The Duke Read online

  “Your palm is callused. You are no longer a naval officer yet you still have the hands of a sailor, it seems. What have you been doing, I wonder, to make that so?”

  “If you imagine the hiding place you’ve chosen for that key will prevent me from leaving this room, you’d best be reimagining, lass.”

  “I will happily give the key to you after you have answered my questions.”

  “I’ll have no’ need for you to give it if I’ve already taken it.”

  Tremors crawled from her belly into her throat.

  “You do not frighten me.” She snipped the syllables to hide the quaver.

  His gaze that was black in the dim light scanned her face—her cheeks and hair and lips and chin.

  “Then you are unique among women,” he rumbled. “Now, open the door.”

  “Why won’t you speak with me?” This was frankly terrifying. She had not anticipated this or planned for any scenario like this. She had imagined that when she finally cornered him he would act like a regular person and converse—unwisely, she realized belatedly. He had never been anything like a regular person, after all.

  “Five and a half years, yet not even a little small talk?” she said. “Come now. Let us give it a try. I will start. I hear you have become a duke. And an abductor of innocent maidens. And possibly a practitioner of the dark arts. How do you find all of that?”

  “Lass.” The word was a warning shift of tectonic plates. “Open the door now or I’ll be taking that key.”

  “You cannot deter me, Urisk.” Now her words quivered quite obviously. “Either you will sit down here now and answer my questions until I have asked them all, or you will in fact be obliged to take the key from me.”

  In the darkness, the gleam in his eyes was like a knife’s blade.

  “As you wish,” he said as though he whispered in her ear.

  Her heart slammed into her lungs.

  His hand surrounded her hip.

  She gasped.

  Large and strong, his five fingers and broad palm took complete possession of her flesh. He was not smiling.

  “The key now,” he said very deeply. His fingers moved on her buttocks. Not painfully. Rather, stroking, kneading as though she were bread dough.

  She swallowed over the shock clogging her throat.

  “No,” she croaked.

  He bent his head and in the murky silence in which the gay music of the ball was only a distant echo, she could hear his breathing, each inhale and exhale a perfectly controlled statement of composure.

  “You are certain?” he said as calmly as though he were asking if she preferred tea to coffee.

  “Yes.”

  His hand slid up her side and wrapped around her waist.

  “What are you doing?” she rasped.

  His thumb stroked along the ridge of her lowest rib and a horrible, wonderful cascade of pleasure descended inside her.

  “Getting closer to that key,” he said.

  No air was reaching her lungs. Hot springs were erupting within her—from her throat to her belly—everywhere—and her head was dizzy and she simply could not breathe. She pressed her shoulder blades into the door, flattening her back against it. His grasp was at once light and complete, like the levity she had always felt from him, and the intensity.

  “You wouldn’t,” she uttered.

  “Aye,” he said so close she could sense the movement of air between them. “I would.” In one smooth movement he brought his hand beneath her arm. The base of his palm encompassed the curve of her breast, his thumb sliding over the soft muslin of her bodice.

  Her throat was completely jammed. Her tongue would not function. For the first time in years her entire body was hot, fevered, on fire.

  “You will actually do it?” she said without breath. “Reach down my gown?”

  “You’ve given me no choice.”

  “What if I run away across the room now? Will you come after the key?”

  “Go ahead.” It was more animal snarl than human speech. “Run.” His thumb traced a line up the side of her breast, and decadent pleasure curled through her. “’Tis what you always prefer.”

  The door handle jiggled. A firm knock jolted the panel.

  Neither of them moved. If she shifted the slightest bit, her entire breast would be in his hand. Her stomach was a yarn basket of knots.

  Another knock came. Another jiggle of the handle.

  She could just make out his features, the sensual lips set in a hard line, the perfect slant of his cheekbones, the lock of satiny hair dipping toward his eyes, the drugging intensity of his gaze still on her.

  He was no longer breathing with ease.

  “Do you see, sir?” came Libby Shaw’s voice from the other side of the door. “It is locked.”

  “Aye, Miss Shaw,” a man said. “During a public ball it always be locked. Now, I’ll just be finding the correct key.” Keys jingled.

  “Promise to meet me in a quarter of an hour,” Amarantha whispered to the big, handsome, dark man whose hand was creating a hurricane inside her, “at the end of the block, by the green, and I will slip away and hide now. Then you will not be obliged to explain this circumstance. For I cannot imagine you wish to give everybody yet another reason to think the worst of you.”

  “Lass, if you imagine I care anything o’ what anybody thinks o’ me”—he bent his head closer and she felt the brush of that lock of hair against her brow—“you havena been reading the papers.”

  “Here!” the man exclaimed as his keys rattled again. “I’ve found it, miss.”

  “Invite me to your castle,” Amarantha said quickly. “To Haiknayes.”

  “Haiknayes?” He was staring at her lips.

  Brass clinked in the keyhole.

  “’Tis a sticky lock, miss. I’ve to summon the locksmith here to see to a number o’ doors.”

  “If you do not invite me to Haiknayes,” Amarantha whispered, “I will go there anyway. I will gain entrance. I will scour the countryside around it. I will ask everyone every little question that occurs to me. I will learn what I must whether you wish it or not.”

  The door handle turned. She dodged to the side and the panel swung open. The duke seized it just before it slammed into her nose.

  “Duke!” Libby said on the other side of it. “Were you speaking with someone else in here? I thought I heard a woman’s voice.”

  “Good evening, Miss Shaw.” His fingers slipped away from the edge of the door.

  “I am glad to see that you have in fact come to town,” Libby said. “Everybody downstairs is talking about it, of course. Silly gossips.”

  “Your Grace,” the key man said. “Begging pardon for disturbing you and . . . ?”

  “You havena disturbed me. I am alone here.”

  Another whorl of tingles flew up Amarantha’s middle.

  “You departed Edinburgh last summer without fulfilling your promise to me,” Libby said.

  “The house burned to the ground, lass, with all that was in it. What would you have had me do?” he said with a smile in his voice.

  “I should like to see the collection at Haiknayes,” Libby said with the same familiarity with which she spoke to her father. “I have read that your father’s collection of natural specimens at Haiknayes is in fact much larger and more diverse than the collection at your house in Edinburgh was anyway.”

  “Your Grace?” Dr. Shaw’s words came from farther along the corridor. “What a welcome surprise to meet you here. How do you do?”

  “Papa, the duke should fulfill his promise to allow me to study the old duke’s collection. Shouldn’t he?”

  “Elizabeth, he has only just returned to town. No doubt he has plenty of obligations already.”

  “You have plenty of obligations, Papa, but you do good deeds for people every day. You even share your house with me and Amarantha, who occasionally require your attention, while the duke is a hermit. Duke, you did promise.”

  “That I did.”<
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  “Your Grace,” Dr. Shaw said with a chuckle, “you mustn’t inconvenience yourself.”

  “In fact it will be the opposite of an inconvenience, Papa. I mean to catalogue the old duke’s collection. When I am finished, I will give a complete copy of the catalogue to you, Duke.”

  “Your Grace, I accede to my daughter’s sense of fairness,” Dr. Shaw said. “Now, Elizabeth, the president of the infirmary has agreed to meet you tonight.”

  “Has he?” she cried.

  “But if we tarry here disturbing His Grace’s peace you will certainly lose the opportunity below.”

  “Come along, then, Mr. Keymaster,” Libby said. “I will tell you how to make an oil of graphite to loosen the locks in the building so that you needn’t hire the locksmith. Don’t forget, Duke!” she called back. “We will await your invitation. We will bring Amarantha with us, too. She is wonderfully sensible. And also very kind—far too kind, really. She has agreed to stay with us even though she has a family with magnificent houses in London and Shropshire and even Cumbria now.” Her words began to fade down the corridor. “I’m certain you will like her.”

  “Forgive me, Your Grace,” the doctor said, still close by. “As you are already aware, Elizabeth’s excitement for a project occasionally overcomes her.”

  “’Tis my pleasure, Doctor.”

  A peculiar throbbing began beneath Amarantha’s ribs. The Shaws and the Duke of Loch Irvine were obviously on even-fonder terms than she had thought. In three months of living with the Shaws, she had chosen not to reveal her quest to them. Perhaps if she had, if she had been entirely honest with her friends, she might have already fulfilled it.

  “Elizabeth spoke just now of our friend Mrs. Garland,” the doctor said. “She is intelligent and well traveled. I believe you will find much to admire in her.”

  “To be sure, I already do,” came the duke’s reply so close to the door that Amarantha felt the vibration of the words in her palms on the panel.

  “She is downstairs now,” the doctor said. “I would be happy to make the introduction. But perhaps you prefer a good book to dancing. Have you discovered anything worthwhile here?”

  “More than I dreamed.”

  The door closed, sinking her into black silence disturbed only by the amber glow of the lamp at the other end of the room and her racketing heart.

  He would not meet her tonight. And by the time she returned to the ballroom, he would already have departed. She knew this for certain.

  But he could not evade her forever.

  More than I dreamed.

  Obviously he had not left off with the flirtatious teasing of his youth. That he could say such a thing to her now—touch her so intimately—as though she were still a foolish girl . . .

  But he had fooled everybody in Scotland, after all, for years.

  Shaking herself free of the lingering sensation of his touch, she walked the length of the room to the chair in which he had been sitting. Taking up the book he had discarded, she opened it to the page in which the silken ribbon was lodged.

  “‘The magical properties of newts, frogs, and salamanders,’” she read aloud from the top of the page, “‘and potions to be made when combined with the hair, fingernail clippings, or blood of virgins.’”

  Snapping the book shut, she flipped it over. On the binding stamped in gold leaf was the title: Black Magic: A Complete Compendium of Receipts.

  Setting down the book on the table, she walked to the door, returned the key to the lock, and left the room smiling.

  The Miss Tates were scandalized.

  Rather, nineteen-year-old Jane Tate and seventeen-year-old Cynthia Tate were. Twelve-year-old Iris was sprawled on the bed with a kitten of indeterminate color.

  “Amarantha, are you not . . . cold?” Jane’s doe eyes widened. With lily skin upon which a modest blush always lingered and rosebud lips that never uttered a contrary word, Jane was precisely the sort of woman Paul had believed he was marrying until it was too late.

  Still, Amarantha liked Jane. Her kindness was sincere.

  “I am not cold.” Her toes and nose were like ice. Yet inside, twelve hours since the Duke of Loch Irvine had held her, she was still hot as a brazier.

  “This,” declared Libby, “is the sternum.” She tapped the tip of a wooden baton to the thin strip of linen stretched across Amarantha’s chest. “Often referred to as the breast bone, it is not however beneath the subject’s actual breasts.”

  “And what lovely breasts they are,” Alice Campbell said, not raising her eyes from her work.

  “Miss Alice,” Jane whispered.

  “False modesty never did anybody good, Jane.” A confirmed spinster in her sixth decade, at whose house their little group of friends had taken to gathering, Alice was embroidering a stool cover and paying no attention to Libby’s demonstration of the bones of the human skeleton using Amarantha as a model. “Amarantha’s breasts are lovely,” Alice said. “She may as well admit to it.”

  “Thank you,” Amarantha said. “I hadn’t anything to do with fashioning them, of course.” She drew a slow breath, controlling the heated shiver that came with the memory of his thumb not far from the tip of Libby’s baton now.

  She had allowed it.

  Five and a half years of tepidity, and in mere moments he had roused every dormant ember within her.

  “If I’d had such breasts when I was your age,” Alice said, “I would have been the toast of town.”

  “Who cares about breasts?” Iris flipped the kitten onto its back and ran a fingertip the length of its soft belly.

  “Gentlemen care. They are wild about breasts, the poor creatures.” Alice jabbed her needle through the square of linen that read “Enjoy life. You’re a long time deid.”

  “Gentlemen don’t care about them.” Lounging before the dressing table, Cynthia watched herself in the mirror as she combed and recombed her own hair. “Common men do.”

  Alice snorted. “Cynthia Tate, you have a great deal to learn about men.”

  “Would you care to borrow my shawl, Amarantha?” Jane said.

  “She is perfectly well,” Libby said. “Aren’t you, Amarantha? In the tropics you must have experienced considerably more discomfort than this, after all, not to mention marriage, in which one must be regularly undressed.”

  “Really?” Cynthia’s eyes in the mirror were suddenly wide.

  “If you’re doing it right,” Alice said.

  “Thomas wishes to marry Amarantha, so he must want to see her undressed,” Iris said, untangling the kitten from her hair.

  “Iris,” Jane gasped.

  “Your cousin and I are fond friends, Iris. But I do not believe he wishes to marry me. And I do not wish to marry anyone.”

  “I don’t understand that,” Cynthia said, primping her hair. “I cannot wait for everybody to address me as Missus.”

  “This is the right clavicle,” Libby said, running the pointer along Amarantha’s exposed shoulder to her neck. “And this is the left clavicle.” She slid the pointer along the other bone. “Their principal purpose is to allow the free movement of the arms away from the torso. They are connected to the true ribs”—she tapped Amarantha’s breast where a man had put his hand the night before—“by the sternum, all of which function to protect the fragile organs of the chest cavity.”

  Fragile organ.

  He had callously broken her heart, yet last night he had behaved as though he could tease her and she would fall breathlessly at his feet. Again.

  Not again. No matter how weak her flesh.

  The trouble was, he had actually taken her breaths. And for hours afterward her nipples had been deliciously sensitive.

  Foolish flesh.

  Famished flesh. In four years of marriage her husband had not touched her as intimately as a stranger had in a library.

  He had called them strangers.

  It would make her project of interviewing him easier. As soon as Libby finished the lesson, she
would suggest they find Dr. Shaw and pay a call on the duke—the duke who as a young libertine had never touched her but who now apparently had no qualms about doing so.

  “Is clavicle spelled with two K’s?” Iris had taken a slate upon her knee and the kitten set its tiny teeth to the chalk.

  “Two C’s,” Libby said. “The Scholastics did not use K’s. I wish Tabitha could hear this lesson too.”

  “She has gone to the shop for more paper,” Amarantha said.

  “The who?” Iris said.

  “Scholastics were medieval scholars that wrote in Latin due to the Romans having conquered half of Britain,” Libby said. “They did not conquer the unruly clans of the Highlands, of course. I will lend you a book about it.”

  “I should like to write a book like Amarantha and Tabitha’s,” Iris said.

  “How intrepid you are, sister,” Jane said. “I would not know a thing about writing a book.”

  “That is because you haven’t had any adventures. Amarantha has.”

  “I am not writing, only scribing,” Amarantha said. “Tabitha is dictating her story to me.”

  “Why isn’t Tabitha writing it herself?” Iris said.

  “She only learned how to write a few years ago,” Jane said. “Amarantha writes more swiftly and fluently.”

  And some things were simply better done with a friend.

  “Elizabeth dear,” Alice said, “Amaratha’s lips have turned blue.”

  “We have fifty-six bones still to review.”

  “Her phalanges are as pale as sheep’s milk.”

  Libby set her fists on her hips. “Miss Alice, you have been listening.”

  “And her patellas are knocking together.”

  “Pattelae.”

  “Won’t you capture a chill, Amarantha?” Jane said.

  “I am fine.” Burning up in sinful fire.

  She could still hear Paul’s words on their wedding night: Inordinate carnal desire is not love, my lady. It is lust. I will not put your pure soul in peril by tempting your flesh. I promise it will be quick.

  It had been. Very quick. And so painful that she had dreaded the next night. Yet that had not been the worst. The worst was when she eventually learned to bear the pain and finally ventured to touch him.