Any Duchess Will Do (Spindle Cove #4)

“I . . .”


Griff didn’t know. With everything in his hollowed-out shell of a heart, he wanted to soothe the child’s cries. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

He passed the baby into Pauline’s arms, muttered a few words of excuse that he’d never remember later. Then he turned and strode away, into the rain.

“Your grace! Griff, wait!”

He could shake off her calls, but the wailing carried high above the din of the streets, above the dark clatter of rain. Those wordless cries of accusation followed him all the way to the street.

Haunted him for miles.

Chapter Thirteen

Very early the next morning, Pauline woke in the darkness. She wrapped her body in a dressing gown, lit a taper, and made her way downstairs to the library.

She didn’t find the man she’d spent a fitful night alternately worrying over and dreaming about. But she found something almost as intriguing.

The naughty books.

She plucked a volume from the shelf, built a fire in the grate, and settled in.

An hour or so later she was immersed in a scandalous encounter—a dairymaid’s lover had his hands under her skirts and was questing determinedly higher—when the library door swung open with a whoosh of freezing air.

She startled, whipping her head up. Her attention was ripped from the story roughly, unevenly—like a sheet of pasted paper torn loose. Little scraps of lewdness clung to her. She was blushing so fiercely she worried her cheeks would glow in the dark.

Thank goodness the intruder wasn’t the duchess or a servant.

Only Griff.

But she couldn’t call him “only Griff.” He could never be “only” anything. The intruder was life-altering, heart-muddling, oft-maddening Griff.

And she didn’t know what they’d make of each other, after all that happened yesterday.

He tossed her a brief, dark look. She couldn’t tell whether he was glad to see her or the reverse. “You’re awake at this hour?” he said.

She closed her finger in her book, holding the page. “I wake early every morning. I’m a farm girl at heart. Can’t sleep past five, it seems.”

As he shrugged out of his coat and draped it over the back of a chair, she recognized it as the same one he’d been wearing when she’d seen him last. His jaw was unshaven. He was still hatless as well. And he looked every bit as miserable as when he’d left her at the front gates of the foundling home, squalling babe in arms.

However he’d spent his night, the activity hadn’t succeeded in cheering him.

“Are you just coming in?” she asked, hoping she didn’t sound too managing or . . . well, wifely.

He nodded.

What a stark illustration of the differences between them. This hour meant early rising for her, but late homecoming for him. The two of them were literally night and day.

But even night and day had to cross paths sometime.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

His answering sigh was a slow, weary rasp. “Simms, I honestly don’t even know.”

“Oh.” She swallowed. “Well, I’m glad you’re here now.”

Wordlessly, he crossed to his desk and rolled up his uncuffed shirtsleeves. He lit two candles, sat down and regarded the broken clockwork he’d left waiting the other night.

“I hope your evening was more exciting than mine,” she said lightly. “After dinner, your mother set me reading aloud from Scripture to improve my diction. I was told to read only the H words. Hath, holy, heresy. Rather a bore.” She lifted the book in her hand and reopened to her current page. “Now that I’ve found the naughty books, the exercise seems much more interesting. Hard as hornbeam. Heaving hillocks of bounteous flesh.”

When that failed to coax a smile from him, she set the book aside and curled up in the chair. Propping her chin on her knees, she regarded him through the veil of lingering dark.

Something was very, very wrong. In a word (in an H word, no less—they seemed all the words she could think of now) he looked horrible. Haunted, too—even more so than he had the first night.

And part of her suspected he needed to be held.

She wasn’t sure how to initiate anything of that sort. To make the attempt seemed unwise, for many reasons. But there was one thing she could do for him—a skill learned through years of practice.

She rose from her chair, crossed to the bar in the corner and poured him a drink.