My Dangerous Duke (17 page)

“How sad!”

He shook his head and sighed. “Then there was the third duke, who allegedly pushed his lady off the tower roof.”

“Allegedly?”

“Gust of wind. Uneven stones. She might have tripped.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“The seventh duke discovered his wife in flagrante delicto with his best friend and, I’m sorry to say, shot them both. Not allegedly.”

“That’s terrible!” For a moment’s brooding silence, she peered into her champagne. “Well,” she said, glancing up again with a mischievous glimmer of deviltry in her eyes, “at least your curse must keep the ton huntresses at bay.” She began chuckling merrily. “Honestly, it’s brilliant! What a perfect plan to keep all those matchmaking mammas at a safe distance. It’s the perfect excuse!”

He looked at her in astonishment. “I beg your pardon?”

“Now I see how you managed to remain a bachelor all this time. Truly, it’s ingenious! All I want to know is did you concoct this tale yourself, or was it handed down to you by your forebears? This must be a perennial problem for eligible dukes.”

“You think we made this up?” he exclaimed.

“Well, surely, you are not serious!” She laughed harder. “How it must torture them! All of those haughty debutantes who long to set their caps at you—but are they brave enough to risk the Kilburn Curse?” she asked with feigned drama. “Believe me, I don’t hold it against you. I’m sure without some sort of device like this to drive them away, you would never have any peace, poor fellow! But it doesn’t lose you
too
much,” she added with a wicked sparkle in her eyes. “It does not altogether negate your appeal. In fact, to some girls, it might make it all the stronger. Gothic novels are the rage, after all, and curses are completely glamorous.”

Rohan scowled and picked up his dessert spoon, nonplussed by her irreverent mirth. “You asked me a question. I answered it. Nobody’s asking you to believe it.”

“Good. Because I don’t. Because it’s nonsense,” she added with a grin from ear to ear. “I’m not as gullible as some people.”

He could scarcely believe she was sitting there making fun of him—the fearsome, the terrible Beast. She ought to be paling and quaking and running for her life, from the horror of him, the assassin and his curse, but instead, she just sat there looking like the blasted cat who swallowed the canary.

Without another word on the subject, Rohan took a large, resentful bite of cheesecake and washed it down with a swallow of wine.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he grumbled.

She frowned. “You don’t really believe all this?”

“Of course I don’t,” he shot back with a self-conscious scoff.

“You
do!
” she said in amazement. “The ghosts, the curse, and all that! Oh, my goodness.” She stared at him, slack-jawed. “That is adorable!”

“Do you mind?” He threw down his napkin.

“So, that’s why you never come to the castle! I heard the smugglers complaining about that. But you don’t look like you’d be afraid to duel with the Devil himself, and some silly ghost—”

“I am not
afraid
of ghosts!” he declared.

But she just smiled at him—and Rohan suddenly found himself laughing. Damn her, she had disarmed him.

“I’m just a little superstitious, that’s all! The dead duchesses supposedly want revenge on the current duke. How would you feel?”

“Don’t worry, Rohan, I’ll protect you from the ghosties.”

“Little mockingbird!” He shook his head at her with half a mind to lunge across the table and stop her laughter with a hearty kiss. Instead, he glanced toward the sideboard. “You see that lemon meringue pie over there? You’re going to get it in the face if you persist.”

“Oh, no! A shot across the bow.”

“Fair warning.” He eyed her hungrily. “Now, eat your cake or whatever it is and try to be a good girl.”

“It’s German apple puff, for your information. Have you tried it? It’s delicious. Here.” She leaned slowly across the table and fed him a bite from her spoon.

He helped himself to a leisurely look at her décolletage as he opened his mouth and accepted. “Mm. That is good.”

“Told you so.” Her eyes twinkled as she leaned back in her chair in leisurely contentment.

“I thought you said a while ago you had no room left for the sweets.”

“I’m pacing myself. Besides—” She took another dainty nibble off her dessert spoon. “There were no corsets in the trunk of goodies your servants brought me, so, you see, I’m wonderfully free to make a glutton of myself.”

This little fact arrested his full attention. His stare homed in on her figure—what he could see of it over the table. “You mean … ?”

“Indeed, Your Grace. Tonight, I go
au naturel
.” She laughed like she enjoyed teasing him and took another remorseless bite of German apple puff.

Rohan watched her with strange sensations of delight.

God, she was a maddening woman. An unpredictable blend of innocence and passion. Intelligent, mercurial. Her prickly side amused him, but he liked her even better like this, open and relaxed.

Uncorseted.

In her scintillating humor, she threw off light like the candle glow as it played over the cut-crystal facets of their wine goblets. In short, she enchanted him. Maybe she had inherited some of her ancestor Valerian’s magic.

Rohan had a feeling he was doomed.

He could sense a most unforeseen bond growing between them and did not know what to make of it.

“Staring again, Your Grace?”

“I’ve just decided you are rather naughty. And I like it.”

She shrugged. “You said we were celebrating. Anyway, it’s your fault. If you wanted me to behave, you shouldn’t have made me try so many wines.”

“Why on earth would I want that?” he asked softly.

“Hm.” She caught a bead of condensation running down the shaft of her narrow champagne flute on her fingertip and brought it to her lips.

Damn, but just watching her got him hard.

“Rohan.” The way she purred his name made his blood pound with wild potency.

“Yes, Kate?” he responded barely audibly.

“Can we talk about serious things now?”

He gazed deeply into her eyes, slowly pushing his lust aside along with his dessert plate. “Yes. I think we should.”

“I still have many questions.”

“As do I.”

“You do?”

He nodded, bracing himself for the chess game. “Is there anyone you need to contact? Let them know you’re safe?”

“No. There’s no one.” She shook her head, lowering her gaze, but she held her chin at a proud angle despite this painful answer.

“There must be somebody—”

“There’s not,” she said sharply. “I want to know what Peter Doyle said.” She glanced up again in defiance, as though daring him to pity her.

He saw her prickly side was back, defenses up and ready to shield her pride.

“Was I right?” she persisted. “Are they stealing women to sell to depraved men of means?”

“No.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re sure?”

“Trust me, I’m entirely certain.”

She furrowed her brow and slowly looked away. “But then, that would mean that I … was the sole target of their scheme.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes flared with alarm. “But, why?”

“You tell me.”

She looked at him in confusion. “What do you mean?”

He paused, then took another tack. “Peter Doyle seems to think that someone is after your father.”

“But that’s impossible.” She shook her head with an incredulous look. “My father is dead. He’s been dead for over a decade.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Of course I’m sure! What a thing to ask!”

“Do you mind if I ask how he died?”

“At sea. He was a merchant captain. He was making the run from India. His ship hit a terrible storm off the Horn of Africa. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?” he asked quietly.

“Like you think I am lying!”

He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “Tell me something.” He ignored her feisty scowl. “What do you make of Pete’s claim that your last name is Fox?”

The scowl faded slowly; her eyes grew large and soulful.

“Kate? ”

The question had clearly upset her. Her face had paled, and she looked a bit shaken.

It did not escape his notice that she made no attempt to conceal her emotions. They were written plainly on her face, and no Promethean agent would ever allow that.

Besides, no one was that good an actress, especially after three glasses of wine. Avoiding his scrutiny, she let her gaze wander off across the table. “All right,” she whispered more to herself than to him, then she nodded. “There is something that I-I think I need to tell you.”

Stoic down to his bones, he refused to betray any sort of reaction, though her quiet words struck him like a punch in the gut. “I’m listening.”

“It makes no sense that I can figure. None that puts my mind at ease. An old childhood memory …”

“Yes?” he urged when her words trailed off. “Go on.”

“I’m not sure where to start. You don’t want to hear my whole life story.”

“I’d like that very much, actually.” He leaned his elbow on the table and rested his face against his fingertips.

“Well, it’s fairly hazy, because I would’ve only been about five years old,” she began in a halting voice. “I had just been sent to live ashore after my mother’s death. Wait—let me back up,” she amended with a wave of her hand. “As I said, my father was a merchant captain.”

“His name?”

“Michael Madsen.”

Or Gerald Fox?
Rohan wondered. Pete had said that “Madsen” was just the captain’s alias.

“I was born at sea,” she continued. “In my earliest years, we lived aboard Papa’s frigate. Our floating home. The crew was like our extended family. That boat and everyone on it was my whole world.”

“Sounds like a colorful childhood.”

“I suppose it was. But that’s not the half of it.” She offered him a pensive smile. “My parents’ story was the most romantic thing you ever heard.”

“Really? Do tell.” She had his full attention.

She rested her crossed arms on the table before her. “My mother was a French émigrée, the daughter of a count at the time of the French Revolution.”

“Do you know his name?” he asked, holding his breath.

“Of course—though I never met him. The Count DuMarin.”

He could have sworn he felt the very castle stones groan and shake around him at the name. He hid his astonishment to hear it confirmed.

She certainly had not tried to hide it.

“What’s wrong?” She tilted her head with a slight scowl. “You don’t like it that I am half-French, is that it?” She snorted. “I know, I’m quite familiar with the prejudice from all you full-blooded English folk. But I assure you, Your Grace, my relatives were no Jacobins. My grandfather was a royalist, I’ll have you know, and a personal friend of the King.”

That’s not all he was.
“Believe me, Kate, I have nothing against France or the French people. They have their strengths and weaknesses, as do we, and every other nation on the globe. Have you ever been there?” he added. “To France, I mean. Your mother’s homeland.”

“I have never been anywhere,” she answered crossly. “I have had the dullest life you could possibly imagine.” Then she heaved a sigh and idly scratched her eyebrow. “I used to travel about and go on adventures with my parents when I was little—back when I lived aboard Papa’s ship. But ever since I moved to the cottage in Dartmoor, my guardian, old Charley, kept me living in the middle of nowhere like a blasted hermit. He wouldn’t even take me to London, ever, or anywhere else interesting.” She paused. “He died about a year and a half ago, and I thought then that I’d go myself, but—” She shook her head, her words breaking off in frustration.

“But what?”

“I didn’t know anyone! I did not know the way. I was—too scared.” She gazed at him in dismay. “How or when or why Charley managed to turn me into such a coward, I hardly know.”

“You may be many things, Kate, but a coward isn’t one of them.” He watched her intently.

“I don’t know … at least being kidnapped pulled me out of my safe little nest, didn’t it? I suppose that sounds odd.” She laughed cynically. “But they say everything happens for a reason.”

She didn’t talk like a Promethean, he thought. She was too honest and made no effort at self-aggrandizement.

“Not that I’m happy to have been kidnapped, mind you,” she amended, “but I was … so bored and isolated out there. Yet too afraid to leave. It’s like I was trapped.”

“What were you so afraid of?” he asked in a murmur.

She considered with a shrug, then shook her head. “I don’t even know. Charley always drummed it into my head that the world was much too dangerous out there. That people couldn’t be trusted. That certainly turned out to be true! Well—except for you,” she added very cautiously.

He gave her a guarded half smile, beginning to wonder if the remote Dartmoor cottage, the false name, and her caretaker’s efforts to keep her at home were all measures Gerald Fox might have taken to
hide
his daughter from the Prometheans.

She dropped her gaze. “Anyway, I was telling you about Mama.”

“Yes, please, go on.”

“When the French Revolution broke out, my mother was still at her convent school, soon to make her debut, and having been so completely sheltered there, she was in no way prepared for all the chaos as France began exploding. Before long, my grandfather, the count, decided it was no longer safe for her to remain in France, so he arranged for her to be taken to safety in America. She was to join some of our relatives in the Vieux Carré, the French Quarter of New Orleans.”

It all matched.
He was stunned that she was being so open with him. Everything she was saying corresponded with what Rohan knew about the DuMarin affair—which meant she was wasn’t lying. At least not yet.