Page 11 of Hazardous to a Duke’s Heart (Lords of Hazard #1)

T he next morning, Jon was surprised when Tory, still wearing mourning attire, met him at the door of the art room.

“I’m exactly on time,” he pointed out.

“So you are.” Her smile warmed him through. “I just wasn’t certain you understood we would still have our lesson today.”

He stared at her, perplexed, as he walked into the room. “I did agree to the rules you established.”

“Well, I didn’t know how you perceived our bargain. Is it one lesson for every social event I attend? Because I didn’t attend any social events yesterday.”

He chuckled. “I’m not that rigid, I swear. But if you prefer, should we find ourselves with two social events in one day, I’ll make sure you attend both. To keep us even.”

She cocked her head. “And just how exactly do you mean to ‘make sure’ I attend?”

“I think you know I can be very persuasive,” he said in a low voice.

When she colored, he had a moment of pleasure at seeing her react as strongly to him as he did to her. Then he chided himself. He wasn’t courting her, nor was he trying to seduce her into his bed. Since neither was acceptable, he must keep their encounters professional.

Even if he had spent the night dreaming of her naked. Indeed, that had been the reason for his sleeping late and barely making it to the art room on time.

Turning on her heel, Tory removed her black shawl and hung it on a nearby hook, then headed toward a long table set directly below the largest window. “Perhaps we should draw up a contract so there’s no confusion about the specifics of our bargain.”

He laughed. “Shall I add that to the many things I mean to discuss with your father’s solicitor this afternoon?”

She halted to glare at him. “You can’t see my solicitor without me.”

“I can. I’m executor of your father’s estate. I must consult with the man.”

“Oh. I suppose that’s true.” She crossed her arms over her bosom. “Then I wish to go with you, at least the first time.” Her stance screamed irate female here .

He considered her demand. Yesterday afternoon, Beasley had doctored the codicil to Jon’s satisfaction, and the extra page had matched the others quite well. But well enough to fool a solicitor? That, he did not know. Still, this was the only way to continue in his scheme, so he might as well let her be there. Because if it all went to hell in a handbasket, he’d rather it be sooner than later.

He’d also arranged with the family banker to have five thousand pounds put aside for Morris’s family. If anyone questioned why the dowry was coming from the Falconridge account, Jon would merely point out that Morris had entrusted his money to Jon on his deathbed, and Jon had dutifully put it into an account for Morris’s daughter.

“We’ll ride to my solicitor’s in Alban’s phaeton,” he said. “That way you won’t need a chaperone.”

Only then did she relax.

He joined her at the table, noticing a small, marble sphinx sculpture, along with a real pear, a horse figure, and a lumpy clay reproduction of the Discobolus.

When he picked up the last one to examine it, she said, “I made that one. I wanted to show you that you couldn’t do any worse than my awful first sculpture. And that effort was despite all the time I spent studying the original.”

“So, you chose a naked man for one of your early attempts?” He tried not to smile, but his lips weren’t listening, for they curved up in spite of him. “Clearly, you’re as enamored of nude figures as I am.”

With a frown, she snapped, “I wanted to portray a nude in motion. None of the Venuses are in motion.”

“That certainly explains your choice,” he drawled.

She narrowed her gaze on him. “How about if we don’t focus on my choice and instead focus on yours?”

That brought him up short. “Good God, you sounded so much like your father just then. He liked to turn things back on me, too.”

“It’s a good teaching technique, you must admit,” she countered, arching one eyebrow.

“It is, indeed.”

“So, have you thought any more about what you’d wish to sculpt?”

He hadn’t, though he knew better than to admit it. Besides, he really wanted to sculpt her , for when she finally found a husband and disappeared into married life. Sadly, he lacked the ability. “Why don’t we start with the pear? That seems simplest. And I wouldn’t need a sketch for it, do you think?”

“You can probably get by without one.” She pulled a bucket from beneath the table. “You can recreate it in clay. If it’s good enough, we’ll make a mold of it, and do a casting in bronze.” She flashed him an impish smile. “Assuming you can afford such an expensive metal, Your Grace.”

“I have no idea what I can afford, to be honest.” The banker could only tell him what was in the various accounts, not what his financial obligations were. “I stayed up late last night looking through the account books and papers Mother gave me, but I can’t clarify anything until I speak with the accountants and the land agent. Which I hope to do today after I meet with your solicitor.”

She nodded. “Then we’d better get started. You can work right here by the window. I’ll sit beside you and give you instructions where needed.”

When they were seated, she was so close to him that her skirts brushed against his trousers—so close he could easily pull her onto his lap.

Stop that! You won’t be pulling her onto your lap, for God’s sake. You’re a gentleman now, and not the wild young fellow you were when you left London.

More’s the pity.

“Don’t you think?” she asked.

Damn. He had no idea what she’d just said. “I . . . er . . . sure. I agree.”

“Wonderful! I was worried you wouldn’t. But you won’t regret it. Chloe has been dying to see your friend Heathbrook again, and she’ll be ecstatic when she hears you’ll invite him to your box at the theater tonight. She was hesitant to ask you herself to invite him. I think your comments about Bow Street runners gave her pause the other night.”

Oh, bloody hell, he’d just agreed to put Chloe and Heathbrook in a box together? His box, which he’d only two days ago remembered that the family had? His mind raced, but he couldn’t think of a way to get out of inviting his friend.

A sigh escaped him. He’d better invite Scovell, too. And make sure Mother was fine with it. Because he didn’t trust Heathbrook one whit when it came to women, and certainly not when it came to his sister.

This was what he got for lusting after Tory—he lost his wits when he was around her. He had to stop doing that.

Reaching under the table to the bucket of clay, Miss Oblivious-to-His-Lusting Morris dug out a lump much bigger than the pear. “This shape is very easy to create. Essentially, you start with two balls—one half the size of the other.”

An inappropriate joke came into his head that he squelched with some difficulty. The old Jon would have spoken it just to see the reaction of the woman he was with.

The old Jon had been an arse.

Meanwhile, she divided the clay into two unequal parts and offered him the larger part.

He reached for it with his gloved hand, and she said, “You won’t want to wear your gloves for this. You’ll get them too grimy to keep.”

“Right,” he said, though he still hesitated, hating that she would see his marred flesh again.

As if reading his mind, she said kindly, “Your hands aren’t as bad as all that, you know. Nor am I the squeamish sort.”

“I didn’t think you were,” he said coolly, and yanked his gloves off.

She placed the lump of clay in his ravaged palm. “Now, roll that into a ball.”

“I believe I can manage that. I might never have done any sculpting, but I certainly played in mud as a boy.” As he rolled his, she rolled hers, and his mind wandered again . . . to what it would be like to have her hand fondling a certain part of his anatomy—rolling and squeezing lightly and . . .

“Very good!” she said. “What a perfectly round ball.”

“Er . . . thank you.”

“Now I suppose you can figure out what to do next.”

Lay you down on the table, and have my wicked way with you? God, he was damned well going to hell. “Not really.”

She tsked at him. No one had ever tsked at him before.

“Surely you can see it.” She placed her ball on top of his. “This forms the basic shape of a pear.” She moved the snowman-looking thing to sit before him. “Now you press down on the small ball to make it meld better with the larger ball.”

He did as she said, but now the two just looked like one disk set on top of another. “It doesn’t resemble a pear in the least.”

She was clearly fighting a smile. “That’s because you smashed them together. You needn’t use so much force.” Swiftly, she took each disk and rolled it back into a ball, then put the small one on top of the other again. “Now,” she said, and took his hand in hers, “press lightly.”

This time she guided his hand to apply far less pressure than he’d done. Her palm was soft against the top of his hand, but her fingers felt strong and capable as they bent atop his. Thank God it wasn’t his palm she was touching. He had very little feeling there, and he wanted to feel every delicate touch of her hand.

She leaned so close that he could smell the scent that seemed uniquely hers—orange flowers and honey. Only this time it was mixed with something more earthy. Clay, probably. All he’d have to do is shift his head a quarter turn, and he could easily lean forward to cover her mouth with his. But before he could follow that insane impulse, she released his hand and sat back, leaving him feeling bereft.

“That’s much better,” she said. “Now, you should smooth the two together into the actual shape of a pear.”

“Ah. Right.” Feeling rather awkward, he curved his hand around the place where the two balls were joined.

“For this part,” Tory said, “you needn’t be so careful. Clay requires some work at times, so feel free to really get in there with your fingers and work it hard until you achieve that pear shape.”

He stifled a groan. This was not what he wished to be working “hard” just at this moment. And since when had he started hearing double entendres in whatever a woman said?

Probably since he’d met her . At Verdun, eligible young Englishwomen had been few and far between, and he’d been warned against the other sort since it was hard to know whom to trust. At Bitche, there had been no women at all.

That explained why he desired her so badly. What he felt was mere lust, pure and simple. Surely, he could keep his lust in check no matter how many double entendres entered his fevered brain. So, he forced himself to concentrate on his “sculpture,” such as it was.

“Good,” she said. “That’s better.” She watched a moment, then added, “Did you and your fellow prisoners have pears and the like?” When that odd question made him blink at her, she said, “I-I’m just wondering if your diet included fruit. In the prison, I mean.”

“No,” he said tersely. “Fruit was rarely on the menu at Bitche.”

“What was on the menu?”

“A pound of bread. Half a pound of beef. Water.”

“For every meal?”

“For every day. If we were lucky. That was the amount allotted to each prisoner, but we didn’t always get it.” When she gasped, he shrugged. “We could supplement that as we wished with our own funds, but by the time your father and I were at Bitche, we had little money left and no way to establish credit.”

He didn’t realize he’d blundered until she asked, “But what about the money Papa got from teaching? The money he designated for my dowry? Why didn’t you just use that? I’m sure my father wouldn’t have begrudged you that.”

Damn it all. Clearly, his attempt at sculpting had so absorbed him that he’d just blathered the truth. Nor did it help he wasn’t used to lying so blatantly. “Oh, those funds were with a banker in Verdun.” He met her suspicious gaze with the most innocent look he could muster. “We had no way to access it. I had to stop in Verdun on my way out of France just to withdraw the money he’d banked there.”

He patted himself on the back for coming up with a believable lie.

“But . . . but you said he was paid for teaching the commandant at Bitche, too,” she said, looking truly perplexed. “That some of the funds came from that.”

He suppressed a groan. This time he’d put his foot in his mouth so deep he was choking on it. “Some of the funds did, but not all of it. Since that was the only money we had at Bitche, I used it for the doctor and medicines and other things for your father’s care at the end.”

Her cheeks pinkened. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for what you did for my father. I was just trying to understand what you both went through.”

“Of course. That’s not surprising.”

He was beginning to regret ever coming up with a scheme to give her a dowry. He should have just told her that her father had died in service to him, and so he was gifting her with five thousand pounds.

Then again, if he had, he couldn’t have done the only thing Morris had asked of him—make sure she married well. “I’m happy to answer whatever questions you have.” He was probably going to rue the day he told her that, but if he didn’t appear open to that, she would get suspicious.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice soft as silk as she laid her hand on his arm. “You have no idea how much that means to me. After thinking on everything you said the first night you were home, I have so much I’m curious about. You said Bitche was like a real prison. How exactly? I mean, I’ve read about prisons, but have never seen one. Were your cells in a dungeon or a building or . . . what?”

“Prisoners of our class lived two to a cell, but the common sailors and soldiers—and criminals—were thrown into the dungeons below us. Those fellows caroused and fought and made trouble for their guards day and night. That made it hard for us to sleep sometimes, what with the wild sounds that rose from below, but we weren’t allowed to venture into those areas, so we could endure it.”

When he noticed her worried look, he added, “You don’t want to hear all the details of our imprisonment, trust me. Suffice it to say, it was unpleasant.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “What’s unpleasant for a duke might not be all that unpleasant for a professor.”

The rebuke stung a little. “You forget I wasn’t a duke then. And believe me, it was ‘unpleasant’ for all of us, if one can even use such a tame word to describe it. Your father and I shared a cell. Our experience was mostly the same.”

“I should think it was worse for him once he was ill.”

“It was indeed.” She had no idea how much.

“How did he fracture his thigh bone, anyway?”

He tensed. “In a fall.” But he couldn’t talk about this, or he would tell her things he’d regret. “Perhaps we should get on with this lesson. Otherwise, I’ll never finish before it’s time to go to your solicitor’s office.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She eyed him closely. “But I have more questions.”

He stifled a groan. “And I will answer them in due time, I promise.”

That seemed to satisfy her, but probably not for long. One day he would have to give her a full reckoning of what had happened in France. And he was certainly dreading that.