The Duchess’s Secret. Elizabeth Beacon

when she woke up to see Ash watching her with such warmth and tenderness in his intent gaze her heart raced with longing for him all over again.

      ‘We still have to face our families,’ she reminded them both, feeling some of her blissful joy tumble back to earth. ‘Your grandfather the Duke and my stepfather the Earl will not be very pleased about our elopement. They are sure to look down their long noses and threaten to cut us out of their lives,’ she added and shivered against Ash’s bare shoulder at the thought of those two arrogant old men making their displeasure plain to them and then the rest of the world.

      ‘My grandfather threatens to do so at regular intervals, but he never does it. They will pretend it was their idea all along and inform the world what a fine match it is when they see I am a reformed man. I don’t know why your stepfather was so against our marriage when I did promise him I would settle down and help Grandfather manage the estates during Charlie’s minority. Now we are wed they will admit we are a well-matched pair and not to be put asunder by a couple of jealous old fools,’ Ash drawled lazily, as if he could not see any need to worry now the deed was well and truly done.

      Rosalind felt a superstitious shiver run through her like ice. A wicked old god might be listening and blight this glorious love of theirs if they were too bold and rash with it. ‘It seems like tempting fate to take anything for granted,’ she told him carefully, turning to look up at him and very ready to be distracted if he was not quite done with being her new husband yet.

      ‘Nothing can part us now, my love,’ he told her and ran a soothing hand down her bare back as if he had felt that shiver of apprehension run down it and was fascinated by where that shiver could take them.

      ‘Truly? Nothing I could tell you would stop you loving me?’

      ‘What could? I love you; you love me. There’s nothing a couple of bitter old men and a pack of gawping fools can do about it now.’

      Rosalind thought about the nasty little secret her stepfather had held over her for the last two years to keep her obedient and half-heartedly attracting the best offer her looks could draw in while a shadow loomed over her happiness. What would the Earl do now his hopes of arranging a profitable marriage for his penniless stepdaughter were ruined? She ought to tell Ash in order to draw the sting out of the story Lord Lackbourne would tell him with relish when he found out what they had done. His lordship’s price for housing her since her mother had died could not be paid by the second son of a second son, even if Ash was the grandson of a duke. Ash had warned her from the start that his father had gambled and caroused most of his fortune away before breaking his neck on the hunting field. Ash had gone on to admit his own misdeeds and his wild ways, but he did not gamble and that seemed a very good thing to his future wife. But the fact remained Lord Lackbourne would not squeeze much in the way of settlements out of Rosalind’s husband. The thought of his frustrated fury when he had been expecting the golden good looks she had inherited from her famously beautiful late mother to attract fortune and influence instead of a rackety young man made her shiver again.

      ‘What is it? Why are you so worried about admitting we are married?’ Ash said, pushing himself further up in the bed so he could look down at her face in a shaft of midwinter sunshine peeking nosily in through a gap in the innkeeper’s best bed hangings.

      It wasn’t a tale Rosalind wanted to tell, but did she dare keep it to herself? What if the Earl and Ash’s military brother caught up with them today? Any chance she might have to explain her folly two years ago would fly out of the window under their critical eyes and her stepfather had never loved her, so what was to stop him telling Ash about her youthful stupidity? Even the thought of Ash looking at her with horror instead of love made her flinch from saying anything, though. Maybe the Earl would be struck by lightning and so changed he became her kind and gentle protector instead of the impatient and penny-pinching autocrat she knew him to be.

      ‘Are you really sure nothing could part us?’ she asked, sitting up in bed as well and turning her face up to meet his gaze again with every ounce of sincerity she had in her while she tried to gauge his inner thoughts.

      ‘Do you mean to be faithful to me?’ he demanded with a hard note under his usually flexible deep voice and in his smoke-grey eyes.

      ‘Of course I do, to my dying day,’ she swore as ardently as if they were in front of an archbishop, because anything less than total fidelity to this fine and brilliant young man felt unthinkable.

      ‘Then we have nothing to worry about,’ he told her with an only-for-her smile on his slightly stubbly face and a gleam in his eyes she simply had to resist until she had confided her silly story and got the last obstacle to their happiness out of the way.

      * * *

      ‘What did you say?’

      ‘I should have told you before, but—’

      ‘No,’ Ash roared and leapt out of bed, ‘there is no “but” in the world important enough to stop you telling me until you had my ring on your finger. You lied; you used me,’ he added and the revulsion in his voice was straight out of her worst nightmares, but at the same time too real to hope she would wake up and find she had dreamt it.

      Rosalind watched her husband throw on his clothes as if it felt wrong to be naked with her now and shock held her frozen, like an abandoned houri after a night of unimaginable sin. Her mother had been right then; she should never have told her husband what a fool she was at sixteen. She should have kept it to herself that young and silly Rosalind Feldon had let a handsome young rogue convince her she was the love of his life before she found the touchstone of true love the moment she saw Ash. She had been so blinded by the grown-up glow and glamour of her first love affair she had let that rogue convince her the punch at her first grown-up party was made with spices and lemon juice and honey and wouldn’t harm a baby. Later he told her a man like him couldn’t help himself in the company of such a beautiful girl. Rosalind had been so intoxicated with rum and dreams he had managed to seduce her while she was so dazed and loose-limbed she had hardly known her own name and thought it a strange and oddly uncomfortable dream. Waking to an appalling headache and the terrible realisation it had truly happened, Rosalind had discovered the furtive rogue had left at daybreak for his new posting at the Russian court without even a note to say sorry.

      ‘No, I never actually lied and I do love you. I was a fool to believe a word that man said, but I refuse to let a careless rake ruin my life, then or now. It cost a great deal of heartache to put my life back together, but I know the difference between real love and pretend—I know you love me as he never could. He was too selfish to ever love like you do, with every bit of your heart and soul. My mother was dying when he did what he did,’ Rosalind added and paused for a moment to find enough strength to carry on talking with the memory of that terrible, precious time clogging her throat with tears. Mama had urged her to be strong and not tell anyone else, ever, and she was so right. ‘She made me promise not to let him ruin my life,’ she whispered sadly now.

      ‘Yet he has managed it anyway,’ her Ash said bleakly and he hadn’t been listening after she told him her dark secret, had he? He had made up his own story about her fall from grace, but that would not stop her fighting for her marriage and this new, true lovers’ life they were so eager to begin.

      ‘No, that makes him the winner. I refuse to be used and ruined because of one foolish action when I was little more than a child, Ash. He was a cold-hearted rogue who took advantage of me, then left.’ She got out of bed at last to face his stony gaze bravely as she reached for her hastily discarded clothes and began to scramble into them.

      ‘So you say. That’s your version of what happened and how can I ever trust that again? You have had a lover and you didn’t tell me. This so-called rogue of yours didn’t sit by my side all the way to Scotland so we could marry in haste and repent at leisure. You were ready, willing and eager to elope with a lovesick fool. Who else was going to marry a soiled dove, Rosalind? I really thought you were an angel in human form and you look like one, on the outside.’ He must have seen her flinch at that tired description of her golden looks and his stare turned cynical. ‘You gave an exquisitely polished performance. Your unspoilt grace and sweetly hesitant