Page 13 of Don’t Let Your Dukes Grow Up To Be Scoundrels (Dukes in Disguise #1)

Hal managed to stay away for five whole days.

Five days of breaking his back over getting the grass and hay brought in before the weather shifted and they were hit with spring showers that would turn the fields into muddy swamps and the hay into piles of moldy rubbish.

Five days of scrounging his meals at the Manor, nothing but cold bread and cheese.

Five days of hearing about the trickle of new guests to the inn turning into a steady stream—thus far, mainly a steady stream of ladies hoping to encounter the dashing highwayman who was now being written up in all the papers as The Gentle Rogue after the first highly romanticized chapter of his story had been serialized in the London Observator by an anonymous author.

Five days of falling into bed exhausted but still totally unable to sleep until he’d succumbed to the temptation of reliving those sweet, stolen moments of heated passion with Gemma.

Five days of waking up hard as stone, with nothing but the touch of his own hand for release.

On the fifth day, he woke up hard, yet again. By now, he didn’t even bother to pretend he would be able to go about his day until he took care of the inconvenience between his legs. With a deep sigh, he got down to business, trying to keep it mechanical and impersonal, a physical release and nothing more.

The scrape of his callus-roughened palm was a maddening contrast to the memory of Gemma’s smooth, silky skin. He breathed in deep and pretended he could catch a whiff of her honeyed cinnamon scent. His mouth watered for the taste of her. He fisted his cock and gritted his teeth against the images that flooded his mind, but they were too vivid, too strong, too enticing.

Closing his eyes, Hal let himself drown in the memories of Gemma’s lush, curvy softness and ardent, uninhibited response as his hand tightened at the base of his cock and twisted to pull all the sensation up to the tip. With a muffled curse, Hal flung himself over on the bed so he could drive his hips down into the tight circle of his fist. Pounding hard, it was the memory of the way she moaned his name that sent him over the edge.

For the fifth day in a row, Hal panted and shivered his way through the aftershocks of orgasm and wondered what Gemma was doing at that exact moment before he caught himself.

It didn’t matter what she did. She was no concern of his.

Hal had his duty to his tenants and the small farmers who lived in the county. He had his own plans, and they didn’t involve dashing about the countryside pursuing a London lady who couldn’t wait to shake the dust of this place from her heels.

On that fifth day, Hal resolved yet again to take no notice of Lady Gemma Lively or her antics. Her plans would either come to fruition and she would find a Prince Charming to whisk her away from Little Kissington, or they would come to naught, and she would—here his brain ran down to a stop, like a clock that needed winding.

He didn’t know what would happen if her plans came to naught, and he didn’t care, he told himself firmly, hoisting his sore body from the bed and tossing on his clothes.

One day at a time. He had stayed away from her for five days; he could manage to stay away from her for a sixth.

Except he never made it to day six, because on that fifth day, little Peter Cartwright, who’d been hired on as a potboy at the Five Mile, came bounding up the path to Kissington Manor to tell Hal the news.

“Hal! Hal! Lady Gemma has a man!”

Hal’s heart lurched in his chest. He hitched his leather satchel of tools higher on his shoulder and clapped young Peter on the back. “Slow down, there. Catch your breath before you choke, and then tell me everything.”

Between gasps for air, Peter managed to relate that three days earlier, a splendid carriage had pulled up and disgorged no less than a baronet!

“Thir Gilbert Grathy,” Peter lisped through the gap in his front teeth, his button nose scrunching with the effort of getting the name right. “Went thtraight in and up to his private room, he did, and brought a manthervant with him. I helped with the horthes and his coachman told me Thir Gilbert is thingle and on his way to take the waters for his health, but he’d heard the Five Mile was a worthwhile thtop along the route from London to Bath!”

A chill skated down Hall’s back. This was it. It was exactly Gemma’s plan, and it appeared against all odds to actually be working.

That dandified Duke of Thornecliff and his high-and-mighty friends must have spread the word far and wide, and now here was a plump, juicy baronet swimming right into Gemma’s net. And he’d been there for three days—easily enough time to fall under Gemma’s enchanting spell, as Hal could attest from personal experience.

He had to see this for himself.

He ought to stay away, Hal told himself even as he strode down the hill toward the village, his long legs eating up the distance so that Peter had to break into a little jog to keep up with him.

It was unlikely that one of the aristocratic visitors to Five Mile House would recognize Hal as the elusive Duke of Havilocke, but it wasn’t impossible.

It was damned lucky that Hal had never had much use for Polite Society. Of course there were the years he’d spent at Eton and Oxford with the scions of other noble families, but since then, he’d spent more time traveling than he had in England. Until Walter died, and Hal finally came home.

There had been a bad moment when the Duke of Thornecliff stared at Hal across the taproom, he recalled uneasily, but the reprobate hadn’t said a word to indicate he’d seen anything other than what he expected to see: a barman.

A duke saw a man behind a bar, a man whose job it was to serve him, and that servant instantly became invisible to the duke. It would be a rare peer of the realm who deigned to even acknowledge the existence of someone so supposedly beneath him, much less to look at Hal closely enough to recognize him beneath his beard.

Hal’s secret was safe.

All the way to Little Kissington, Peter kept up a steady stream of gossip (“The coachman thaid the baronet has theven thousand a year and a houthe in Mayfair and a country ethtate in Kent!” “Lady Gemma has waited on him hand and foot thince he arrived!” “Sir Gilbert complains of many ailments but he et a huge thupper latht night including of goose and plenty of port, so I think I know what’th ailin’ him and maybe I ought to be a doctor one day, what do you think?”) which made Hal very glad he’d suggested the boy for the position.

Anything that happened at Five Mile House was observed by Peter’s keen brown eyes, and faithfully related to his good friend, Hal.

Of course, now Hal could barely hear the boy’s chatter over the incessant drumbeat in his ears, throbbing out one word over and over: MINE .

Finally, they reached the village. “You’ve done well, Peter,” Hal complimented the boy as they walked into the inn’s courtyard. “Run along to Mrs. Pickford in the kitchen and see if she has any jobs for you, there’s a good boy.”

With a cheeky grin creasing his brown cheeks, Peter tugged at his forelock and took off for the kitchen door at a run. Sparing a moment to envy his youthful energy, Hal took a detour through the stable to inspect the carriage and horseflesh residing within.

Nothing flashy—nowhere near as fine an equipage as the Duke of Thornecliff’s had been, for example—but a tidy little coach and four with scrupulously polished harnesses and fastenings. The horses were good stock but not exceptional.

Hal frowned. Sir Gilbert, thus far, seemed sensible and unpretentious. Hal disliked him immensely.

Pushing open the door to the taproom, Hal stood still for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dimmer indoor light. His little spy had reported previously that when the gentry stayed overnight, the bar would be repurposed into a breakfast buffet the following morning, but today there was nothing set up.

Interesting. Hal took the back stairs down to the kitchen to scrounge a cup of coffee and get the full story from Bess.

But when he got to the kitchens, they were in a full uproar. Instead of Bess’s usual oasis of calm competence, there were pots askew in the washbasin, multiple pans on the cooktop, piled high into wobbly towers, a fine coating of flour dusting the table and a slick of some spilled gravy or sauce striping the center of the floor.

Bess herself was standing at the counter beside the oven, stirring something in a bowl with swift, frantic whips of a bundle of clean, flexible twigs.

Before Hal could ask what the hell was going on, a bell rang. Bess audibly groaned, her eyes fluttering shut for a moment in despair, before the clatter of racing footsteps heralded Lucy’s progress down the stairs.

Red-cheeked and scowling, she slammed down the tray she was holding and growled, “This porridge was ‘too rich’ if you can believe it. Now he’s saying what he really wants is a light consommé with some dry toast.”

Bess dropped her bowl, apparently not noticing or caring that some of whatever she’d been stirring slopped out of the side. “Consommé? That’s like broth, isn’t it? Let me see.”

Whirling to reach the top of her shelf of pots and pans, where a few cookbooks resided, Bess caught sight of Hal. “Oh! Hal. You’ve caught us at sixes and sevens this morning, I’m afraid. There’s no coffee.”

He blinked. No coffee. From somewhere upstairs, a bell rang again, insistently.

“If he keeps ringing that bell, I vow I shall snatch it from him and, and…stick it somewhere very unpleasant!” Lucy looked up at the ceiling, crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue before running back upstairs.

Laughing, Bess shook her head and leafed through a tattered, stained copy of Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Families . “She won’t. Gemma says we’ve all got to do whatever it takes to make Sir Gilbert’s stay a pleasant one. Ooh, it says here it’s an extra rich stock, but it’s also supposed to be perfectly clear somehow, not cloudy a bit. Comes from being boiled for hours and skimmed, I expect, but we don’t have hours! And it’s not as if I keep con-som-may on hand!”

“Bess,” Hal said firmly, marching into the kitchen to grasp her lightly by the upper arms. “What in the devil is going on around here?”

“It’s that Sir Gilbert,” Bess burst out, her complexion more skim milk than sweet cream. “Nothing we do is right for the man, and he can’t decide what he wants to eat to treat his…whatever he has. Oh, do let me go, there’s a dear, I’ve got to figure something out about this broth. Do you want some breakfast? You can have this porridge, I doubt he’s even touched it.”

Hal eyed the “too-rich” porridge, which actually looked far thinner and gloopier than Bess’s usual thick, smooth oatmeal.

“No, thank you,” he said politely as another peal of the bell sounded from upstairs. Bess jumped at the sound and hurried back to her stovetop. Hal looked at the stairs.

Morbid curiosity propelled him up them, along with a need to see this Sir Gilbert for himself.

Upstairs was no more calm or serene than the kitchens, he found. Lucy and Henrietta both appeared to be rushing about like chickens who didn’t realize their heads had already been chopped off, aimless and squawking.

They fetched and carried various things while he watched: clean linen face towels, smelling salts, a new pillow, then a different pillow pilfered from another bedchamber, and then yet a third pillow when the first two proved inadequate.

All the rushing around centered on the largest private chamber, the one Hal remembered setting up with the best of his family’s heirlooms. The bed, he believed, had belonged to his great uncle and had been hand-carved by a local artisan. The headboard depicted a pastoral scene of shepherds minding their flock.

The door to the chamber stood open, and it was from within that room that the intermittent bell ringing could be heard.

Over Lucy’s muttered complaints and Henrietta’s rattled nerves, Hal could just barely make out a breathy tenor voice raised in confident demand…and the soothingly soft, musical tones of Gemma’s replies.

In a lull between pillow deliveries, Hal stepped to the open doorway and peered in.

The sumptuous, comfortable bedroom had been transformed into a sickroom. For some reason best known to himself, Sir Gilbert appeared to have arranged for the mattress to be removed from the four-poster bed and deposited on the floor, where he reclined, propped up with a multitude of pillows and wearing a dark red silk brocade dressing gown. The young man was entirely unknown to Hal, which allowed him to relax a bit.

Hal wondered if the demands for new pillows were to replace ones that had become soaked with the buckets of pomade required by Sir Gilbert’s artfully tousled dark curls.

Sir Gilbert had the sunken-eyed look of a poet in the early stages of consumption, at once pallid and feverish, full of things he needed desperately to communicate. One white-fingered hand clutched a small brass bell, the other…Gemma’s wrist.

For an invalid, he had quite a strong grip, Hal observed.

Gemma, who appeared to be attempting to pull away and rise to her feet, said, “Sir Gilbert, please, if you’ll only let me go down to the kitchen, I’m sure I can manage?—”

“No,” Sir Gilbert interrupted peremptorily. “You stay here. I know we’ve been acquainted but a few days, yet I find myself strangely comforted by your presence. Do you not believe in love at first sight? I do! If you leave my side, there is no telling what spasms shall overcome me. Stay, and let me read you another of my verses.”

Alarm widened Gemma’s eyes even as she swayed wearily on her knees at Sir Gilbert’s floor mattress bedside.

“Yes, sir, of course,” she soothed him while Hal held in a laugh and congratulated himself on his diagnosis of fashionably consumptive romantic poet.

Gemma gazed around her in obvious desperation, and Hal leaned against the doorjamb with his arms crossed over his chest and waited to be observed.

The moment she saw him, she gasped, and her lovely bosom rose and fell with the sharp intake of breath. Hal watched with interest, as did Sir Gilbert, whose vantage point was likely even more thrilling. Hal frowned.

She jerked her head at him in the direction of the hallway, her expression fierce; Hal divined that she would like him to leave. He also noted the way the motion of her head caused other portions of Gemma to jiggle interestingly. Sir Gilbert noticed it too.

“Yes, dear lady, sweet lady,” Sir Gilbert said fervently, his watery brown eyes fastened securely to the curve of Gemma’s breasts, “do not think of leaving my side. I shall surely die without you.”

Above his head, where Sir Gilbert could not see, Gemma rolled her eyes up to the heavens as though asking for special dispensation to do violence to another of God’s creatures. At least, violence was what Hal was contemplating as he realized that Sir Gilbert was steadily encouraging Gemma to bend down closer and closer to him until she was all but reclined on the hard wood floor beside his mattress.

Sir Gilbert appeared not to have noticed there was another man present; unsurprising, when his face was that near Gemma’s bountiful person. Hal could not blame anyone for finding that distracting. But since he wasn’t interested in watching whatever fumbling seduction was about to take place, Hal cleared his throat.

“Lady Gemma,” he said courteously, sketching a small bow. “And Sir Gilbert. I came to see if you required any help.”

“Can’t a man have any peace in this place?” Sir Gilbert cried, impassioned. “All these people coming and going with bowls of this and that and stuffing pillows behind one’s head, it’s exhausting! And now some scruffy, unkempt stable hand wants to know how he can help? It’s intolerable.”

The poetic lassitude had vanished, overcome by a distinct petulance that made itself known in the whine of his final words. Hal watched Gemma grit her teeth over the tart reply she so clearly wished to make. She managed to swallow it and produce a sickly smile instead.

Not having any ambition of his own to marry a baronet, Hal decided to help out. He widened his eyes. “Oh, sir, shall I fetch a doctor? There’s one who lives in the next village, only a few miles away; hopefully not too drunk yet by this time in the morning!”

Hal said a mental apology to old Dr. Phipps, who certainly deserved no such slander.

Sir Gilbert, meanwhile, had assumed an expression that made it look as though someone had slapped him with a codfish. His eyes, already quite round, seemed to bulge slightly. Hal realized the man was actually afraid.

“A doctor,” cried Sir Gilbert, bringing a hand to his throat. “Why?”

Hal blinked innocently. “Why, because you seem to have lost your memory! You complained of being interrupted constantly, but it was you yourself who ordered those many variations on breakfast and bedding—do you not recall?”

The sallow cheeks went ruddy with rage, momentary fear forgotten. “Why, you impudent?—”

“Sir Gilbert,” Gemma interrupted with a touch of desperation, “do not overtax yourself! You have indeed been complaining all morning of feeling unwell. I would see you rest, sir.”

The baronet subsided against his many pillows, his hand going out again to clutch at Gemma as his eyes fluttered shut. “Yes, very well. As long as you stay with me, sweet lady.”

The sweet lady grimaced and shifted her hip where it pressed into the hardwood. Hal quirked a brow. “Why is the mattress on the floor, if I might ask?”

“For my back,” the baronet bit out, not opening his eyes.

His back. The threat of spasms. The very real fear he’d shown at the mention of needing a doctor—Hal lounged in the doorway and considered the baronet.

Yes, it was the fashion for poetical young men to affect a tremulous, languishing temperament. But this was something more. It reminded Hal of the way his brother’s wife had become obsessed with her own health whenever they were too long in the country; any illness she heard about or thought of, no sooner had it crossed her mind than she was certain she suffered from it.

Her only true ailment, from what Hal had seen, was chronic boredom, but the constant whirl of physicians, bed rest, medications, treatments, poultices, and certainty of imminent death had kept her very well entertained. And it had the added benefit of forcing the entire household to divert every scrap of attention in her direction.

Hal thought of the chaos downstairs in the kitchen and realized why it had felt familiar. It was exactly the sort of scene his sister-in-law’s bouts of malaise had caused.

On the floor, Gemma shifted again, clearly in some discomfort, only to have her dozing suitor pout and pull her down more firmly at his side. He could at least let her share the mattress, Hal thought absently, then stood up straight in surprise at the volcano of rage the image ignite in his belly.

MINE.

He was still angry with Gemma for pursuing this ludicrous course. He was angry that she stubbornly clung to the hope of a vapid, empty life as a London socialite instead of seeing the possibilities that were right in front of her. He was angry that he might have chosen to see something in her that wasn’t there.

Because of all that, he’d assumed it would be enjoyable to watch this absurdity play out. To watch her dance attendance on this querulous baronet who clearly cared more for his own comfort than anything else.

Hal thought it would make him feel better, or at least cure him of this ridiculously tenacious fixation on her. To see Gemma betray herself by cynically, desperately setting her cap at some awful gentleman.

But it didn’t. If anything, it made the gnawing ache in his gut sharper and the anger in his chest hotter.

He hated it. He wanted it to stop.

And suddenly, he realized he knew exactly how to get rid of Sir Gilbert Gracy.

Hal locked eyes with Gemma for a moment. Unhappiness and defiance seemed to be fighting for control of her countenance, but of course defiance won.

He almost smiled to see it; of course, Gemma would not be daunted by this suitor’s eccentricities—not if he had a fortune large enough to make up for them. And seven thousand a year would keep her and her family in comfort.

So long as Gemma didn’t mind being a nursemaid to a perfectly healthy man, instead of merely his wife.

His mind on the first steps of his plan, Hal turned to leave. He was arrested by a quiet noise from Gemma, a sound he hadn’t heard before, almost like a plea. But when he looked back over his shoulder, she had turned her lovely face away so all he had was her profile. As cool and perfect as a cameo brooch.

She looked distant, untouchable in a way that made Hal’s hands close into fists to keep from reaching for her. But there was no time. He had things to do.

There was an unsuitable suitor to send packing.

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