Page 3 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

Chapter Two

Five years later

Light glowed from the windows of Ashbourn House, as golden and welcoming as when her father had been alive to throw the most scandalous parties Mayfair had ever witnessed.

Lucy stepped down from the traveling chaise and stripped off her gloves, staring up at the old pile.

It had been a long time since Ashbourn House had felt like home to Lucy.

If she were to be honest, she’d have to admit that she’d never truly known the meaning of “home” until she and her mother and older sister had been unceremoniously tossed from this one and forced to make a new place for themselves in the ramshackle coaching inn of a tiny Wiltshire village.

It was there that Lucy had decided that home was not so much a building as it was the people who lived in it.

Since then, Lucy had laid her head in many an odd place: the narrow bunk of a boat sailing for France; a series of inns on the way from Paris to Rome; a pensione in Florence with a nosy landlady so nurturing and funny and dear that Lucy had stayed on there for months.

Armed with the fortune her half-brother had settled on her, an increasingly dog-eared travel guide, and a searing need to be away from England, Lucy had seen the world.

She had grown up. In the ballrooms of Paris, the piazzas of Rome, and the poppy-strewn hillsides of Florence. While gazing at risqué French fashions and crumbling frescoes and soaring cathedrals…Lucy had grown up.

She hadn’t put her life on hold; she had lived. But she’d never forgotten the man who had driven her from England in the first place, and the way she’d felt when she was with him.

Though he’d almost certainly forgotten all about her.

Pushing that lowering thought from her mind, Lucy checked that the footmen were exercising particular care with regards to unloading her traveling writing desk from the roof of the coach.

Satisfied that her closest companion of the past five years had arrived intact, she gathered her travel-stained skirts and strode up the steps to Ashbourn House.

A stooped white man with ruthlessly combed steel-gray hair answered the door. His dour expression brightened minutely upon seeing Lucy; he’d always had a soft spot for her.

“Lady Lucy.” He bowed from the waist, as solemnly as though she were visiting royalty and not someone Goring had once rescued from a tumble into the coal cellar when she was a toddler. “We did not expect you until the morrow! Do please come in.”

“Thank you, Mr. Goring.” Lucy felt a strong urge to give the elderly butler a hug, but she resisted. It would have discomfited him greatly. “Are they all at dinner? Shall I go through?”

His hesitation surprised her. “Of course, my lady. It is only that there is a guest for dinner tonight.”

The heavy emphasis he placed on the word “guest” made Lucy grin.

Poor old Goring had weathered the turbulent ups and downs of the Lively family for decades now, from the extremely staid and respectable affairs organized by Lucy’s father’s first duchess, through the wild years of the last duke’s scandalous marriage to Lucy’s mother, and now into the advent of the new Duke of Ashbourn, Lucy’s half-brother.

Goring had seen it all and had remained stoic throughout—but Lucy knew he took the family’s reputation more seriously than ever her brother had, even at his proudest and most arrogant.

If this guest had overset Goring’s tender sensibilities, Lucy felt she was quite likely to enjoy them, whoever they were.

“Don’t announce me,” she said impulsively. “I want to surprise them.”

“Very good, my lady,” Goring reluctantly replied, though his eyebrows conveyed how little he approved of this irregular behavior. “If you are certain you don’t wish to refresh yourself first…”

Giving in to her urges had become something of a signature for Lucy on her Grand Tour. Italy was not where one went to practice restraint. Accordingly, she leaned in and gave Goring’s impressively clean-shaven cheek a swift kiss.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Goring, all shall be well! They will simply have to take me as I am, dusty and creased and nearly perishing from hunger. I’m certain any guest of my brother and my dear sister-in-law will be equal to the occasion.”

She stripped off her gloves and tossed them to him; he snatched the flying kid leather from the air without turning a hair. Lucy smiled. It was good to be home.

Even if her reason for returning was somewhat worrying.

But if her sister-in-law was well enough to be entertaining a guest, Lucy reasoned as she made her way down the hall toward the grand dining room, perhaps Bess wasn’t quite as poorly as Nathaniel had implied.

The tinkle of crystal and silver was a pleasant accompaniment to the low babble of conversation emanating from the room, punctuated with the occasional burst of merriment.

Lucy stopped at the door, easily identifying her dear friend—now sister!

—Bess’s musical laughter. And there, to her surprise, was the deeper rumble of Nathaniel’s amusement.

Lucy had never accounted her brother to be much given to humor. It had always seemed to her as if even a mere smile had to be pried from him with a chisel.

Though he had relaxed and warmed considerably once Bess got ahold of him, Nathaniel would never be the sort of man who laughed easily.

Or so Lucy had assumed before she heard him give another low chuckle. Good Lord, who was their guest tonight? The most amusing person alive?

For some reason, a drop of foreboding trickled down her spine.

Ignoring it, Lucy straightened her bodice and threw open the dining room doors with a smile at the ready.

A smile that faded instantly upon seeing that the only guest present was a man seated in the place of honor, on Bess’s right, lazing back in his chair with a slight smile gracing his too-handsome face.

The Duke of Thornecliff.

What in the bloody blazes was he doing there?

“What in the bloody blazes is he doing here?” Lucy demanded.

“Lucy!” Bess stood up from the table to greet her with the warm, open fondness that made Lucy feel as though they were sisters in truth, not just by marriage.

Narrowing her eyes, Lucy scanned her sister-in-law for signs of the ill health that had worried Nathaniel enough to mention it in several of his letters.

She thought Bess looked a trifle pale, perhaps, the fine bones of her face more prominent as though she’d lost weight…

despite the small, round bump of her belly.

“What are you doing here, you scamp?” Bess cried. “Your letter said you wouldn’t be arriving until tomorrow!”

“I took an earlier boat from Calais to surprise you.” Lucy frowned at Thornecliff over Bess’s shoulder. “Why is the worst duke in London sitting at your table and making Nathaniel laugh?”

“Because I invited him,” Nathaniel said in that deep, stern, laying-down-the-law tone of his.

Lucy was not cowed, however, as she had learned over the years that Nathaniel couldn’t help sounding like an autocrat. That was just his voice.

“Is he blackmailing you? Is he concealing a weapon under the table or somewhere in those extraordinarily tight trousers? Because otherwise I cannot account for your choices, brother.”

Nathaniel, who had been starting to glower at Lucy’s rudeness, visibly softened at her use of the word brother .

They were half-siblings, in fact, a distinction that both of them had clung to during that difficult Season when Nathaniel had brought Lucy out into society and attempted to make a proper lady of her.

An attempt which had failed miserably, Lucy was pleased to recall, but which had resulted in several happier outcomes: most notably, the union of Nathaniel to Bess, who’d been acting as Lucy’s chaperone for the Season, and a reconciliation between Nathaniel and Lucy that had then spread to the rest of the Lively women.

“Thornecliff is here as our guest, and as such I would appreciate a modicum of politeness from you, Lucy,” Nathaniel grumbled as Lucy released Bess and came over to embrace him.

His arms went around her slowly, still unsure of his welcome, and Lucy made certain to hug him extra tightly around his trim middle.

“I would appreciate it,” he amended wryly, “but I know better than to expect it. Come, hellion, sit with us and eat something.”

“Yes, you must be famished,” Bess said, taking her own place once more at the head of the gleaming table of polished inlaid wood. “We’ve only just finished the soup course.”

Stepping back from her brother, Lucy glanced down the table to where the Duke of Thornecliff had sat sprawled, elegant and silent, throughout this exchange.

There was something utterly galling about his particular brand of handsomeness, Lucy had always found. Never more so than in this moment, as he arched a brow at her, his midnight-black eyes glittering with detached amusement.

Lucy had been to Paris and Rome; she had studied statues carved by the masters and cherished through the centuries as depictions of the perfect ideal of masculine beauty.

So she felt herself in a very solid position to judge that Thornecliff put them all to shame.

From the tousled waves of his dark gold hair to the cut of his cheekbones and the exquisite edge of his jaw, he was perfection. He looked like if Michaelangelo had undertaken to immortalize the fallen angel Lucifer in marble, rather than heroic David.

Undeniably gorgeous, yes, but Lucy knew—though some seemed to have forgotten—that outer beauty hid a rotten core.

“Do join us,” he said softly, jolting Lucy from her reverie and making her uncomfortably aware that she’d been staring at him for far too long. “Unless you would prefer to take supper in the nursery?”

Was he trying to drive her away?