Page 22 of Never a Duke
He turned the horses onto Rosalind’s lane just as the breeze picked up. “I love them with all my heart, but then, who wouldn’t? I have no sisters. My mother was gone much too young, and while I esteem Her Grace enormously, she has never climbed into my lap and demanded that I read her a story. The little girls, by contrast, besiege me.”
That image, of Ned Wentworth patiently enduring the demands of small, determined females, did odd things to Rosalind’s heart.
“Do you mind that I kissed you?”
He guided the horses around to the mews and drew them to a halt under the porte cochere. “Do Imindthat you kissed me?”
“Young ladies are doubtless throwing themselves at you all the time, but you were so splendid with Lindy and Miss Tait, so self-possessed and at ease.”
He wrapped the reins and leaped to the walkway. “While you were notably quiet. I exhort you to deliver a thorough scold to Windy Lindy when you have him behind a closed door. He was an utter dolt, and deserves to be charged a fortune for the repair of his watch.” Mr. Wentworth came around and offered his hand to Rosalind. “Down you go, my lady.”
Anxious to get rid of me?Rosalind had enough pride—barely—not to ask that question, and yet, when she alighted from the curricle, she made no move to retrieve her hand from Mr. Wentworth’s grasp.
“If I had asked you to indulge me in another tour of the park,” he said, “would you have obliged?”
“Yes.” She would circle the park with him until the first snowfall, if he asked it of her. “Why didn’t you ask me?”
He let go of her hand. “I am expected at the bank, my lady. Why did you kiss me?”
“Amanda Tait knows that I used to be afflicted with a stammer.”
“Years ago. Years ago, I was an illiterate pickpocket. Even His Grace had difficulty pounding letters into my hard little head.”
“Theduketaught you to read?”
“Tried to. We both needed a diversion at the time. I had no use for the letters, but His Grace fascinated me. Tell me about the kiss, Rosalind, because that fascinates me too.”
The porte cochere was a grand affair, arching over the whole of the vehicle and ensuring the conversation had no witnesses. Rosalind was unlikely to have this much privacy with Mr. Wentworth in the foreseeable future, and the topic was best handled discreetly.
“To explain the kiss,” she said, “I need to explain about Miss Tait. When Mama died, I developed a stammer, as I’ve told you. Papa sent me off to school, where a proper elocution teacher was to relieve me of that embarrassment.”
Mr. Wentworth ambled up to the horses’ heads, stuffed his gloves into his pocket, and loosened the near-side check rein. “How long had your mother been gone when you were banished to the land of elocution and deportment?”
Banished. Rosalind hadn’t used that word, but that’s exactly what it had been. “We hadn’t started receiving condolence calls yet, so maybe two months. In any case, Amanda was the queen bee of the establishment, though she was two years my junior. I was an earl’s daughter and thus a threat.”
“Until you opened your mouth,” he said, loosening the check rein for the second horse. “Then she had a weapon and could keep you in your place, not that you had any designs on her petty fiefdom.”
The horses craned their necks and tossed their heads, clearly having needed a respite from the strictures imposed by their harness.
“Miss Tait made a game of me. Imitated my stutter and goaded the other girls into doing likewise. I see her now, and I can hear them all chanting my name, but stumbling purposely on theLinladyandRinRosalind. They would swarm me like locusts, consonants buzzing, until I learned to retreat into silence. The headmistress did not notice the teasing, but she noticed that I’d stopped saying much of anything and sent me back to my father.”
Mr. Wentworth stroked the neck of the nearest horse. “And now?”
“I see Amanda Tait, and the safest course for me is still silence.”
“Then I wish I had dumped your brother headfirst into the nearest horse trough, and I am glad we did not tarry in Miss Tait’s company. Is that why you kissed me, because I exchanged some small talk with her and his loathsome lordship?”
“Because you put her in her place,” Rosalind said, “because you got even with Lindy for me, because I can ask you to escort me, and because you read stories to little girls and pine over their lost affections, and because…” Rosalind fell silent, appalled that tears were threatening.
Mr. Wentworth waited, patiently stroking the horse, who had calmed beneath his touch.
“You freed me from that situation with my dignity intact, Mr. Wentworth. I value my dignity.” Though until that moment, Rosalind had never said as much. “I won’t presume on your person again, but in the moment, I simply felt…I wanted…” She cast around for some way to end an increasingly mortifying confession. “You are so very kissable.”
He took her hand again, and Rosalind was certain he was preparing to bow correctly and tool right out of her life. A polite note would arrive reporting no progress in the search for her maids, the postscript regretting an inability to escort her to any more musicales, breakfasts, or what-have-yous.
She’d find her heart glinting up at her from the bottom of the nearest birdbath.
“Once upon a time,” Mr. Wentworth said, bending nearer, “I was a naughty, merry little boy, or so witnesses claimed. All the merriment and spontaneity were starved, beaten, and bullied out of me. I should never have sparred with Miss Tait, and never havelifted Lindhurst’s bauble, but I could not resist the temptation to do a little mischief. That I yielded to my impulses does me no credit.”
