style="font-size:15px;"> Jane resisted the impulse to take a step backwards, determined that she would not reveal how much being alone here with him like this disturbed her. Even if it did. Very much so. ‘Very foolish, indeed, Your Grace.’ She nodded abruptly.
‘Are you not cold in here, Jane?’ he prompted huskily, instead of responding to her rebuke.
‘Perhaps a little,’ she acknowledged frowningly. ‘But it was not my intention to remain here for long…’ Her voice dwindled off as the Duke went down on his haunches by the fireplace and put a flame to the kindling already laid there. The yellow-orange flames that instantly flared into life illuminated his sharply etched profile.
‘There.’ He rose slowly back to his feet before turning to look at her. ‘Is that not better, Jane?’
It was certainly warmer. Cosier. More intimate. None of which was in the least ‘better’ after what had happened the last time she and the Duke had been so alone together.
‘Jane?’ he prompted huskily, those gold-coloured eyes warmly searching on her upraised face.
The warm flames now crackling in the hearth were as nothing compared to the flames leaping inside Jane as she stared up at the Duke. Her pulse was beating erratically. Her heart thumping so loudly she thought he must hear it. Her palms were slightly damp. Her breathing shallow.
She nodded abruptly. ‘Much better, Your Grace.’ Hawk watched the movement of her tiny pink tongue as it moved moistly across her lips, her throat moving convulsively as she swallowed, and the soft swell of her breasts slowly rising and falling as she breathed softly.
It had taken him several long, anxious minutes to locate Jane here in the darkness of the summerhouse, but now that he had found her he questioned the wisdom of being alone with her like this.
The summerhouse was situated in a copse of trees at the far end of the spacious gardens that surrounded Mulberry Hall, well away from the main house, and was the place that he and his siblings had disappeared to as children, when they had wanted to escape the restraining company of adults.
As he and Jane had now escaped the restraining company of other adults…
A move, he now realised, not without its own dangers.
‘Did it not excite you earlier, Jane, to have two men challenging each other to a duel over you?’ he prompted huskily.
She arched auburn brows. ‘Over me, Your Grace?’ Hawk frowned darkly. ‘Who else, Jane?’
She gave a derisive shake of her head. ‘Perhaps some other lady of your mutual acquaintance? This Countess, for example?’
Hawk’s eyes widened at the directness of her attack. Although he should perhaps have expected nothing less from a young woman who was never less than forthright.
She gave a knowing smile. ‘Ah, I note by your scowling silence that my surmise is possibly the correct one. The Countess was your mistress as well as the Earl’s?’
Hawk stiffened. ‘I do not believe this to be a suitable subject for discussion between us, Jane—’
‘Why?’ Her eyes were curiously wide. ‘Or is it that the Countess is a married lady?’
He frowned darkly. ‘She is widowed.’
Jane frowned her puzzlement. ‘The Earl has informed me he is also widowed. And you are a single gentleman.’ She shrugged. ‘I do not see where the problem lies…?’
Hawk looked at her in exasperation. ‘The problem lies, Jane, with the fact that a single young lady such as yourself does not discuss a man’s mistress—ex-mistress!—with him.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it simply is not done, Jane!’
She gave a derisive smile. ‘Perhaps in the polite company that you keep, Your Grace, for which the Earl voices such contempt.’ She nodded. ‘But, young as I was, for lack of anyone else in whom to confide my father occasionally discussed such matters with me when it involved one of his parishioners.’
‘I am not one of your father’s parishioners, Jane!’ Hawk muttered irritably.
Inwardly, he was wishing that he had never met the Countess of Morefield—let alone so briefly and, as it had transpired, so unsatisfactorily shared her bed!
He had no doubt that it was because of that brief dalliance that Whitney was behaving so provokingly this evening, in monopolising the company of both Jane and Arabella. The other man had made it obvious at the time that he had taken exception to Hawk’s interest in the Countess, which had resulted in her changing from sharing her bed with an Earl to a Duke.
‘No, you are not,’ Jane acknowledged ruefully, staring into the flames of the fire as she wondered what her father would have made of a man such as Hawk St Claire, the forceful Duke of Stourbridge.
Her father—her adopted father—had not been a man of the world, but a simple country parson. Nevertheless, in the boundaries of his parish there had existed avarice, jealousy, incest, adultery and even murder. Perhaps not, as the Duke had said, subjects for a young girl’s ears, but in the absence of a wife to share his worries Jane’s father had sometimes talked to her about such matters.
‘What manner of man was your father, Jane?’
She looked up sharply at the softly spoken query. ‘He was a good man,’ she stated defensively. ‘A good, kind and loving man.’
The Duke’s mouth twisted derisively. ‘All things I am sure you believe me not to be!’
‘Untrue, Your Grace!’ Jane gasped.
He looked grim. ‘Was it a kind man who refused to let you continue on your journey as you wished and instead brought you here, Jane? Was it a kind or loving man who only days ago took advantage of your lack of a protector?’ He shook his head self-disgustedly. ‘In the six days of our acquaintance, Jane, it seems to me I have shown you I am not any of the things you so admired in your father!’
They were two very different men, yes. But these last three days, as Jane had watched the Duke work so tirelessly about his estate, he had shown himself to be just as good a master to the people who lived on his estate as her father had been minister to his parishioners.
Besides, her feelings towards the Duke—the wild, soaring love she felt just looking into that aristocratically handsome face—bore absolutely no resemblance to the sweet, uncomplicated love she’d had for her adopted father!
She shook her head. ‘I do not think of you in that way, Your Grace.’
Hawk looked down at her searchingly. ‘Then how do you think of me, Jane…?’
That pink tongue ran once more over the softness of her parted lips. ‘I—I see you as a man. A strong, arrogant, forceful man who expects—demands—to be obeyed without question.’
Hawk smiled ruefully at her description. ‘You do not obey me, Jane.’
She gave the ghost of a smile. ‘Perhaps that is why you are here with me rather than with the Countess…?’
