Truly, this was madness. But such delicious madness.
Part of her wanted to say yes to his bizarre proposal. Wasn’t it a perfect solution? And yet she knew she should not give in to the unfamiliar aching and yearning currents rushing through her body. It could lead to disaster, and there was something she needed from him first.
“All right. If you help me find Mary and keep her safe, I will marry you,” she told him. “Not before then.”
“Very well,” he agreed, pushing up the light muslin sleeves of her dress and tracing her wrists and then forearms. “I shall, however, seek to persuade you to the altar, and my bed, at the earliest opportunity… Good God, who did this to you?”
His fingers brushed the bruises left by her uncle’s brutal grip, and she flinched. She had forgotten why she had chosen to wear long sleeves today despite the heat.
Tears sprang to her eyes, and she closed them, desperate to hold back her sobs. Would the Duke still wish to marry her—and help her find Mary—or would he be repulsed by her?
“No one should do this to a woman,” he said, with more real feeling than she had heard from him yet.
“I… It is nothing,” she stuttered, wanting them to focus on finding Mary rather than fighting her uncle. “I can look after myself.”
“I think you’ll find that a husband could look after you better,” the Duke said flatly, drawing her sleeve back down again as she tried hard to dispel the confusing desire in her blood and vulnerable tears in her eyes.
“So, how do we find Mary?” she asked, forcing herself to step back out of his arms and away from those warm hands that made her skin tingle and her inhibitions lower.
“If I send a carriage for you this evening, can you get out of your house and meet it? Our first stop should be Greyhaven Park, and then we’ll follow the road north from there and ask at coaching inns.”
Cecily thought about this for a moment and then nodded slowly. It seemed that she, too, was about to run away from home. Although in her case, she doubted that her uncle would care, and her grandmother would only miss having someone to lean on and order about at social events.
“Yes, I will meet you tonight, but if I leave my uncle’s house like this, I do not believe I will ever be able to return,” she murmured.
“Do you even want to?” the Duke questioned. “If he’s the one who did that to your arm, I do not want you going back there anyway. I could easily?—”
“No!” Cecily interrupted, not wanting to hear any glib offer of renting a house for her, or keeping her at Greyhaven House or Greyhaven Park until their wedding—a prospect that still sounded insane.
Such arrangements were how so many young women ended up as mistresses after accepting a proposal, she supposed. Well, she would rather go out to work than face that shame. She was well-read, spoke French and Italian, and played the pianoforte and harp reasonably well, having strong fundamentals from early childhood lessons, although her uncle had begrudged her more. Surely someone would want her as a companion or governess?
“I was going to say that I might easily arrange for you to stay with my cousin, Lady Jackson, in Richmond,” he said with an amused smile. “She is a very respectable married lady, but shares some of my views on the foolishness of society’s more mindless rules. She also loves company, which is one of the reasons why I never accept her invitations.”
“Oh,” Cecily breathed, blushing all over again at the apparent wrongness of her assumptions, and vaguely rememberingsomething about Lady Jackson from the gossip columns. “Yes, I see. That would do very well.”
The Duke of Greyhaven really was the most impossible man. She could not predict at all what he would say or do next. Masking her confusion with action, she went to his desk and scribbled her address on a piece of scrap paper with a pencil.
“Our house is on the edge of Mayfair, just off Park Lane. I will be at the eastern corner of the street at ten o’clock tonight, or as soon after as I can manage. Now, I must go, or my grandmother will be suspicious. She thinks I am doing the rounds of Mary’s friends to look for her discreetly.”
“Perfect,” the Duke responded, reading the paper as she handed it to him and then folding it into a pocket. “But there is one very important thing you have forgotten.”
Cecily looked at him quizzically. “What?” she asked, caught again in the blue of his eyes.
“I will need your full name and age for the marriage license. No bishop will grant one without those details. It would help to have your father’s name too, although I dare say I could look it up.”
The Duke might as well be mad, but he was also desperately attractive and apparently serious in his intent to marry her.
Cecily swallowed. “Cecily Alice Elizabeth Holt,” she told him. “I am six-and-twenty, and my father was the Baron Charles Holt.”
“Cecily Alice Elizabeth Holt,” he repeated, as though the name charmed him. “Until tonight, Miss Holt.”
“Until tonight, Your Grace.”
Before the Duke could kiss her hand again, or kiss her anywhere else, Cecily fled from the room and out of the house.
* * *
“Will you be dressing, Your Grace?” the valet asked, calling back Nathaniel’s attention from the window on the first-floor landing where he was watching his visitor depart.
