Your Grace!” she protested, gliding over the nighttime accomplishments. Those were best left without inquiry, at least while she wore only a coverlet and a nightshift and most especially while she was feeling so giddy in his presence. “Perhaps you should be the one to ask for a sleeping draught.”
“I think not.” He shrugged carelessly, a simple gesture filled with potent charm. “I’ve been like that as long as I can recall, at least since I was boy at school. Besides, if I’d been snoring away yesterday morning, the way you’d have me do, then I wouldn’t have gone out with Jetty and Gus, and I—rather, they—wouldn’t have found you.”
She ducked her chin contritely. “I should thank you again, Your Grace, if you would but allow me.”
“Which I won’t, because it’s not necessary.” He tapped his palm on the balustrade and smiled again, the kind of smile meant to end their conversation as definitely as a period did a sentence. “Now whether either one of us plans to sleep or not, Miss Corinthia, perhaps it would be best if we each returned to our separate—”
“No—that is, not yet!” She gulped, wondering desperately what had become of all her well-practiced poise in such positions. She was supposed to be good at this. “That is, the evening is so fair, and I am not tired, and you aren’t, either, and…and—”
“And so we should remain here together awhile longer?”
She nodded vigorously, relieved he’d understood despite her dithering.
“Even if this must seem a, ah, compromising situation for a young lady like yourself?” he asked, more bemused than scandalized. “Swaddled only in bedclothes, your feet quite bare, alone in the moonlight with a wicked old rogue like me?”
She made a little puff of indignation. “I never said you were wicked, or old, or a rogue!”
He laughed, and roguishly, too. “I’ll admit I’m gratified by that, even though I shouldn’t be. You know there are others who would judge me with far less sympathy in these circumstances.”
“I wouldn’t. Besides, who else will ever know?” she asked, sweeping one arm, draped with a coverlet wing, to encompass the rest of the sleeping household. “Who is there to see us, Your Grace, or even to miss us when—oh, please, you are not married, are you?”
“I?” he asked, a question to her question and no answer at all. “Why?”
“Because I should like to know, Your Grace,” she explained. “Not because I have any designs upon you, but because while being your guest is one thing, being the guest of you and your lady wife would be quite another altogether.”
“Ah,” he said. “So you would expect her to have come inspected you by now?”
“Well, yes.” Jenny smiled wryly. “I don’t believe any wife worth her salt would lump me into the same category as a stray puppy.”
“And here we had a straw-filled basket and a dish of warm milk all ready for you in the stable, right beside Jetty and Gus!” He chuckled, but the smile didn’t last and even in the moonlight she could see the fresh wariness in his expression. “But tell me. Why does my being wed seem so damned inevitable?”
“Because of who you are, Your Grace,” she answered promptly, with another little curtsy for emphasis. “You’re not like common folk, free to marry or not as we please. Dukes must marry their duchesses, to produce the next generation of heirs to your lands and titles and goodness knows what else.”
“But I’m not married,” he protested. “Never have, nor likely ever shall.”
“No, Your Grace?” she asked curiously. “How…how remarkable.”
Of course Rob would judge it not only remarkable but remarkably lucky. It was always easier to win the confidence and trust of a lonely bachelor, to gull him without a wife to ask suspicious questions about where his money was going. That was the situation here, as Rob would see at once, and one he and Jenny had worked often before.
And yet for Jenny it wasn’t the same at all. How could she lump this duke into the same hamper with the other fusty old bachelors with bad teeth and ill-fitting wigs that she and Rob had known?
“‘Remarkable’?” he repeated, still guarded. “You consider it so remarkable that I have never inflicted myself upon some poor woman in matrimony?”
“No,” she said. “Rather I think it remarkable that no woman has inflicted herself upon you. Surely you must have a trail of broken hearts to your credit.”
“I can assure you there’s not a one,” he said, his wariness fading, as if she hadn’t said what he’d been dreading after all. “You flatter me to believe otherwise, miss, but if you knew me better, you’d realize that I’m hardly the great prize you seem to think.”
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
