A Duke of Her Own(69)

"I'll escort her upstairs," Villiers said, cutting her off.

Eleanor let go of the table and rose from her chair. "I'm perfectly all right. It must have just been the shock. I do believe I shall retire, however."

"Please forgive me!" Marguerite called imploringly after her.

Eleanor's heart was beating a guilty rhythm.

"Don't be a fool," Villiers said harshly, behind her on the stairs.

She waited until they reached the landing."! never wished her ill. But I—I wished to be her."

"Well, be grateful that you didn't get your wish," Villiers said, as unemotional as ever. "You'd be measuring a plot of ground right now." But she was learning to read those gray eyes, and they said something. Not that she was sure what.

The image of Gideon standing over Ada's body was so heartbreaking that Eleanor actually swayed and caught hold of the railing.

Villiers swore and plucked her up as if she weighed no more than one of his daughters.

"You needn't," she said feebly.

"Be quiet," he ordered.

So she was quiet and stopped thinking about how she felt about Ada when she was alive, and just remembered her quiet smile, the sweetness in it, and the happiness with which Ada would show her newest embroidery project. Tears began to roll down her face.

Willa pulled open the door to her bedchamber and left immediately when Villiers jerked his head.

He sat down in the chair and tucked her head against his shoulder, and Eleanor sobbed as if she were no older than one of his little girls. He handed her a white handkerchief but he didn't say a word.

After a while she stopped crying, sat up, and blew her nose. "I'm sorry she's dead."

"I know you are."

"I must look awful," Eleanor said, remembering all her makeup. "It's interesting," Villiers said. "The shoe black around your eyes has run in little streaks down your cheeks. You look like the sister to a zebra."

"It's not shoe black," she protested, wiping it off with his handkerchief.

"I should return to the supper table," he said, not moving, staring at her with his curiously beautiful gray eyes.

"Tobias has exactly the same eyes you do, have you noticed?" she asked. "The same temperament as well. And the same brute nose." "He doesn't have a brute nose."

Villiers leaned closer, so slowly that it seemed an eternity before their noses touched. "Yours is quite patrician," he said. "Slender, straight, narrow. Like the pathway to heaven, now that I think of it."

"Then yours is as short and wide as the path to another place," she whispered.

"Nothing about me is short."

"Nothing about you is humble."

"False humility is one of the seven deadly sins."

He snatched a kiss, the kind that made Eleanor realize just how much she loved kisses. How much she wanted more. How—How desperate she felt. And if that wasn't humiliating, what was? She had to regain her composure.

"We shouldn't be kissing like this when Ada is just buried," she said.

"I expect at least four women around the world died during the time I kissed you. If not more." He was frighteningly good at speaking in an utterly unemotional voice.

"It's not the same."

"Why not? Are you telling me that you were genuinely fond of Ada?"

That question was a mistake, because she thought again of how critical she had been, thinking that she herself would have been a more affectionate wife, and tears welled in her eyes again. "If I wasn't fond of her, it was my own shortcoming and my own stupidity," she said, getting off his lap rather clumsily. She walked over to the black window and looked blindly out. "She was a very kind person."

"Why do her virtues mean that I can't kiss you?" Villiers said, rising from his chair.

"It doesn't seem respectful."

"Or do you think we shouldn't kiss because Ada's death leaves an opening for a new duchess?"

It took a moment for that to sink in, and then she spun about, took one step and slapped him. They stared at each other for a moment.

"I apologize," Villiers said finally. "I should not have implied that you wept for any reason other than the obvious. I met the duchess only once, but I cannot imagine her uttering an ill-natured comment."

"That was her greatest accomplishment," Eleanor said. "She must have known..."

Villiers's eyes didn't even flicker. "Must have known what?"

She was tired of all the lies she had told her mother, all the lies she had told everyone. "That Gideon and I were devoted friends," she said. "Before." "Devoted. And yet—he married Ada."

"She had every accomplishment," Eleanor pointed out. "And as I told you, his father's will dictated his choice."