Page 4 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Four

Bess stared across the carriage at Ashbourn and wondered what the penalty was for strangling a duke. Probably hanging or something equally terrible.

Though surely no one who’d met this particular duke would blame her.

Anyone who’d faced that particular look on this particular duke’s face and survived it would think her the bravest soul who ever lived. Bess swallowed hard against an instinctive urge to back down.

He was just so…physically present, in a way she had not expected of a peer. From what she’d heard of him from his half-sisters, she would’ve expected him to be priggish and stuffy, overly concerned with his own importance in Society. Soft.

Not this duke.

This duke was hard, in every sense of the word. He was soberly, if impeccably, dressed, in a well-fitted dark blue coat over dun-colored trousers, with a snowy white linen shirt and a cravat of blue gray tied in a simple yet elegant style.

And, most unfortunately, he did not seem to be a fool.

Fools were easy to manage. This man was not. Especially not when Bess could hardly find her balance in the conversation, so aware was she of the cold marble planes of his face; the taut, muscular bulk of his shoulders; the tight taper of his waist; and the length and strength of his legs.

The Duke of Ashbourn loomed, even when sitting perfectly upright with correct posture. When he let his thick, muscular thighs widen and hunched over them, he seemed to take up all the available air in the carriage’s interior.

She would have gasped when he growled about burning his own house down, but there wasn’t enough breath in her lungs.

So instead, she pulled herself together and said, “That is ridiculous. I have known mules less stubborn. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You are a man who is used to the entire world revolving around you.”

His sharp laugh startled her. She sat up a bit, disconcerted to realize how close their faces had been.

“I assure you,” he said drily, “I have never known the world to care overmuch for my wishes. Which is not a complaint—I have learned to make the world do as I wish, which is certainly a more useful skill than simply waiting for things to work themselves out.”

Frustration coiled in Bess’s chest and curled her hands into fists. “Then why can’t you see that you ought to be reconciling with your sisters and helping them in society!”

“Lady Gemma is now a duchess.” His jaw set, a muscle ticking at the back of it. “She informed me herself that she needs no assistance from me.”

“Well, Lucy does need your help,” Bess argued. “The kind of help she can only get from a wealthy, titled relative willing to sponsor her debut by introducing her to the right people and garnering her invites to the right parties. Gemma might be a duchess now, but she is not in a position to spend weeks in London away from her new husband and the life they’re building together, nor does she have the connections you have amongst the Ton.”

The help Ashbourn could offer would make the difference between Lucy having no choice but to skulk home to Five Mile House with her tail between her legs, or…the choice of a very different future. A future she, in all her nineteen-year-old wisdom, didn’t currently think she wanted.

But in Bess’s view, there was nothing quite so precious in this world as having a choice. She thought it might be worth putting up with a little stubbornness to give Lucy a chance to say yea or nay later on down the road.

Bess glanced out the window of the carriage at the closed door of the doctor’s surgery. Only a few more minutes, surely, before Lucy reappeared and this chance to sway the Duke of Ashbourn to the correct course would be lost.

Attempting to moderate the impatience she felt, Bess finished, “And surely it is in your best interest, as well as hers, to give that help.”

“I don’t see how.” His voice was chillier than the frost that rimed the edges of Bucklebury Pond each winter. “The connection between us is of the most tenuous kind—a state of affairs that I imagine suits us both very well, given her reaction to my interference moments ago on the riverbank.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I take it back; I don’t understand you at all. Now you are pretending not to grasp the most basic concepts of family connection? You, the same man who came all the way out to Wiltshire to tell Gemma to pack it in and leave Five Mile House because it was beneath the family dignity to work in a pub! Oh yes, I know you are a man who is keenly aware of the way your sisters’ doings reflect on you and your family name.”

That muscle in his jaw jumped once more, stark against the clean, cold lines of his haughty face. “But as you point out, that is nothing new. Lucy and her mother and sister have been making spectacles of themselves for years. Why should I take notice now?”

“Because now you are the head of the family.”

Bess was breathing hard, she noticed distantly, her ire raised in a way she had seldom allowed herself to experience. There was something terribly invigorating about it. “When a cad like the Duke of Thornecliff thinks he can say what he likes, do what he likes, with Lady Lucy Lively— that is what reflects badly on you. Not Lucy’s natural, vivacious, unspoiled behavior.”

If Bess had not been watching his face so closely, avidly tracking his extraordinary eyes for any flicker of expression, she would have missed it. But there, deep in the colorless depths of his gaze—that was a spark of anger when she reminded him of Thorne’s unacceptable conduct.

Running hot with some combination of righteous indignation and the undeniable thrill of speaking her mind to a duke, Bess was emboldened to poke a gloved finger into his chest.

It was like poking a rock.

One of Ashbourn’s large hands came up to encircle her wrist, the fine kid leather of his gloves finding the sliver of bare skin between Bess’s glove and her sleeve.

She shivered, a shock rolling through her that loosened her tongue and made her reckless enough to stare into his implacable face and whisper, “Your father was content to be a laughingstock. Are you?”

His long fingers tightened for a moment around her wrist, almost to the point of pain, but before Bess could even wince, he had loosened his grasp.

He did not let go, however. Instead, he used that grip to pull her toward him, overbalancing her and hauling her into his lap as though her heavy, sodden skirts weighed nothing.

She was pressed to his wide chest, suddenly, like being pressed against a wall, but a wall made of heat and sinew that coiled and flexed against the softness of her breasts beneath the loose support of her stays. Her heart galloped in her chest, thundering against her ribs so heavily that surely he could feel it from the other side.

The Duke of Ashbourn looked down his autocratic nose at the bar wench he held unknowingly in his arms, and said, “You go too far.”

Bess knew she should scream or at least demand that he unhand her, but the problem was, she didn’t want to.

She was in London looking for a scoundrel. Maybe she’d found him.

“I’ve come a long way to get here, and I’ll keep going as far as I like,” she said, breathless and daring. “I’d go a lot further than this for Lucy, Henrietta, and Gemma, believe me.”

His piercing eyes searched her face. “I believe you. All of this to secure an invitation to stay in my home?”

“You need not include me in the invitation, if you don’t wish to.”

If Henrietta and Lucy went to Ashbourn House, Bess realized, she would be free to explore London as she wished, unfettered by the rules and constraints imposed on highborn ladies. She could finally have her adventure.

He bent his head for a moment, breathing in. The tip of his patrician nose trailed along the side of her neck, the small patch of bare skin above the high neck of her pelisse, with his inhalation. Wanton desire pooled low in Bess’s belly.

His voice was so deep. “I would have to be a lunatic who enjoys torture to wish to see you across the breakfast table every morning.”

Her heart didn’t know whether to skip or sink. “I promise if you begin to make amends with Lucy, I will cease to be an irritant.”

Ashbourn’s eyes truly defied easy description. This close, she was struck by the dark smoky rim that encircled the pale iris. Were they blue? Gray? A translucent green?

“I don’t wish to be irritated by any of you. I value my solitude, madame.”

“In nature, there is nothing solitary, not really. As Mr. Goethe says, everything exists in connection with something else, which is before it, beside it, under it, or…over it.”

Just as she was over him, still perched in his lap. His pupils widened, swallowing up the pale iris until only the dark rim remained. Nervous excitement spangled through her veins like sparks flying from a stoked fire.

“I spent a long time trying to think of something in nature that is isolated,” Bess babbled, “when I first read that bit. Eggs are very self-contained. Or maybe an oyster?”

She needed to pull herself together. This entire conversation and the way he was holding her, his touch feeding the hunger under her skin, it was all playing merry havoc with her head.

He arched a brow. “If I’m an oyster, what does that make you? The grain of sand caught in my craw?”

A grain of sand, small and inconsequential , Bess thought. She was not unaware of the insult. But…

“When a grain of sand irritates an oyster,” she pointed out, “it turns into a pearl. And do you know, I’ve always thought the oyster must enjoy the process a bit, as well. Just as most wealthy gentlemen I’ve met could stand a little more irritation in their smooth lives.”

He frowned, but his clasp tightened for an instant. Bess was very conscious of the fact that her bottom was against something hard and thick in his lap. It made her want to squirm.

“I must be going mad,” Ashbourn muttered.

He was going to say yes. Bess’s pulse raced. The heat in his predatory gaze thrilled her.

She’d known love in her early youth, the sweet, innocent love of a good, kind, decent boy—but she’d never been wanted by a man of the world, a man who knew himself…a man with the experience to show her what she’d come to London to see and feel.

Mouth dry with nervous anticipation, Bess licked her lips and watched the way Ashbourn’s gaze dropped to follow the movement. A bird of prey swooping to snatch up a soft little creature and devour it whole.

The moment stretched between them, endless and fragile as a soap bubble—and it burst when the door to the surgery slammed open and the carriage rocked as the coachman leaped down, ready to open the door for Lucy’s return.

A curtain dropped behind Ashbourn’s eyes, all the heat and hunger she’d glimpsed there extinguished in an instant. Before the carriage door had cracked open a single inch, Bess found herself back on the bench opposite, flushed and disconcerted and still catching her breath.

Across from her, Ashbourn sat straight and tall, entirely composed and looking as if the very idea of having a human emotion like desire would never occur to him.

He turned it off like a spigot , she thought somewhat hysterically.

She still felt the thrumming of needy heat throughout her lower body. Her breasts still tingled from being crushed against his chest. Her lungs were still full of the breath they’d shared in the intimate space between them.

But he looked at her now with the empty eyes of a cold, dispassionate stranger. The sharp line of his jaw was the only place she could discern any feeling whatsoever, and more than anything, the way he clenched it looked angry.

This was a man who ruthlessly controlled his own emotions, she realized with a chill. A man who would never listen to his heart—if he even possessed one.

He hadn’t been trying to turn her up sweet with all that talk about how seeing her every day would be torture, she realized. He might be attracted to her, but he didn’t want to be.

Ashbourn was used to being in control. More than that, he needed it.

Perhaps Bess knew of a way to convince him after all.

Lucy was walking toward the carriage, still chattering away to the surgeon’s wife. Looking Ashbourn in the eye, Bess took a deep breath and said, “This is your chance to take the reins of a situation that has been running wild out of your control for more than a year. Welcome Lucy and her mother into your home, lend them your social influence and help Lucy find her footing, and you need never see me again.”

His pale eyes flared molten silver for a heartbeat of a moment, and then Lucy was upon them. She scrambled into the carriage unaided, too impatient to wait for the groom to hand her up, and flopped onto the bench beside Bess.

Bess supposed it did no good to wish Lucy would behave decorously and make herself more palatable to her older brother. Lucy could only be who she was, and Bess had no real wish to see her sweet, lively friend shaped and molded into a Proper Young Lady.

Thank goodness Bess wasn’t truly Lucy’s chaperone, as Ashbourn had assumed, or that task would fall to her! She had thought it better to go along with his supposition rather than admit Lucy had committed the social faux pas of appearing in public with neither her mother nor a respectable chaperone.

All these rules fair made Bess’s head ache, and for what? It was all a lot of nonsense. Still, she noted the way Ashbourn’s finely shaped lips pressed together in disapproval at Lucy’s unladylike pose.

“How is the patient?” Bess asked quickly as the horses pulled away from the surgery and into the heavy flow of London traffic.

“He came round long enough to give his name, Charles Truitt. He is a midshipman in the Royal Navy; his grandfather was a sailor from the West Indies who actually fought and perished in the real Battle of Trafalgar, so Charles was determined to take part in the mock battle today. Although he regrets it now, I imagine. Or perhaps not, he passed out again before I could ask him. But I expect I can find his mother easily enough, now that I have his name, and perhaps the captain he serves under ought to be informed.”

Lucy broke off to frown out the window. “Where are we going?”

Heartbeat quickening, Bess craned her neck to see past Lucy. The streets of London all looked much the same to her, however, an indistinguishable warren of narrow lanes chockablock with carts and carriages and people on horseback and afoot.

“You are going home,” Ashbourn said, his deep voice rumbling through the carriage like a pronouncement of prophesy.

“This isn’t the way to Charlotte Street,” Lucy argued. “The driver ought to have turned left at Goodge Street, not right. This road will take us all the way to Mayfair.”

Mayfair. When Ashbourn said home he didn’t mean the rented lodgings in Charlotte Street. He meant his home. Ashbourn House.

Bess whipped around to stare at him. He was looking at Lucy, which was good as it meant he didn’t see the moment Bess realized that removing herself from the situation was the final inducement he’d needed to change his mind.

She wasn’t as good at controlling her emotions as he was. In that moment, all she could feel was an aching sense of disappointment.

But this trip to London had never been about Bess. Of course she couldn’t impose on her friends’ kindness to keep the Charlotte Street lodgings just for her, and Bess couldn’t afford it herself. But there were worse things than returning to Little Kissington without having tasted the pleasures she’d missed since Davy died.

The past two weeks had still been exciting. And if the memories of London and the feeling that there was more out there than she’d yet seen made her life in a sleepy Wiltshire village seem awfully small, well.

A small life could still be a good one.

Rallying herself, Bess managed a soothing smile for Lucy. “Your brother has been generous enough to extend an invitation for you to come stay with him at Ashbourn House.”

There was a pause like the moment between the flash of lightning and the crack of thunder. Bess braced herself.

“I won’t go!” Lucy stared at her brother’s blank expression in outrage. “You can’t make me!”

“I can,” he replied calmly. “And you will.”

High-handed, arrogant…Bess could’ve told him, that was not the best way to bring Lucy around.

“Help!” Lucy rattled at the door handle. “I’m being kidnapped!”

“Are you always this excitable?” the duke inquired, arching a dark brow. He seemed no more than mildly curious.

“Only when I’m being held against my will!”

Bess restrained an unfortunate urge to laugh. Laughing at Lucy would also not help the situation, but it wasn’t easy.

“Please, Lucy, stop and think a moment. Mending fences with your brother will open doors for you that will make this Season and all its challenges worthwhile. I’m certain your mother will wish to accept.”

“ Half -brother,” Lucy muttered mutinously, throwing herself back onto the velvet squabs with a scowl. “A half-brother who has never made a secret of how much he hates us, I might point out. Why are you doing this?”

In answer to her furious question, the duke folded his hands in his lap. “I do not hate you. I don’t think of you enough to hate you. Perhaps that has been a mistake. As it was recently pointed out to me, I have let things go on in this haphazard way long enough. It is time to take you in hand—not a prospect I relish, you may be sure. But I am willing to do whatever is necessary to correct the misapprehension of those like the Duke of Thornecliff who wrongly believe the Ashbourn name is to be sneered at and mocked.”

He looked at Bess, a quick, searing glance that flayed across her nerves like a splash of boiling water, then away again.

“Our father may have enjoyed making a laughingstock of our family name,” Ashbourn said coolly. “But I find I cannot countenance it.”

“Don’t you talk about Father,” Lucy hissed. “He loved us!”

A faint smile touched the corner of the duke’s mirthless mouth. “That must have been pleasant, but it has no bearing at all on the present moment.”

Good grief. There was certainly no love lost between the current duke and the previous, was there?

Bess could feel from the trembling vibrations running through the girl beside her that Lucy was about to blow the lid right off the pot. Normally, Bess would let her explode and be done with it—Bess learned at an early age not to get herself in the middle of messy family disputes, particularly those of the gentry.

But she’d already put herself squarely in the center of the tempest in this particular family teapot, so she put a restraining hand on Lucy’s arm.

“Lucy, I’m certain once you and your mother have spent a few days at Ashbourn House, it will be as if you never left.”

“You keep talking about Mama and me,” Lucy pointed out, narrowing her blue eyes. “What about you, Bess? Where are you in all of this?”

Drat the girl and her ability to ferret out the finer details! This was not the moment Bess would have chosen to impart the news that she wouldn’t be going to Ashbourn House with them.

Swallowing a sigh, Bess smiled sunnily and said, “Me? Why, I’ll be heading back to Little Kissington, of course. No point in my staying in London as your chaperone when the duke will no doubt wish to supply you with a far more suitable companion to help you make sense of the Beau Monde. And it’s glad I’ll be to sleep in my own bed again, I can tell you.”

It was all for the best, probably. If he had extended the invitation to her, she would’ve been constrained by all the same silly rules the gentry shackled themselves with. She’d not be able to go out and about on her own, to explore London as she wished.

She’d be stuck with this chaperone charade, forced to perform propriety under the judgmental eye of the Duke of Ashbourn.

No, better all around that Bess should simply go home.

Not that Lucy agreed. But even as the outraged protest visibly formed on Lucy’s face, that deep voice rolled over Bess from across the carriage.

“I’m afraid sleeping in your own bed is a pleasure you must forgo a while longer,” said the duke.

Bess slowly turned her head to stare at him and was instantly ensnared by his gaze. “I don’t understand,” she said faintly.

His eyes gleamed like the light glinting off the teeth of a poacher’s trap as it sprang shut. “If you think you are going to run along home and leave me to deal with this disaster on my own, you are sadly mistaken, Mrs. Pickford. This invitation is entirely contingent upon you joining us at Ashbourn House.”

Her breath came short, as though she’d climbed a hill carrying two full pails of milk. She might not be quite ready to go back to her quiet life in the country—but absolutely nothing good could come of her staying.

She wouldn’t have the freedom to find the adventure she was looking for. Instead, she’d be faced with daily temptation in the form of the coldest, most controlled, most dangerously seductive man she’d ever met.

“I would really prefer to go home to Wiltshire! Lucy and Henrietta will not need my company,” Bess objected, only to break off as Ashbourn shook his head with slow deliberation. He never took his eyes off her face.

“I see I have not made myself clear. Henrietta Berring will never step foot inside Ashbourn House again while I live. So either you join Lucy for the Season, Mrs. Pickford, or you may all three pack up and go back to Wiltshire. The choice is yours.”