Page 37 of A Duke to Undo her
“It’s also possible that ill-feeling can be the result of mistake or misunderstanding, Josephine. A week ago, you didn’t have a good word to say about the Duke of Ashbourne, remember, and now he appears to be your champion and a most honorable and estimable gentleman.”
Josephine couldn’t help laughing aloud at this rather grandiose description. A most honorable and estimable gentleman? When she thought of Cassius Emerton, these were not the words that came to her mind, although she could not exactly say that he had been dishonorable. He had certainly done nothing that she had not welcomed, nor that had harmed her.
Honorable or anything else, there were few descriptive words at all in that part of Josephine’s mind now dedicated to the Duke of Ashbourne. It contained more thoughts of his deep blue eyes under locks of disordered dark hair, the damp flush of his skin when he was excited, and the way he always seemed to know how to touch her.
If Cassius Emerton had taken her for this walk in the moonlight, they would have been in one another’s arms by now in some hidden corner, her dress loosened for his hands and mouth and all thoughts of decency abandoned to the winds…
“Why are you laughing, Josephine?” Rose asked in puzzlement at Josephine’s reaction, not at all able to understand her friend in recent days. “Do you like the duke or not? I am very confused.”
“I don’t believe I could like any honorable and estimable gentleman more than I like the Duke of Ashbourne,” Josephine said, and then held her peace.
Chapter Seventeen
Josephine tossed and turned in her bed that night, her body and mind both far from sleep, one aching and the other spinning.
She had learned in recent weeks that the real world could be stranger, deeper and more exciting than any storybook fantasy, but it was also more disturbing because it never stopped so neatly. There were no clear chapters, obvious answers or large print denoting “The End.”
There was no way to switch off or resolve her increasing perplexity over her relationships with both Benedict Emerton and Cassius Emerton. Relationships between men and women were turning out to be far more confusing than Josephine had ever imagined.
If she were Lady Jane Tremayne or some other heroine in a romantic novel, she would fall in love with one perfect man and marry him at the end of the story.
In Josephine’s life, all her faith in such certainties had been shaken up. The man she had determined to love, she liked but found easy to forget. The man she thought she hated, she now desired with a physical intensity that defied all logic. Marriage, the central goal of her life, and that of other young ladies, seemed almost incidental and irrelevant to current proceedings.
Deciding that she’d had enough of reality for one day, Josephine swung her legs out of bed and decided to go downstairs to the library. She doubted somehow that the Duke of Ashbourne would have any taste for the kind of books that included heroes like Sir Edmund Venner and heroines like Lady Jane Tremayne, but surely there would be novels or poetry of some sort.
Tying her dressing gown and taking up her candle, she crept out of her room and down the stairs. The whole house seemed to be asleep and the only sounds Josephine heard were the soft tread of her own feet and the creaking of old wooden bannisters, floorboards and beams.
The library lay further along the corridor where the duke’s study was situated and she closed her eyes with the shimmering memory of that particular encounter as she passed it. Josephine’s mind told her that she must never be alone with the Duke of Ashbourne again. Her body told her that nothing in the world mattered more than being in his arms.
Lighting a few more candles in the library, Josephine set about her browsing. Despite earlier fears that the library in such a house might be old and fusty, full of only worthy books and highbrow literature, there was a good stock of modern and lessserious works on one set of shelves, perhaps intended for guests to peruse.
The works of Lord Byron sat alongside the novels of Jane Austen and a novel calledFrankensteinby Mary Shelley, a few pages of which made Josephine shiver and decide it was best read in daylight.CandideandLes Liaisons Dangereusesoffered diversion for readers of French, whileMoll FlandersandFanny Hill, tucked away slightly behind other books on a higher shelf, contained the most astonishingly indecent illustrations.
Gasping at one of these pictures that actually showed a man’s head between a woman’s thighs, Josephine knockedThe History of Tom Jonesto the floor. The noise sounded loudly to her but she doubted it would have been heard by anyone beyond the ground floor.
She was surprised therefore, and dropped another book, when the door to the library swung open a few minutes later and the Duke of Ashbourne marched in, looking rather fierce and holding a walking stick.
“Who is there?” he demanded.
A little sheepishly, Josephine stepped out from the shelves she had been browsing and looked at him.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she explained. “I came downstairs to find a book. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
It was then that she realized the duke was still fully dressed, or at least clad in his shirt sleeves, trousers and shoes. He had likely had been downstairs all the time, maybe even in the study as she passed.
“Good God, Lady Josephine, I thought you might be a burglar!” he exclaimed and laid down the stick, his eyes looking her up and down in her nightclothes. “How do you always manage to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
Something in these words cut Josephine deeply, touching as they did upon her deepest insecurities that she could never quite do anything as other young ladies did. It hurt her all the more now because this message came from this particular man.
“Why are you even here?” she threw back at him rather irrationally. “Why don’t you go away and leave me alone?”
“I live here,” he pointed out with a frown.
Knowing that she had spoken like a foolish child, tears came to Josephine’s eyes and she rushed towards the door, only wanting to escape back upstairs.
But Cassius Emerton was too quick for her, stepping in front of her and taking her hand in his.
“What is wrong, Josephine?” he asked. “I seem to have said something to upset you.”
