Tamed by her Duke (Seductive Mysteries #4)

Epilogue

EPILOGUE

W hen Grace had idly wondered aloud if they might go to London for part of the Season, the year after they were wed, Caleb turned her down flat.

“No,” he said, laying his newspaper down flat. “There’s much I would do for ye, leannan , but not that.”

On a normal day, Grace might have argued with him, teased him about putting limits on what he would do for her, but today was not a normal day. She’d spent half the night up with the baby, whose primary nursemaid had a cold and thus feared passing the illness onto the child. As baby Diana—named in what Grace called an homage and Caleb called an act of revenge against the Duchess of Hawkins—was only three months old, this was a reasonable precaution.

Grace just wished that her daughter would accept the other nursemaid in the night, just for a little while, to give her mama a break and a nap. But little Anna, as her father had taken to call her, had inherited that Gulliver stubbornness.

Thus, instead of arguing, Grace had put her head down on her arms right there at the breakfast table, rules be damned.

“Oh, very well,” she said. In truth, she didn’t want to attend any Society events either; she just wanted to see her friends. “I just miss Emily, Diana, and Frances.”

“Have them here,” he offered dismissively.

Grace’s head shot up so fast she felt her brain rattle around in her skull.

“You want me to invite my friends here ?” she asked.

He looked at her sullenly, as if he could not understand why she was acting so surprised…though a glint in his eye said that he was teasing her more than anything else.

“Oh, aye,” he said with a great sigh. “Yer brother is nae so bad, I suppose, and I like sparrin’ with the tall one. Frances is good company.”

“You know all their names,” Grace insisted crossly.

Caleb grinned, unrepentant.

The only visitors they’d had north to Montgomery Estate since their marriage had been Evan and Frances, who had come themselves to finalize the sale of the mill from the Graham estate to the Montgomery one. Graham had ultimately not been fully stripped of his title, though he had been sentenced to a decade long prison sentence and had lost any of the privileges in accordance with his title. Evan was now, officially speaking, the head of the Graham dukedom, even if he still technically sported the Oackley title.

Though the visit had ostensibly been about business, Grace’s brother had made no secret that he was truly interested in making sure she was safe and secure with her husband and in her new life. Evan had admitted—with a great deal of reluctance—that he supposed the enormous, ancient keep and its well-managed outbuildings were good enough for his sister.

“And Montgomery is fine, too,” he’d grumbled.

Frances and Caleb, meanwhile, had gotten on quite well…mostly because, Grace thought, she’d once observed them sit in the same room for a full half hour without exchanging a single word. Frances had overcome the worst of her shyness since her marriage, but she was still not unsettled by silences.

And Caleb was Caleb, of course.

Inviting six people to stay was not a large party by most standards, but Grace wondered if it would stretch her husband’s capacity for socializing.

Not that she planned to argue, however. She wanted them to come very much. So, she agreed and quickly skipped off to pen invitations before he could change his mind.

To Caleb’s credit, he did not change his mind in the intervening months between when Grace sent out the invitations and when her friends were set to arrive. He regarded the event more with grim acceptance than excitement, of course, but he did not put up a real protest.

That was, not until the morning that they were scheduled to appear.

Grace woke to her husband’s arms tight around her, his face pressed into the space between her shoulder blades. This had become one of his preferred positions for sleeping, though Grace couldn’t understand how he bore being tickled by her hair all night long.

“That’s the part I like,” he’d once mumbled sleepily when she’d asked.

He was, she thought fondly, an unusual man.

“ Leannan ,” he said, his voice still creaky with sleep. “We’ve made a mistake.”

“Have we?” she asked, tracing her fingers lightly over the corded muscles of his forearms.

It hadn’t taken long for her husband to find that the inactivity of the average duke’s life left him restless, particularly after so many years in the army. He’d taken to aiding the tenants with vigor, one that they had at first eyed with suspicion.

“They don’t like that I’m there,” he’d grumbled enough times that Grace began to suspect he felt offended by their coolness.

“Aren’t you the man who hates using his words?” she demanded.

“I wouldnae say hate ?—”

“Of course they’re not going to trust when you say you’re there to help,” he barreled on. He got much less disgruntled about her interruptions, she’d noticed, when they were both unclothed and in bed. “So keep showing up. They’ll learn.”

And they had. By the time the harvest had been fully taken in that autumn, Caleb had even been asked along for a celebratory drink at the tavern. He’d come back absolutely soused.

Being the lord of the land suited him, Caleb had learned. And Grace had found that she, too, liked working with the villagers, with the tenants. She’d thrown a Christmas festival for the local children that had made one small girl so happy that she’d clutched at Grace’s skirts and had needed to be pried off by her apologetic parents.

“Aye,” Caleb said now, pressing himself against Grace’s back, tightening his grip on her. Early spring was still plenty frosty this far north, so Grace shrank happily into his warmth. “Why did I let ye convince me to have guests ?”

“It was your idea!” she protested.

“Doesnae sound like me,” he grumbled.

“Well, it was,” she returned tartly, wiggling to get herself free. His warm, strong arms, she could now see, had been a trap. “And they’ll be arriving momentarily!”

Her friends had written to explain their travel plans, which would divide the trip into three days instead of two. Emily and Diana were both expecting, and though neither of them was far enough along in her pregnancy that travel was a hazard, Benedict and Andrew refused to tax them even the slightest bit.

This mean, however, that they would reach Montgomery Estate closer to mid-morning than mid-afternoon. And, judging by the sun in the sky, the duke and duchess had already lingered abed long enough.

“Aye,” Caleb said again. “That’s why it’s a mistake. If we have guests arriving, we need to get out of bed. I daenae want to do that.”

The way he snaked a thigh between her legs made her not want to do that, either. But she wanted to scandalize her friends—not to mention her brother —even less.

She wriggled harder. Caleb rolled his weight atop her.

“Ye do realize,” he asked, his voice now raspy for an entirely different reason, “that movin’ like that doesnae give me much incentive to let ye go, do you no’?”

She tried to sound sour, but she was giggling too hard.

“If you release me so I can prepare for our guests, I’ll be very, very sweet to you later,” she offered.

Caleb grunted. “Ye were already going to do that. Ye’re always very sweet.”

He still wasn’t perfect at expressing his feelings with words; Grace could still count the number of times he’d uttered the word love on one hand. But she didn’t mind, not when he showed her how he felt in a dozen different ways each day.

“Then maybe,” she said, still wriggling for freedom, “you could be sweet to me back, just this once?”

He groaned in exasperation…but he did roll off her.

“Fine. Ye win. I hope ye are pleased.”

Grace popped up, the blanket falling off from around her shoulders and letting the cool air touch her skin. She pressed a smacking kiss to her husband’s cheek before she darted out of bed to don her dressing gown and slippers—in a matching Blackmiur pattern, which she’d received for Christmas from her husband, who grumbled that she’d not be warm enough just wrapped in that blanket—which had been left to warm by the banked fire.

“I am very pleased,” she confirmed. Their room faced the front of the house; as she passed the window she realized, with a start, that the moving speck in the distance was the approach of a carriage.

“And we are very late!” she exclaimed. “They’re nearly here. Up, up! Caleb! Hurry!”

“A terrible mistake,” he muttered darkly. But he rolled out of bed and made for the bathing chamber. Grace lamented that she didn’t have time to enjoy the view of his naked form as he disappeared from view. But there would be time for that later. For now, her friends were arriving, and she was not at all ready. She had to get dressed and do her hair and make sure that breakfast would be served and a dozen other things.

But first, there was one thing she could not forget.

She crossed the room and poked her head into the bathing chamber, where Caleb was splashing water on his face with no concern for the, no doubt, freezing temperature of last night’s ewer water.

“Caleb?” she said.

“Aye, leannan ?” He swiped the water from his face with a flannel, catching her eye in the looking glass.

She gave him a smile that she hoped said everything she felt for him.

“Thank you for doing this. It means a lot to me.”

The look he gave her was soft as down. “Of course, leannan . Anything for ye.”

As declarations of love went, Grace thought as she skipped off to attend to her own toilette, that would do just fine.

The End?