The Duke of Jarrell looked over at her again, and this time, his eyes lingered over her face and neck, and then over the low neckline of her amethyst gown. When his eyes met hers again, his stare was unreadable.
“My apologies for your impending marriage, Lady Eleanor,” he said. “You are far too good for my nephew, but alas—he is too hopeless for me to release you. You are sadly needed.”
Her mother gasped softly. Her father sighed and took a long drink of sherry.
“No one seems to care that I don’t wish to be married either,” Sloreley pouted.
“Then it’s a good thing I don’t give a fuck about your wishes,” Jarrell replied. “Shall I carve the roast now?”
And then Eleanor broke the second rule and did something outrageous.
She fell in love with the duke.
Chapter Two
The week leading up to the betrothal ball was miserable.
Not because the guests for the celebration and wedding had begun to arrive.
Not even because Sloreley’s mother and sister were just as dismissive and selfish as he was and seemed to feel that Eleanor owed them a great debt for being allowed to marry their precious Gilbert.
No, it was because falling in love with the duke was the worst—the absolute worst—thing she had ever felt.
She had prided herself on being efficient? On being serene? Ha! She could barely dress herself now without rushing and fumbling through it to get downstairs on the slight chance the duke would be down there also. She couldn’t make it through teas or tours of the grounds without getting flushed and flustered and restless in a way she’d never been and couldn’t bear—except it was also a restlessness she couldn’t get enough of. It was a restlessness she sought out in the same way she might’ve worried a loose tooth when she was younger. It was a delirium that left her speechless and flushed.
She watched out her window in case the duke rode past; she listened for his low, rough voice as she walked through the house. When he sat next to her in the drawing room as they conversed with the first of the houseguests, she couldn’t breathe.
Even in stillness he was arresting; even in the constraints of polite small talk, his cold but raw physicality seemed barely leashed. More than once, she caught his eyes on the wild hills outside when he was supposed to be entertaining a guest, as if he wished himself far away from these tiresome niceties and out onto the lonely, howling lands that made up his estate.
In every way, he was Sloreley’s opposite.
In every way also, he was Eleanor’s opposite.
He was not serene; he was not respectable. His idea of efficiency was brute force, and his idea of patience was not openly growling at his guests.
And the sheer, bodily presence of him—his long stride, his large, ungloved hands. His silvering hair and his stern, carnal mouth.
Just the thought of how all of that would feel against her softness—his rough hands on her smooth ones, his hard body against her curves.
His stubble against her neck . . .
It was that particular fantasy that consumed her thoughts as she climbed the stairs to the tower one morning, having seen to her mother’s comfort and having made her excuses to Sloreley’s mother and sister for not joining them in the morning room. She’d claimed a slight fever, but truly the only fever she felt was in her blood, which pulsed madly at the idea of the duke’s mouth on her skin. On her neck, yes, but also on her breasts. Her belly.
Her thighs.
That night at the Foscourts’, there had been a woman kissing another woman between her thighs—slow, languorous kisses that had made her lover arch and pant. How would that feel to have kisses there? How would it feel to have a woman’s soft lips giving those kisses—how different then, would a man’s unshaven mouth feel?
Eleanor wouldn’t mind sampling both . . . and then perhaps a few more times each, in the name of the scientific method and all.
But now her only chance to feel such a thing would be with Sloreley, wouldn’t it?
An instinctual wave of unhappiness met the realization. For all the desire simmering in her veins at the thought of the duke and his mouth, she had no answering appetite for her actual fiancé. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that or if she even had to feel a certain way about it, but there it was. She felt nothing for Sloreley, not even curiosity, not even academic interest. She could only muster up mild apprehension. A resigned distaste.
Eleanor emerged from a slender doorway to find the top of the tower and went immediately to the parapet, looking over the crenellated wall out to the narrow valley below. The Hope River, thin and shallow, glinted like a shining ribbon that unspooled all the way out as far as the eye could see. The floor of the valley remained as green as a garden in springtime, while a sharp autumn wind fussed at the moors above it, sending clumps of mist drifting this way and that.
It was beautiful here.
Not like Pennard Hall. Not in an obvious way and not in a safe way, because there was nothing safe about it at all. This place was rugged, old, chilly, stern—a spot that seemed to resist the very idea of modernity. She could never make a project out of Far Hope.
If anything, it felt like Far Hope would make a project out of her.
The thought was rather thrilling once she voiced it to herself.
“I used to imagine,” a voice said unexpectedly, “that everything I ever wanted was just beyond that mist.”
She turned to see the duke coming toward the wall where she was standing. He stopped a few feet away from her and braced his hands on the two stone merlons in front of him, staring out onto his lands, and onto the moors above them that belonged to no one save for God and the King.
Jarrell didn’t wear an overcoat—only a tailcoat made of gray silk, subtly embroidered but otherwise free of ornamentation—and he was in long boots again, which were glistening as if he’d just come from a walk through the hills. His shoulders strained the seams of his coat, and his breeches hid nothing of his legs, and Eleanor suddenly couldn’t look at him straight-on, because if she did, she’d do something outrageous. Like ask him if he’d like to walk through the hills with her.
Or if she could nuzzle against one of those muscular thighs. Just for a few hours.
Serene Eleanor, at least, regained control of her senses and managed to speak. “Was it?” she asked politely, relieved to hear that she sounded normal and not breathless at all. “Just beyond the mist?”
He turned to look at her, all midnight eyes and that beautiful mouth. “No,” he said after a minute. “It wasn’t.”
“That’s the trouble with imagining,” she said, tearing her gaze away from his face. “It so rarely leads one to the truth.”
He made a low noise of agreement. It almost sounded . . . well, sad, if she could believe such a forbidding man capable of sadness.
“What would be just beyond the mist for you?” he asked her. “If you could reach through it and part it like a curtain, what would you find?”
He sounded genuinely curious, and so Eleanor genuinely considered his question. Serene Eleanor would have an easy answer, a simple one—the health of her mother, perhaps, or a good deal on lead guttering—but it had been so long since someone had really cared about her answers that she wanted to savor it as much as possible. She wanted to honor it by being honest.