she'd been enjoying herself. Before her dear mama arrived." He whirled to face her, wagged his finger again. "Not your fault."

Her gaze drifted away from him, and she lifted a hand to her mouth, bit her fingernail as her eyes closed. She scowled, as if trying to remember that night. "Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I should not carry such guilt." Her eyes popped open. "But it does not mean I do not wish my friend to be happy. I will do what I can to make that so."

"And who will make you happy, Lady Prudence?" He stepped closer—two, three steps until the breath they exhaled filled the same warm space.

She shivered, wrapped her arms around herself, her shoulders caving in as she met his gaze with eyes like a wary animal's. "Why are you here?"

"For you."

She shook her head. "But why do you want me?" Her eyes narrowed, and her thin shoulders became blades, rigid and sharp.

He didn't want her. He didn't. But somehow, he had an answer to that question anyway. Not the truth he'd known up until this very second, but another truth all the same. "Because you see me. And I see you. And that's rare."

She took several slow steps backward, away from him, her hand lowering to clench at her skirts. Long, pale fingers, slim and lithe, outlined by a brown stain dried upon her pretty green skirts. The outer edges of the stain were darker, and her hand seemed haloed. What had happened? When had she spilled? Had the coffee or tea or whatever she'd spilled seeped through her skirts, her shift, and burned her?

He scowled.

She backed away another step. "You should leave, Mr. Bailey. I do not wish to be seen."

He whipped his gaze up to hers. "I won't leave. In fact, I look forward to joining the little tête-à-tête with you and your friends. I happen to like knitting. And shooting. I'll make sure not to watch with too much masculine interest. So I don't startle your friend."

And her gaze floated to his lips.

And his trousers tightened. How the hell could any fellow keep arousal a secret in clothes so tight? But she wasn't looking south of his lips, so she wouldn't notice. He wet his lips, and her breath hitched, so he prowled closer to his prey, lifted one hand to brush a wispy bit of hair behind her ear. She shivered.

And he fought a predatory impulse to nip at her earlobe. "Though if you prefer, we can go off together, find a private corner. I have a feeling you like one thing about my lack of a beard."

"Oh? What is that?" Each word wavered.

"You can see my lips now. Would you like to kiss them?"

She inhaled so deeply her small breasts strained against the low bodice that now barely contained them. And his cock strained against the blasted tight trousers. He tilted her chin up, rubbed his thumb over her lower lip. Again. And damn the gloves. Again.

"What'll it be, Lady P? A jolly gathering with just your friends. And me. Or a private corner? Just me"—he leaned closer—"and you, and…" Their lips almost touched now, and when her tongue darted out at the corner of mouth, he almost broke down, almost crashed through the small distance between them to take her right there in the garden, with a dozen windows at least looking down upon them. "Kissing."

His hand still at her chin, he felt her throat bob up and down. "I… I… yes. Yes. A corner. That."

He smirked, stepped away from her, almost lunged back to grab her when her legs went a bit wobbly.

Turning toward the house, he said, "Good. See you soon, Lady P."

No answer from her. He didn't need one. She would comply. No question. She didn't want him near her friends for some reason. Wanted him far, far away, in fact, and would do whatever necessary to make that happen.

Including kissing Ben.

But there would be no kissing. Private corners were good for more than furtive touches. They also proved useful for whispered confidences. And Lady Prudence had shown she could open up to him today. He could earn her trust. And if he earned her trust, he could earn her secrets, too.

No kissing. He could manage that.

His cock disagreed.

Didn't matter what his cock wanted, though, in the end, Lady Prudence wouldn't kiss him. A prim woman like that? Even though she did seem to admire his lips… Never.