“Mmmm,” she said with throaty pleasure. “Salt.”
Jeremy’s brain had seized up, and he came up with only one response. “You must say No to the duke,” he said. “Conclusively.”
She licked another finger. “Duke? What duke?”
“Greywick.”
“Thaddeus is not a duke, but a viscount.”
“Bess. He’s courting you.”
“Oh, all right. I must say no to being a duchess, is that your command?”
“Precisely.”
Her hands went back to her coat. “Unless you want to help me transform into a plump schoolboy, you’d better leave.”
For a moment, time froze. Jeremy’s eyes caught on the laughing curve of her red lips, the heat of her gaze as it met his.
“I do want that,” he said, his voice a ragged groan.
“Next time?”
Next time. His mind obediently served up an image of Betsy in her breeches, laughing from horseback.
It wasn’t until he was sluicing himself in water that he realized he’d imagined her in the courtyard of the house where he grew up.
The house he had sworn never to return to after he’d disgraced his name.
When he first returned from the colonies, he and his father had fought bitterly; he couldn’t remember the precise words now. But he had left believing that he was thrown out.
It seemed he had been entirely wrong. Unsurprising. In those first months, anger had raged inside him to the point where he hadn’t been able to sleep or think. The only sounds in his ears were the ricochet of bullets, and the moans of dying men.
The anger was still there, the grief and guilt too. But it felt as if a snowstorm had covered those emotions. They were muted by soft mounds of snow. The voices of dying men quieted.
Not silenced . . . but muted.
The voices of his men would always be with him. His experience on the battlefield had changed him forever.
But he could live in this wintry landscape better than the hellfire he had walked through for the last months.
He shook his hair, drops of water flying across the chamber. He felt clean.
Chapter Eighteen
While Betsy waited for Winnie to return with a greatcoat, she stripped off her coat, waistcoat, and the long white shirt underneath. Her breasts were tightly bound. Below them her waist curved in and her hips curved out.
The breeches strained over her hips, and when she turned to peer in the glass over her shoulder, she could actually see the stitches that held the fabric together over the roundest part of her bottom. She’d be lucky not to split them down the middle.
A giggle escaped her at the memory of Jeremy’s expression. She put a hand on her rear and slowly ran it over the curve. There was something erotic about breeches on a woman.
Her hand slipped off her rear as a frisson of anxiety hit her. This excursion was mad. It was as if she’d pent up her love of mischief and her reckless impulses, and now they were exploding.
It had been an interesting year. She had fulfilled her fourteen-year-old self’s ambitions. She had collected enough proposals to prove that her mother’s disgrace didn’t define her.
Every time she refused a proposal, she wielded a small amount of power over her own future. But the world wasn’t ready for the unnerving prospect of women who made their own decisions, society be damned. In fact . . .
She sank into a chair, feeling stunned.
The only woman she knew who had made her own decisions in the face of social disgrace was her mother.
The infamous second duchess. She still didn’t agree with Yvette’s choice.
But now she understood it.
The one decision Betsy had made in defiance of social rules—going to an auction in breeches—was almost as likely to cause a scandal as Yvette’s flight with the Prussian. The scandal wouldn’t be on the same scale, but still . . .
It could be that she did have an inheritance from her mother. She had looked at Yvette through the lens of Clementine’s disgust.
But what if Betsy inherited courage and decisiveness from her mother? What if she inherited a wish to create her own future? A dislike of being penned in by society?
What if she inherited the ability and the wish to astonish people?
What if that drove Yvette?
Until that moment Betsy hadn’t realized how taxing it was to dislike one’s mother, even an unknown one.
The door swung open and Winnie flew in. “Here I am! Oh, you undressed again.”
“We have to make me fatter,” Betsy said, standing up and trying to ignore her giddy feeling. Freedom? Was this what freedom felt like?
“Fatter?” Winnie didn’t like that. “Why?”
Betsy turned around and pointed to her rear. “It’s too obvious.”
“I suppose I see your bottom every day, but I don’t think about it,” Winnie said, taking the bundle of muslin strips Betsy handed her.
“If I’m rounder all over, it won’t be so obvious.”
“Hopefully that’s true.” Winnie began to wrap Betsy like a mummy from the British Museum. “Straining over the belly means that straining over the bottom won’t matter.”
“I’m filling in back and front,” Betsy said, a moment later. “That’s good enough.” When she buttoned up the last button, she turned to face the glass and they both broke out laughing.
“You look like a stuffed goose, ready for Christmas!”
“More like a goose egg,” Betsy said, giggling. “I’m so round in the middle!”
“No one will think of you as a woman,” Winnie said.
“More like a pillow out for an excursion,” Betsy said, pulling down the hem of her coat.
“Time to go!” Aunt Knowe bellowed from the bottom of the stairs.
“It’s a good thing there aren’t other guests in the inn,” Betsy said.
“You’ll do,” Winnie said, adding a final hairpin to Betsy’s wig. “Just don’t bend over because the egg might crack.”
Betsy nodded, savoring the feeling of adventure that flooded her. She took pleasure thumping down the stairs in her riding boots because her demi-boots always tapped in a ladylike way and her slippers swished.
The corridor was full of people. With a rapid glance, she saw that the duchess resembled a round-faced mayor. Jeremy’s father had an expression of suppressed glee, and Lady Knowe looked exactly like her twin brother, the duke. Jeremy . . .
He was waiting for her. Looking for her. As if she were the only person who mattered.
Somehow her feet kept thumping down the stairs, her hand holding the rail. Aunt Knowe cried, “Here’s the gentleman we’ve been waiting for! I wondered if you would be attractive as a boy. Now I have my answer!”
Betsy walked toward her. “No?”
“You look like a turnip,” her aunt remarked. “All right, everyone. The carriages are waiting.”
Betsy’s heart was beating quickly, but not because she was about to take her first step out of doors in breeches. No, it was the way that Jeremy stepped toward her as if he would always walk at her side.
“Jeremy, Betsy, and the marquess in one carriage,” Aunt Knowe ordered.
“We’ll take my carriage,” the duchess cried, grabbing Aunt Knowe’s elbow.