Page 3 of A Gamble on the Duke (The Gambling Dukes #4)

TWO

Catherine

Look. I hadn’t had a hot meal in days—the room within which I lodged had a fireplace, obviously, but that required having money to buy food, and that had been in relatively short supply the last few days.

So I wanted a free luncheon. It was hardly a crime.

What did feel like a crime was stepping into that restaurant wearing…well. Anything that wasn’t silk. The place simply ached with money, from the way the waiter looked at me like dirt on his shoe, to the genteel quiet conversation just audible over the pianoforte music.

I smiled weakly. “Um.”

“Um?” said the Ma?tre d’ with a raised eyebrow. “I am sorry to say, Miss, that we do not have any reservations under the name of Um.”

I tried not to laugh. It wasn’t that amusing, as jests went. It was also only a few heartbeats later that I realized the man wasn’t joking.

“Oh,” I said a little helplessly. “Right.”

And that was when I realized that the gentleman I’d accosted and redecorated with my raspberry pastries…hadn’t given me his name.

“I'm meeting a man here,” I said impulsively.

The second eyebrow met the first, high up on the Ma?tre d’s forehead. “Indeed.”

It sounded daft when I said it like that, but it was the truth. “He asked me to meet him here for luncheon at one. I know I'm fifteen minutes late?—”

“Eighteen minutes late,” said a voice behind the Ma?tre d’. “Apologies, Simeon. She’s with me.”

The waiter turned and became all politeness. “Oh, Your Grace, how wonderful to be hosting you again. You are seated at your usual table?”

Usual table? Your Grace?

Oh, hell. What on earth had I managed to get myself into?

The man was a duke, or a marquess at the very least—and the man must be rolling in money to be coming here often enough to have a regular table. The only place that knew my regular order was the coffeehouse just down the street from the room I rented, and that was because I ran on coffee.

It was a habit, now I came to think about it, that I should probably stop. Coffee was expensive.

Wait—stop and think, Catherine. A duke. You’re about to have lunch with a duke?

“If you will follow me,” murmured the Ma?tre d’, all politeness.

I almost tripped over my own hemline as I was led through the resplendent ferns to a table covered in more cutlery than I’d ever seen in my life. When the waiter left, it was not before casting my host a worried smile .

And I had to think of him as my host because I still didn’t know the man’s name.

Your Grace. Your Grace!

“Catherine,” he said, waiting for me to be seated before taking his own chair. “A pleasure to see you again.”

I raked his face for sarcasm—after all, the last time I’d seen him, I’d doused him in something intensely sticky.

But he didn’t look sarcastic. He didn’t look anything, except devilishly handsome and once again well attired, this time in a light blue waistcoat with a jacket that looked as though it had been made for him.

It probably had. Anyone who could afford a meal here…

“What’s your name?” I blurted out.

Well, it wasn’t like I’d been brought up with a silver spoon in my mouth. Was there a polite way to ask that?

At least he seemed to know the polite way to answer that. “Kineallen. Alfred, Duke of Kineallen. You have heard of me, of course.”

I blinked. “Are you…a duke?”

Dukes had buckets of money, didn’t they? Practically breathed out the stuff. Yes, I could believe this man was a duke. Just look at the way he sat there.

By the smile turning up the corner of his mouth, evidently not. “Yes. Yes, I’m a duke.”

A duke. An actual duke.

You read about them. You knew they existed, somewhere out there. You never actually expected to meet one.

“Right.” I tried not to stare, as though I’d met plenty of dukes in my time. “And you said you had a proposition for me.”

That was it—all I had to do was keep reminding myself that this was a business meeting. Sort of. In one of the fanciest restaurants in London .

I swallowed. Heavens, I had never felt more out of place. This was the sort of restaurant that the noblest in the land added their names to waiting lists to. Just walking in here made me feel…poor.

I hated that feeling.

“Yes, I wished to make you an offer I think you will enjoy,” the Duke of Kineallen said smoothly as food began to arrive. “You don’t have any preferences, I suppose?”

“What would you do if I did?” I said blankly, staring at the complicated looking dishes that were being placed on our table. “You ordered without me?”

“I was here on time,” he pointed out, picking up a knife and fork.

Heat blazed across my cheeks. If he had bothered to ask, this Duke of Kineallen, he would have discovered that I’d had a problem with the lock and had to wait half an hour for the locksmith to come and replace the blasted thing so that I could lock up my shop securely before leaving it.

The other tenants on Mr. Matthews’s street had not been impressed.

“I—”

“As I said, I have a proposition. One which I think will be both lucrative, and…pleasurable.”

My heart jolted, and most against my wishes, the place between my thighs throbbed. “I am an artist, not a street walker.”

I should have known this was all too good to be true. Luncheon at a place like this? This was not the place for me.

My napkin was on the table and my chair pushed back before the Duke of Kineallen could say anything. When he did speak, it was with the words, “I need a fake relationship. ”

I froze, half off my seat, then slowly sank down. “I beg your pardon?”

He dabbed at his mouth with his own napkin and I tried not to look at his lips. “I need to be courting someone, a young lady. Just for a few weeks, it won’t be arduous. We’ll need to get you cleaned up, of course?—”

My hands instinctively went to my hair. “Why?”

“—and a wardrobe will be provided for you,” the Duke of Kineallen was continuing, as though I hadn’t said anything. “You’ll be required to attend functions, smile and laugh, and pretend to be courting me.” His cool eyes met mine. “I hope that doesn’t sound too arduous.”

I stared. Then I laughed. “You’re not serious.”

“It’s a simple matter of keeping up appearances, that’s all,” he said with a shrug. “It happens all the time.”

“Maybe in your world?—”

“Precisely. And I don’t need the complication of feelings, or emotions, or love or any of that nonsense,” said the Duke of Kineallen, leaning back in his chair and examining me. “You need money. You could quit your job at that clay place?—”

“Art shop and?—”

“—and I’ll pay you several hundred pounds for the work.”

I blinked. Several…several hundred pounds?

He couldn’t be serious. Could he? Random gentlemen did not offer people like me hundreds of pounds just to prance about in pretty clothes and attend parties.

Not in this lifetime.

“You want to spend several hundred pounds…on having me on your arm?” I said, disbelieving.

The Duke of Kineallen nodded slowly without taking his eyes from me. “What sounds unnecessary to you is, I can assure you, most necessary to me. I need a woman about the place to keep looking the part. I had two?—”

Oh he did, did he?

“—but they have both recently wed, and now have other entanglements,” continued the Duke of Kineallen calmly. “I have no wish to wed. I don’t want the entanglement. Hiring you for a few weeks, well. Why not?”

I swallowed, hard, head spinning and heart hammering. “Your two other mistresses—they married?”

“Mistresses?” For a moment, the Duke of Kineallen stared at me in confusion. Then he chuckled. “Oh, Georgiana and Lilah weren’t my mistresses—they were my friends. Co-founders of the Gambling Dukes.”

My eyebrows raised, if possible, even further. “The Gambling Dukes?”

“The four of us friends—the Duke of Markham, the Dowager Duchesses of Rotherwick and Cartice, and myself—we had all lost our spouses and were in need of funds,” the Duke of Kineallen said calmly, as though this was a minor setback and one to be rectified swiftly. “We formed the Gambling Dukes.”

“The…the Gambling Dukes.” Was that all I could say?

The Duke of Kineallen inclined his head as he sipped his wine. “Indeed. We made bets, wagers, lived off the proceeds.”

Well. It was easy enough for some, I supposed.

“We have opened up the club to other members with the expectation this shall establish for us a competency,” the Duke of Kineallen continued. “My three other founding members have all recently found themselves ensnared in a scheme I will not join.”

I stared. “I see.” I did not .

His smile was dark. “Marriage, Miss Shenton. They have all married.”

“Oh.” And I was absolutely not looking at the man and thinking about matrimony. His tall frame, his dark eyes, that wicked expression?—

“And yet it is incumbent upon me to host many a gathering, and attend even more to ensure I attract the right members to our club,” the Duke of Kineallen said with a sigh, as though it was most arduous to attend balls and parties and the like.

“I need a companion—someone to attend with me, to take on the partial burden of entertaining. Someone like you.”

Right. Well. A devilishly handsome gentleman—a duke!—has just offered you serious money—like, serious money—to spend time with him and be wined and dined.

Where’s the catch?

“And obviously any…any physical interaction is absolutely out of the question,” the Duke of Kineallen said delicately.

Now my cheeks had to be a blazing red. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me, but now…

Well. He was a handsome gentleman. In a way, it was a shame that such intimacy was off the?—

Careful, Cat, I warned myself. That’s the slippery slope to being a courtesan. He’s off limits.

Wait. Was I going through with this?

The image of Mr. Matthews appeared in my mind’s eye.

“Fine. You’ll get your money in six days.”

“And on the seventh, I’ll change the locks. Nice doing business with you, Cat.”

I stiffened my resolve and tried to ignore the tendrils of attraction that were already curling around my heart. “You need a woman to be courting.”