Miranda Jarrett - The Golden Lord

She frowned. Of course he was a prize. He was a duke.

“But let us speak of you, instead,” he continued. “Are you some fortunate man’s wife?”

“Oh, no,” she answered promptly, her thoughts still on the question of prizes. “I’m most certainly not married.”

He paused, letting her answer hang between them for so long that now she was the uneasy one.

“You’ve remembered that much more, then? Enough to make you sure there’s no worried husband scouring the countryside for you?”

“There’s not—there can’t be—because I would know,” she said softly, and as she did, she realized how much she meant it, too. “If I loved a man enough to marry him, nothing would make me forget him.”

“That’s a rashly romantic thing to say,” he scoffed. “If you’ve been struck hard enough to have forgotten the name you’ve had since birth, how could you possibly remember your lover’s, instead? Here, give me your left hand.”

Before she could refuse, he’d claimed it for himself, holding her fingers up into the moonlight.

“There now, that’s more logical proof,” he said. “No wedding ring.”

She pulled her hand free, rubbing the empty finger where he’d touched it. “My ring could have been stolen by Gypsies.”

“Then thieves would have taken the gold hoops from your ears, as well,” he countered. “Besides, a ring worn day and night, such as a wedding ring, would have left its mark upon your finger.”

Gemini, he was quick at this sort of banter, quick as Rob! “All that proves is what I said before. That even if my head cannot say for certain if I’ve a husband or not, my heart—my soul!—would never forget.”

He wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled something foul. “Rubbish,” he declared. “Only poets and over-wrought young girls believe that.”

“Then you do not believe in love, Your Grace?”

He sighed with world-weary resignation. “I believe that men and women can find a thousand ways to amuse one another in bed and out of it, and call it love,” he said. “And I believe in the useful partnership of marriage for producing children, if it brings reasonable happiness and contentment to both the husband and the wife. But as for Cupid’s darts and boundless souls and all the rest of the established claptrap—no, I do not believe in that, for it doesn’t exist.”

She frowned, perplexed. The duke was claiming to be exactly the opposite of her brother, who could fall in love with a donkey if she fluttered her lashes at him. “Then you have never been in love for yourself, Your Grace, have you?”

“I have generally tried to govern myself by reason,” he said with a solemnity at odds with his disheveled hair and unbuttoned shirt. “I’ve always tried to avoid being ruled by my passions.”

“If you can say that, Your Grace, then you simply haven’t met the special one who’ll convince you otherwise,” she suggested. “I know that must be the case with me. I have yet to find any gentleman that pleases me enough to love. But I shall. I know it.”

“Ah, and so we are back where we began,” he said softly, his half smile now unexpectedly bittersweet. “Here we are, with your heart able to recollect more than your head.”

“I suppose we are, Your Grace.” She drew the coverlet more tightly around her shoulders. Ordinarily she would have laughed and tipped her head to one side in the well-practiced way that gentlemen found so charming.

Yet this time didn’t feel ordinary. Perhaps it was only the bruise on her forehead, or perhaps it was the moonlight addling her wits and making her see things in his expression that weren’t truly there. This time, just this once, she wished she didn’t have to do what she’d practiced. She longed to be able to explain what he said, to ask if that bittersweet half smile meant that he, too, still longed to find the love that didn’t seem to exist.

But he was the grand Duke of Strachen, while she was no more than an invented girl named Corinthia, not even real. Her sole purpose in being here in this house—and only from purest luck at that—was to be pleasing enough that the duke would think kindly toward whatever scheme Rob would decide to invent. Tonight’s moonlight would never matter as much as the money—a loan, an investment, or a gift—that Rob would coax from the duke’s pocket, especially not after she and Rob vanished one morning, off into the next set of false names and identities.

No, better to smile than to dream, and far, far better to keep her wits sharp and keen than to go longing for something that couldn’t be changed. The moment she began thinking with her heart, instead of her head was the same moment the luck would end, and she and Rob would find themselves taken up and tried as common criminals, with transportation or the gallows as their final reward.

That is, if Rob ever did return to find her….

“You are cold,” the duke was saying with concern. “You’re shivering.”

“No, Your Grace,” she said quickly, forcing her smile to be winning even as she began inching back toward her window. If she’d shivered, it had been from the reminder of the gallows and her fears for Rob, not a common chill, and certainly not from anything that he could remedy. “Only…only more weary than I first thought.”

He took a step toward her, his hand gallantly outstretched to offer support. “Then let me guide you back to your rooms. There are, you know, easier paths than hopping through the window.”

“The window does well enough for me, Your Grace.” Tonight she was the one running away, not him, but it was the wisest course—the only course, really—before she blundered and said or did something that couldn’t be undone. Far better to retreat now, until morning, when she could meet him with a clear head in the bright, unmagical light of day.

Lightly she pulled herself up onto the windowsill before he could stop her, the coverlet billowing around her bare legs.

“You were right before, Your Grace,” she said breathlessly. “We should say good evening now and part. Good night, and pleasant dreams. Good night!”

B rant rode slowly through the misty rain, his collar turned up and his hat pulled down against the damp, the two dogs loping along ahead. This was the other side of June mornings, with the green grass blurring in a hazy mesh with the gray sky, soft and wet and peculiarly English, and usually as irresistible to Brant as a bright, cheerful dawn. While his brothers might have sailed as far as they could across the world and away from these fields, to him there could never be a more lovely place in every season and weather than the rolling lands around Claremont Hall.

At least that was how he’d felt on every other morning before this one. Now the clouds could part before the most beautiful rainbow in all creation, and he’d scarce notice in his present mood. The girl had been under his roof for only the briefest time, yet already his entire household was in a blasted turmoil of distraction.

A branch of wet leaves slapped across his cheek and he muttered an irritated, halfhearted oath at his own inattention. And that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? If he were honest—which, as a gentleman and a peer, he generally aspired to be—his household was functioning perfectly well, the way they always did. He was the only one who wasn’t. The girl smiled, she wept, she sighed, she sunk languidly back against her pillows with her hair in childish pigtails, she flashed him a glimpse of a charmingly plump calf gleaming silver-pale in the moonlight, and now he was a hopeless, useless muddle of inattention.

Inattention to everything reasonable and productive, that is. To her, this lost country waif without a memory, he was attending all too well.