How the Duke Was Won (3 page)

It was a feminine room, with a profusion of floral prints. There were pink roses and blue forget-­me-­nots on the carpet. An embroidery sampler depicting the wildflowers of England hung on walls sprigged with delicate white lily of the valley. A silk canopy the color of a rosy summer sunset covered a large wooden bed overspread by a white counterpane embroidered in intertwining vines and floating thistle flowers.

Charlene formed a picture in her mind of her half sister, as soft-­edged and feminine as the room, a butterfly flitting among her flowers.

Charlene used to construct elaborate fantasies about the earl acknowledging her, and inviting her and Lulu, no matter that she was not one of his, to live in this grand house.

Now she was a usurper trespassing in Lady Dorothea's privileged world. Charlene wondered what her half sister was thinking about in her luxurious chambers on the ship back from Italy. Did she even know Charlene existed?

The countess marched into the room, followed by a slender lady's maid dressed in black, with a frilly white apron and cap. “Now then, Miss Beckett. Your speech is tolerable, but we'll have to correct your posture. Unfold yourself if you please. Ladies never sit in that manner.”

“I'm not a lady,” Charlene countered.

“You will be able to emulate one when I'm through with you,” the countess said grimly. “I won't have you embarrassing me. Take off that cloak, Miss Beckett.”

Charlene unfastened the cloak and laid it on the chair back.

“Your hair is in a deplorable state,” announced the countess. She turned to the lady's maid, who'd been eying Charlene as if she'd seen a ghost. “Blanchard, stop gawking and fetch a hairbrush. There's much work to be done. Find the hand salve as well. Her hands need softening.”

Blanchard hurried away.

The countess unfolded a square of blue velvet on the dressing table in front of Charlene, positioning glasses of varying shapes and sizes alongside a row of silver forks and spoons.

“Which glass is for sherry?” the countess asked.

Charlene chose a thin glass at random.

“Wrong. That is for cordial.” The countess launched into a lecture on glassware.

Blanchard returned and unpinned Charlene's hair, brushing it with a gleaming silver brush.

The countess paused for breath.

“If I'm to impersonate Lady Dorothea, shouldn't I learn about her, as well as table etiquette?” asked Charlene.

The countess set down the fork she'd been wielding. “Lady Dorothea is a paragon of virtue. She never speaks unless spoken to, never takes more than one biscuit, something you would do well to emulate,” she said as she glanced significantly at Charlene's waist.

Charlene had never been able to resist sweets when she'd been able to afford them.

“She devotes her free time to embroidery and charitable concerns.” The countess indicated the wildflower sampler hanging on the wall. “One of her earliest pieces.”

Needlepoint was Charlene's sworn enemy.

“Despite my daughter's many virtues,” the countess continued, “for some unfathomable reason, she wasn't the instant success I'd hoped in her first two seasons. There was an . . . unfortunate incident. I sent her to Italy to visit an aunt and acquire more polish. If I'd known a duke would take an interest in her, I never would have allowed her to travel.”

“But what are her mannerisms? For example, how does she laugh?”

The countess frowned. “I don't know, how does anyone laugh?”

“Is her laughter high, or low, does she chortle, or squeak?”

Lady Desmond turned to the maid. “What does Lady Dorothea's laugh sound like?”

“It's high pitched, my lady, more of a giggle than a laugh. I think she giggles when she's nervous. Which is . . .” Blanchard glanced at the countess. “ . . . all the time.” She spoke with a slight French accent.

“Never mind what her laugh sounds like, it doesn't signify. You only have to be her for three days,” said Lady Desmond. “It will be best if you keep speech to a minimum. I suspect the duke isn't searching for brilliant conversation. What he needs is a refined lady to polish his tarnished reputation.”

Silence had never been Charlene's forte. She was far too opinionated. “Are you certain I'm right for the role?”

“You were trained by your mother, were you not? Use your
skills
. Be affable . . . be
accommodating
.”

In other words, encourage the duke to take liberties. Flirt, flatter, and entice him into a compromising situation.

No brilliant conversation required.

The countess continued her dinner etiquette dissertation. Charlene had difficulty keeping her eyes open. It had been a long day, and Lady Dorothea's sumptuous bed beckoned. It would be soft and comfortable. She could pull the embroidered counterpane over her head. Forget the dangerous mission for a few hours.

“Miss Beckett, do try to pay attention,” said the countess. “I will not have you embarrass me at the duke's estate.”

Blanchard gave Charlene a sympathetic smile when their gazes met in the mirror.

Finally, the countess exhausted the subject of proper dining. “We'll continue your lessons in the morning. You may sleep here tonight. You should become accustomed to Lady Dorothea's sensibilities.” She swept from the room without a backward glance.

When she was gone, Charlene stood. “What's your name?” she asked the lady's maid.

“Manon Blanchard, milady.”

“Oh, come now. I think you can tell I'm no lady.”

Manon smiled.

“Tell me about Lady Dorothea. Do we truly look alike?” Charlene asked.

The maid nodded. “You could be twins.” She helped Charlene remove her gown and don a fine cambric nightdress. “She's a sweet girl. Obedient and demure. But she's not . . . what did her ladyship say? A paragon? She's not a paragon. Just a girl.”

Lady Dorothea was becoming a real person in Charlene's mind, not some mythical princess from the pages of a fairy tale. It had to be quite a trial having a mother with such impossible expectations.

As Charlene climbed into bed and finally pulled the whisper-­soft counterpane up to her chin, her eyes pricked with unshed tears. She'd never been away from Lulu, not even for one night. Even though they were five years apart and had different fathers, they were best friends.

Lulu was approaching the age Charlene had been when she'd learned the truth about their life.

At fourteen, Charlene's life had seemed normal, genteel even. Until the evening when her mother had taken her upstairs, to the Aviary. Where she'd never been allowed before.

She remembered the scene so clearly. The girls she'd known only as friends swinging from silken perches and performing feathered fan dances for leering peers in the secret top floor room. Nightingale, Dove, Linnet, Swallow. They all had bird names. And, in one moment of awful realization, Charlene had understood why.

She'd fled from the house into the shock of a frozen winter's night, trying to outrun her destiny. She'd had to go back, rather than risk the streets of Covent Garden in winter. But she'd refused to become a courtesan. She preferred doing the washing.

Charlene never wanted her sister to learn the sordid truth. Lulu was more than simply innocent, she was almost willfully blind to their circumstances. She was always painting romantic scenes in miniature, precise detail. Picturesque ruined castles crumbling in fields of orange poppies. It was almost as if she didn't see the real world, the soot and grime of London, preferring to live in an imaginary world of her own creation.

Charlene would do whatever it took to preserve her sister's innocence.

Seducing a duke was better than living life as Grant's prisoner.

 

Chapter 3

J
ames caught his valet's wrist. “Not too short.”

Pershing gave a wounded sniff. “I'll leave curls around your neck. Your Grace will be fashionably tousled and poetic, and the ladies will swoon.”

“Just not too short.” James had seen too many men sheared like sheep. To keep the lice away. To brand them as prisoners.

The prisoner in the mirror stared back. Dark hair falling around shoulders broad from chopping trees, hoisting logs. Cutting his hair was his one concession to the female onslaught that was about to begin. The rest of him was disreputable enough.

Pershing hovered and darted in to snip like some scissor-­beaked hummingbird.

Hair fell in piles around his feet. A neck emerged. Thick and bullish.

He hadn't cropped his hair these ten years.

A memory saturated his mind like ocean spray over a bowsprit.

Shimmying up the spire, Cambridge dwindling below, his friends watching from the shadows as he climbed and kept going, even when fear and cold numbed his fingers and he no longer remembered why he was climbing.

Higher and higher. Fifty feet, sixty feet, the flag stuck in his teeth. Hanging on with one arm while he lashed the flag to the spire, his stomach lurching.

In the morning light, the black flag streamed above King's College, a skeleton spearing a heart and raising a glass to the Devil.

Blackbeard the Pirate's emblem.

Show no quarter
.
Have no fear
.

It had been so important to him to rebel in those days. Disavow his father's ruthless legacy. Declare his independence.

He'd been sent down for his prank, of course. And his back still bore the scars of the old duke's retribution.

If you insist on playing the pirate, I'll send you to sea. Teach you fear of God and Family.

He'd shipped James to their ailing sugar plantation in Trinidad the next day.

That first year, thirty men on his father's plantation in Trinidad had died of yellow fever. James had nearly been one of them. While he'd been in the sweat-­soaked throes of the fever, he'd hallucinated that his mother was still alive. Felt her cool hand on his brow, a touch he hadn't known since she'd died giving birth to a stillborn baby when he was fourteen, and away at Eton.

As the thirst had raged and he'd vomited black liquid over the bedclothes, he'd seen her soft blue eyes pleading with him not to die.

He'd lived. Grown a beard. Vowed never to return to England and the father who had shipped him off to die.

James had closed down his father's brutal sugar plantation and left the West Indies to travel the world, earning his own way with sweat, gambling, and wise investments.

After several years he'd returned to the West Indies and, using no funds from his father, he'd invested in cocoa cultivation by other small farmers who farmed marginal cocoa lands in Trinidad and in the country of Venezuela.

Scissors attacked his beard.

When they finally captured the notorious Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, and shot him dead, they catalogued his wounds. He'd been shot five times, carved by knives over twenty.

When James received the letter telling of the carriage accident that killed his elder brother instantly and left the old duke dying, he thought of Blackbeard, of cataloguing not the wounds his father had received but the ones he'd inflicted.

It would be a long litany. He'd been a cruel man who'd only valued ­people for what he could bleed out of them. William had learned the art of obedience from their faded, silent mother, choosing survival over independence, while James had chosen to fight.

He'd never stopped fighting.

The crooked nose in the mirror told the story. Too many reckless challenges in dark taverns, too many brawls when he'd been outnumbered but had provoked a fight all the same. He'd never learned to be silent in the face of injustice, never learned to keep his mouth shut.

Pershing smoothed something that smelled like a pine forest over his jaw, and a sharp blade scraped against his skin.

James clenched his fingers, battling the instinct to reverse his vulnerable position and flatten the valet against the wall with a fist at his throat. “Enough,” he said, waving Pershing away and sweeping the towel from his shoulders.

The valet plucked two striped waistcoats from a shelf. “The crimson or the jade, Your Grace?”

“It's no use, Pershing.” James rubbed the towel across his jaw. “You'll never make me respectable.” He angled his head, taking in his reflection in the mirror. “I'll still frighten the poor ladies.”

Hell. He looked like his father. He flung the towel against the mirror, obliterating the unsettling truth.

He had to escape. Every day he stayed in England, the memories grew more oppressing.

The thought of taking his place in the line of Harland dukes whose harsh faces haunted the gallery walls made his jaw lock with anger and frustration.

He couldn't don a gaudy silk waistcoat and stand on the front steps of the house he despised, welcoming polite society to pass judgment on him.

He had no choice, of course.

Producing an heir required a bride. Even if that bride would be repulsed by his brutishness.

Pershing proffered another waistcoat choice. “What about this cerulean blue—­”

James leapt from the chair, startling the valet.

One more hour without the eyes of the
ton
assessing him, finding him lacking, as they always had.

“Robert,” he said to the young footman standing at attention near the door.

“Your Grace?”

He was narrower in the shoulders, but it would work.

“I need your coat, Robert.”

The footman unbuttoned his coat and handed it over without so much as an eye twitch. Delaying the inevitable for an hour would also give James the chance to observe the ladies' arrival in anonymity.

“I won't be needing those waistcoats, Per­shing,” James said. “Not just yet.”

D
amn, the coat was tight.

James stood in line with the other footmen, hunching his shoulders to loosen the tug of the constricting wool.

Dalton ambled down the front steps. “Have you seen Harland?” James heard him ask Hughes.

The butler tilted his head in James's direction, unwilling to voice the unthinkable, unconscionable truth. That his master, James Edward Warren, seventh Duke of Harland, Marquess of Langdon, Earl of Guildford, Baron Warren and Clyde, was, horror of horrors, standing in a line of servants garbed as a common footman.

Albeit a very tall, very irritable footman.

“What the . . .” Dalton walked over. “Is that you, Harland?”

James nodded. The idea of passing as a footman during his initial encounter with the ladies had seemed clever. In his chambers.

Dalton raised an eyebrow. “It
is
you. Damn near didn't recognize you without that pirate beard. You look like the old duke.”

“I know,” James spat, the old helpless hatred pressing on his chest. “But I'll never become him. I swear it.”

Dalton raised a hand. “Of course not. Didn't mean to suggest it. What the devil are you wearing? Is it a prank?” He'd been James's accomplice at Cambridge on too many occasions to be startled.

James gestured to the row of carriages winding up the stately drive. “A woman never shows her true nature to a potential mate. I'll assess them incognito. Gather information about their suitability.”

Dalton nodded. “Haven't changed, I see. Never been one to do anything the conventional way.”

“I don't intend to change.” James wiped a trickle of perspiration from his forehead. “This wasn't a good idea. Think I'll go inside and take off this coat.”

“Too late.”

The first carriage stopped, the Selby family crest emblazoned with such a blinding amount of gold leaf that it left no doubt as to the occupants.

“I'll think of something to tell the ladies,” Dalton whispered. He returned to the front steps.

Nothing for it but to continue the charade. James helped Lady Vivienne, eldest daughter of the Marquess of Selby, descend from the carriage.

Without a glance in his direction, she and her mother, the marchioness, glided toward the house, fastidiously lifting the hems of their cloaks, bonneted heads held high.

When the next carriage stopped, he helped a trim lady swathed head to toe in white velvet down the steps. When her small feet hit the earth, she stumbled and fell against his chest.

“My my, you
are
solid,” she purred. “What have you been lifting?” Her gloved hand remained on his chest for several seconds and drifted suggestively lower.

“Lady Augusta,” huffed her mother, Lady Gloucester, a stout woman in matching white velvet. “Come away this instant.”

Lady Augusta sashayed off with a flirtatious glance over her shoulder.

Good Lord, she had a penchant for footmen. Not exactly sacrificial virgin material.

He'd asked Cumberford to round up a virtuous lot. Must have been some misunderstanding with that one.

Miss Tombs arrived in an ostentatious carriage with twice the normal number of postilions and footmen, the better to advertise the staggering wealth of her father, a baronet. She gazed up at Warbury Park's impressive expanse of sand-­colored stone with determination in her aquamarine eyes. Then she smiled slyly, revealing two deep dimples on either cheek.

“Stop smiling, Alice,” said her mother. “There are to be no games this time. No eccentricities. No ridiculous talk of frugivorousness.”

Frugivorousness? James had no time to contemplate what that could mean, because he caught sight of a pair of blue eyes glinting from inside a carriage window.

At last. His serene saint, Lady Dorothea.

When James helped her down from her carriage,
he
was the one who nearly stumbled.

The pastel sketch artist hadn't captured her at all. There was absolutely nothing pious or prim about her.

An oval face with a slightly too-­sharp chin. A nose that flirted with snub. Opulent honey curls visible beneath her bonnet.

She smiled, only a slight twitch, but it was enough to call attention to extravagantly curved lips that begged to be kissed. And those blue-­gray eyes. They weren't innocent at all. Hell, they sparked with enough delicious wit to tempt a cleric to sin.

Maybe it was because he'd constructed such an elaborate fiction about her saintliness when he'd been in his cups, or maybe it had been far too long since a woman had warmed his bed. Whatever it was, her features had an off-­kilter harmony that hit him with a physical force.

Blood rushed to body parts that signaled danger. This was supposed to be a business arrangement.

Practical.

Bloodless
.

She would
not
do.

James nearly bundled her straight back into the carriage and shut the door.

Lady Dorothea glanced down, then tilted turbulent eyes up at him.

Dark clouds rolling in. Wind from the north. Wooden planks pitching beneath his boots. Men shouting, alarm bells ringing
.

“You seem to be . . . holding my hand,” she said.

Her throaty contralto thrilled all the way to the soles of his boots. It made him want to keep her talking so he could float away on that voice.

Damn
. He dropped her tiny hand. “Begging your pardon, my lady. You . . . remind me of someone I once knew.”

A slight frown wrinkled her brow. “I'm quite sure we've never met.” Dismissing him with a curt nod, she stepped away. James found himself facing Countess Desmond, who harrumphed and gave him a quelling glare as she allowed herself to be helped to the ground.

James retreated into the line of footmen unloading the baggage. He swung one of Lady Dorothea's heavy trunks onto his shoulder.

You thought timid society debutantes wouldn't tempt you, you ass.
Mentally, he kicked himself for being so wrong. Dead wrong.

There was no room for unbridled lust in his carefully laid plans.

How many hours were left? Forty-­six if Lady Dorothea stayed until Sunday evening. Less if he chose a wife quickly and sent the others home. But that would be unforgivably rude, even for an uncivilized lout like him.

Or . . . he could find a way to make her leave early.

Frighten her away.

Scandalize her so thoroughly that she fainted and had to be confined to a bed. In London. Far away from him.

Obviously, that was the only course of action. The footman's uniform would serve the purpose.

But he should have kept the pirate beard.

T
he rude footman caught Charlene's eye and winked.

He knew
.

There was no other explanation for his insulting familiarities.

Charlene swallowed a lump of terror. It was all over. He must have seen her at the Pink Feather on one of the occasions when her mother had been too ill to play hostess and Charlene had been forced to assume the role. It was possible that a duke's footman might have been a customer. He could certainly pass for a nobleman.

But wouldn't she remember him? He was over six feet of solid muscle that wouldn't be easy to forget, with shoulders so wide that she would have suspected padding if his coat hadn't been so tight the seams were ready to split. No doubt all the parlor maids swooned over those shoulders.

He had the telltale bent nose of a tavern brawler. He wouldn't be easy to dissuade if he wanted to make life difficult for her.

Before he disappeared toward the back servant's entrance, he winked again, and this time the countess caught him.

“Well,” exclaimed Lady Desmond. “Such impudence. I shall certainly have a private word with the duke about that footman.”

“I would like to have a private word with that footman,” Manon whispered from behind Charlene.