The Duke's Tattoo: A Regency Romance of Love and Revenge, Though Not in That Order (17 page)

“I don’t take opiates voluntarily.”

“It’s tea, Your Grace, without poppy syrup. Just chamomile and gentian. Very soothing.”

Without turning his head, he asked, “Do you recall your dreams, Miss Haversham?”

“Sometimes.”

“What do you dream?” He asked in a low murmur, “Where do you go when you drift off to sleep?”

She settled back, relieved that he would stay a while longer despite her churlishness.

“They rarely make sense,” she began to explain. “I dreamt recently of finding a bird with a chipmunk’s tail. It tried to fly away but couldn’t…”

She rattled on about her dream. All the while her body yearned for him. Every day, she longed for him. Now, having him within arm’s reach was infinitely worse. As desperately as she wanted to feel the strength of his neatly bundled muscles, she didn’t dare touch him. She wouldn’t survive the mortification if, like his brother, he accused her of throwing herself at him. She kept her voice carefully modulated and described the odd creature about which she dreamt. When she exhausted the subject, she fell quiet.

He lay at her feet without saying a word, waiting for her to continue.

Rather than drone on about a pointless dream, she screwed up her courage and whispered, “I know you’re sorry you came here tonight but you needn’t leave right away. That is, if you don’t wish to. If you want to rest here, you may. You’ll be a gentleman, I know. Truthfully, you might have more to fear from me than I from you.” She added with a soft chuckle, “But if I promise to behave myself, will you stay? Will you tuck me in?”

No answer.

“I have shocked you. Tucked or not, I will behave, you have my word on it.”

His breath huffed out slowly.

“Your Grace?” She sat up and looked closer at the prone man. He slept!

For all his talk of having trouble sleeping, he certainly had no difficulty dozing off in her company, she thought glumly. She’d bored him unconscious a third time. Ah well, one must make the best of a sad situation, she reminded herself. Might as well look at him to her heart’s content. He’d never know. She clambered to her knees and leaned close to study his face.

There he lay: her maddening, over-stimulating source of all earthly temptation. The man’s lips turned up slightly at the corners, making his face in repose boyish and vulnerable. His hair fell away from his brow in waves with a slight widow’s peak endearingly off center. Even his ears, neat as a nautilus shells, pleased her. He lay sprawled on his back wearing only a linen shirt. His right arm rested on his stomach, his left hand lay on his sternum over his heart. All he needed was a suit of chain mail, an unsheathed sword resting under his hands and a little dog at his feet and he would be the picture of medieval nobility enshrined in a stone sepulcher. Her hand hovered just above his chest, warmed by his heat. He was anything but cold as stone.

He twitched and shook then relaxed with a sigh. Or was it a moan?

• • •

Miss Haversham’s soft voice lulled Ainsworth to sleep and into the midst of the nightmarish fight once again:

It had rained all the night before and the dank air was saturated with smells of battle. He breathed sulfurous clouds of smoke that carried the stench of burnt flesh and brimstone. He felt the gut-pounding concussion of cannon fire, heard the screams of fallen horses and men, the crack and whistle of shots fired. All of it left a man blinded, deafened, sickened and disoriented.

He scanned the battlefield shrouded in choking smoke. He rode through the chaos until his horse reared, fatally struck by a bullet. As it fell, he felt a punch in his side. Another bullet found its mark. He had seconds, less perhaps, to fall free. He must not stay in the saddle to be pinned down, a leg crushed, helplessly awaiting the coup de grâce from a Frenchman’s dirty bayonet.

Instinct saved him. Despite the searing pain in his side, he kicked out of the stirrups and tumbled clear. As he staggered to his feet, he felt woozy warmth spread over his side and flank. Punched again by a bullet through the meat of his thigh, he pitched over. His leg throbbed but he could move it, thank heaven. The bone was sound. He struggled to regain his footing, so difficult in the splay of bodies beneath him.

A lance pierced his back and forced him face down, to rejoin the fallen in red and blue littering the ground. He smelled the most intimate realities of war: human sweat in unwashed, wet wool uniforms and urine. It was the odor no soldier mentions but instantly recognizes as the final indignity of violent death.

The copper tang of his own blood in his mouth and nostrils nauseated him. He labored to breathe and live through it.

Dimly he heard, or rather felt, the pounding horses’ hooves as cavalry charged. Theirs or ours, he didn’t know. They came galloping over ground strewn with bodies. Even horses at full gallop try to avoid stepping on the fallen but amid all the butchery, the ground was carpeted with the dead and dying. He felt a horse’s hoof, its crushing weight bearing down on him. Just before blessed oblivion, its iron shoe flayed away meat and skin as if to sever his shoulder joint.

Ainsworth awoke with a violent twitch to find Miss Haversham temptingly close, watching him, with a hand poised over his heart. She snatched it back without touching him.

“Oh! I thought you…” she stuttered and scrambled away from him.

Perhaps he’d cried out and she thought to soothe him. He would’ve remained longer in his nightmare if it meant she’d lay her hands on him. He hungered for her touch. He would gladly relive all of Waterloo so long as she held him throughout the ordeal.

“I apologize for the intrusion, Miss Haversham.” Ainsworth waited for her to excuse him but she said nothing. She watched him with her luminous, changeable eyes. Her silence confirmed his worst fear. Much as he wanted to be with her, she preferred him gone. Though patient and caring, she would rather have a night’s peace. He should’ve known.

Why must I want what I cannot have? A simpler life. The love of a good woman. A night’s sound sleep.

“If you’ll permit me, I’ll rest a moment more then be on my way.”

Miss Haversham bit her lip and looked away, “As you wish.”

Ainsworth accepted the pillow she offered him and tucked it behind his head. For her sake, he shifted to the very foot of the bed to put the greatest distance between them.

“Would you like some tea?”

“No, Miss Haversham. Thank you.”

“Are you comfortable, Your Grace?”

“Yes,” he lied. “Just tired. I shouldn’t have come.” In the dark, his voice faded to little more than a murmur. There was so much he shouldn’t have done, he realized too late. He shouldn’t have lost his heart, for one.

Ainsworth intended to rouse himself a short while later but when he finally opened his eyes, the night sky glowed cobalt blue in the east-facing window. Miss Haversham lay under the counterpane and he lay on top of it spooning her. His head rested beside hers on the pillow. Her hair tickled his nose. Her back pressed warm against his chest. His arm draped over her ribs with his hand palming her soft breast through the covers. His erection lay snug against her muffled bottom. All in all, it was a splendid way to greet the dawn.

The next instant, Miss Haversham jerked awake and wriggled away with elbows flailing, crying, “Drat! Not again. Wake up. You must wake up!”

Grinning but still groggy, he croaked, “Sleep well, nymph?”

“I slept too well,” she replied with a scowl. “Why are you smiling?”

“That’s progress, isn’t it?”

“Lunatic,” she snarled and shoved him for good measure.

H
is vow of avoidance in shambles, the duke entered the Trim Street Apothecary the following day without an appointment. Ainsworth hadn’t the slimmest pretext for his call; his shoulder felt remarkably well. He simply wanted Miss Haversham’s cool, bare hands on his body. Anywhere. Even if she detested the sight of him, he would suffer whatever punishing cure she cared to mete out – even the dreaded pump syringe — so long as her hands touched him.

This, he concluded, had to be a form of madness.

Murphy escorted him to the treatment room and left him to fidget on his own. His heart raced and his palms sweated. He ran a hand roughly through his hair, his left hand, and quickly let it drop limp at his side as Miss Haversham entered at a brisk pace.

“To what do I owe this honor, Your Grace?”

“Wanted to see you.” Ainsworth shrugged out of his coat with no trouble and hoisted himself onto the padded table. Too late, he realized his mistake and added, “For treatment.”

“As far as I can determine you’ve mended quite well.”

“I’m merely stoical, Miss Haversham. We mustn’t stop now. I’m too pleased with my progress.”

The word ‘progress’ sparked fire in her incandescent eyes and she shook a finger at him. “I-I know what you’re about. Indeed, I do! I’m some sort of remedy to you!”

He unbuttoned his waistcoat, untied his cravat and chuckled, “I believe the term is ‘antidote,’ nymph, and you are far too attractive to be an antidote if that’s what you’re flying into a freak about. On or off?”

“On!” She snapped because he had begun to tug his linen shirt from the waistband of his buff doeskins.

“I mean remedy…a sleep potion, a nostrum, which is far worse than being an antidote,” she retorted, her glance flitted over the solid topography of his chest and lingered at the hint of dark hair in the shirt’s open gap at his neck. In a whisper, she hissed, “A remedy. Because I can be counted on to put you to sleep.”

The duke threw back his head and laughed out loud. “Really, Miss Haversham,” he teased, “you mustn’t fish for compliments.”

“I’m not fishing for anything,” she snapped, feeling only marginally more in control of herself. “I simply make objective observations.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, “Go on.”

In a low, emphatic voice, she ticked off points on her fingers: “Fact, a certain man crawls through my window and climbs on my bed. Repeatedly. Fact, this man generally wraps me up like three-day-old fish to avoid contact. And fact, whether he has mummified me or not, he’s snoring in my ear in no time. I may be a hopeless spinster but I’m not entirely ignorant of what normally happens between a man and a woman in bed.”

An eyebrow arched and he teased, “Not entirely?”

“Mostly but not entirely, Your Grace,” she said with badly ruffled dignity. “If it’s sleep you need, I shall mix you a draught.”

Could it be?

Basso profundo rumblings rose from deep in his chest. He leaned back and let loose delighted guffaws. Could Prudence Haversham be as frustrated by their chaste nights as he? The possibility made him chortle with greater glee. He peeped at her and laughed harder as she stared ahead, lips pursed, arms tightly crossed, a pattern card of offended femininity.

“I apologize, truly,” he wheezed out an octave higher than his normal voice. She wasn’t mollified. It took some time, and there were several unbecoming relapses, but the duke finally composed himself.

His Grace leaned toward her and possessed himself of her hand. Separating her index finger from the rest, he pinched it between thumb and forefinger. “Fact, not all of the man in question slept,” he began. “Some of him remained uncomfortably alert.” He took her middle finger next. “Fact, he mummified you for your sake not his, you goose.” Wiggling her ring finger by its tip, he concluded, “And fact, the man continues to behave infamously and has admitted he cannot help himself, which any half wit would realize indicates more interest rather than less. You, Miss Haversham, are anything but boring to me.” He retained her hand despite her efforts to snatch it from his grasp and brought it to his lips.

She stopped pulling away but declared, “Nonetheless, I will not concede the point.”

“No. Of course not,” he kissed her knuckles. “Honestly, I’ve forgotten the point, Miss Haversham, so you’re welcome to carry it.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “This may amuse you, traipsing around like a sneak thief. If you’re discovered, everyone will wink and smile and say, ‘That rakish duke is at it again. Time for an illustration to commemorate his virility!’ Whereas I shall be branded forever for immorality I’m not guilty of.”

“Branded but innocent, I do sympathize.” He kissed the tip of each finger while he waited for her flustered reaction. She blushed to a deep rose shade. Satisfied, he stroked her hand open and placed a soft kiss in the center of her palm to earn a little gasp.

“That is to say…well…Yes, I see your point,” she stuttered delightfully. He so enjoyed having this disturbing effect on her. Through gritted teeth she added, “I-I-I have apologized to you for the horrid tattoo.”

“You have,” he replied amiably. He kissed her palm again.

“Do you accept my apology?”

“I do.” He kissed her bare inner wrist to make her breath catch, which it did.

“And yet you mention it again,” she choked.

“I still enjoy causing you consternation. It’s too great a temptation not to indulge.” He drew her between his open legs, until the soft, loose tendrils of her hair tickled his nose and her body brushed his thighs.

“Stop bothering me,” she said looking away.

“If you don’t wish to see me again,” he began, enjoying her shyness almost as much as her blushes, “you could lock your window.”

“You would just turn up here instead,” she grumbled. “Besides, I like fresh air at night.”

He tilted her face up and whispered, “You like me, Miss Haversham, and I like you.”

He leaned closer and she closed her eyes, pursed her lips and waited for his kiss. He hesitated. She waited. He caressed her cheek with his fingertips and inhaled the delicate scent of his thorny rose. And still she waited. Finally, he kissed the tip of her nose and flopped belly down on the table with a pained grunt.