Romancing the Duke (14 page)

She laughed a little. “Your face did not make me swoon. I was already feeling faint. I hadn’t eaten anything but a few crusts of bread for days.”

“So the scars don’t frighten you?”

“Not at all.”

The words were a lie. The truth was, his scars did frighten her—but only a little, and only because they tempted her to care. Even now, her heart was softening in her chest, faster than a lump of butter left in the sun.

She couldn’t let this happen. It was all well and good to say “no expectations,” but Izzy knew how her affection-starved heart worked. She was so desperate to love and be loved, she could sprout tender feelings toward a rock. And rocks didn’t call her “bewitching” or “temptress.” Rocks didn’t have touchable golden brown hair.

But rocks and Ransom did have something in common.

Neither one would love her back.

“We should go,” she said. “It’s been at least one hundred counts, and the girls are waiting.”

He stood and brushed dust from his breeches and coat. “I’ll make my own way back.”

“By yourself?” The moment the words left her lips, Izzy cringed, regretting how they sounded. Of course he was able to walk back on his own. “It’s just that the handmaidens are waiting for their hero to find them.”

“Then they’d best keep waiting for some other man.” He moved past her. “I’m no one’s hero, Miss Goodnight. You’d do well to remember it.”

Chapter Fourteen

M
iss Goodnight. Is that you?”

Izzy froze, perched on tiptoe.

Drat.

After several hours of walking, talking, counting wild roses, and fending off questions about
two
Ulrics, Izzy had finally bid a warm farewell to the handmaidens and the Knights of Moranglia. She’d been hoping to sneak back into the castle unnoticed. So much for that plan.

At least it wasn’t the duke who’d caught her.

“Yes, Duncan?”

“What is that in your hands, Miss Goodnight?”

Izzy glanced down at her wadded, soiled shawl. She’d been carrying it around ever since her interlude with Ransom that morning.

Embarrassed, she thrust the thing behind her back. “Oh, it’s nothing.”

“Is that your shawl?”

The man had a marksman’s eye when it came to laundry.

She sighed, drawing it out again. “Yes. I . . . You see, there was a bit of a mishap.”

Lord, how did she begin to describe what had happened to the thing? She ought to have pitched it in the moat. It wasn’t as though it could be salvaged.

“Give it here.” The valet took it from her hand. He shook out the frail, tissue-thin fabric and examined it, clucking his tongue. “Dirt . . . grass . . . My word. Are these bloodstains? On silk embroidery?”

She bit her lip, praying that he wouldn’t be angry with her for the duke’s recent injury. Or worse, demand a full explanation of how it had occurred.

“Miss Goodnight, I don’t know what to say. This . . .” He shook his head. “This is marvelous.”

“Marvelous?”

“Yes.” He gripped the fabric in both hands. “This is what a valet lives for. Removing stubborn stains from quality fabric. It’s been months since I had a challenge like this one. I must away to the laundry, at once. If the stains have any longer to set, I’ll never get them out.”

Amused, Izzy followed him down to the room designated as a laundry. He stoked the fire, put a kettle on to boil, and gathered soap, an iron, and pressing cloths.

“These grass stains will be the most stubborn.” He laid the shawl out on the worktable, assessing every little spot and stain. “Lemon juice and a cool rinse first. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try a paste of soda.”

“Can I help at all?”

“No, Miss Goodnight.” He looked faintly horrified. “You’d spoil my amusement. But you’d be most welcome to keep me company.”

Izzy took a seat and watched, quite amused herself by his careful campaign to attack the stains. He scraped them first with a knife. Then rubbed them with a soft-bristled brush. Only then did he reach for his small, brown-glass bottles of spirits and salts. She felt as though she were watching a surgeon at work.

“Duncan, how did it happen? The duke’s accident.”

The valet paused in the act of dabbing vinegar on a grass stain. “Miss Goodnight,” he said slowly, “I know we discussed this. A good manservant does not gossip about his employer.”

“I know. I know, and I’m sorry to pry, but . . . now I work for him, too. Isn’t this what employed people do? Gossip about their employer?”

He arched one brow in silent censure.

She hated seeming so petty, and she didn’t want to break her word to Ransom and disclose his headache the other night. Or mention the letter he’d crumpled and tossed in the grate.

“I’m just concerned, that’s all. The duke’s so . . .”
Stubborn.
Wounded. Maddeningly attractive. “
So angry. At the world, it seems, but especially at me. He’s so determined to interpret everything in the worst possible way, and I don’t think it’s only his injury. I wish I understood it.”

Duncan took a break from his scrubbing to attend the whistling kettle. “Miss Goodnight, it wouldn’t be fitting for a valet to tell tales about his employer.”

Izzy nodded. She was disappointed, but she wouldn’t press him further. He
was
saving her best shawl, after all.

“But,” the silver-haired man continued, “seeing as you are Miss Izzy Goodnight, and so fond of a story, perhaps I could tell you a tale about . . . an entirely different man.”

“Oh, yes.” She straightened in her chair, trying not to betray her excitement. “A fictional man. One who isn’t Rothbury at all. I would so
love
to hear a story like that.”

The valet cast a wary glance around the room.

“I won’t tell anyone, I swear it,” she whispered. “Here, I’ll even start. Once there was a young nobleman named . . . Bransom Fayne, the Duke of Mothfairy.”

“Mothfairy?”

She shrugged. “Did you have something better?”

He set the kettle on the hob. “He can never hear of this.”

“Of course not,” she said. “How could he? This man we’re discussing doesn’t exist. But this is the tale of his tragic past. In his youth, the nonexistent Duke of Mothfairy . . .”

“Was alone. A great deal. His mother died in childbirth.”

She nodded. This much, she’d learned from the man himself.

“And his father might as well have died the same day. The old duke shut himself off from the world to grieve, and he treated his son very coldly. Once this ‘Bransom’ was old enough, he frequently sought out . . . company.” The valet’s face contorted as he searched for words. “The female kind of company.”

“He sewed his wild oats, you mean.”

“Entire plantations of them. Good heavens. He made oat-sewing an industry.”

Izzy could believe it. She’d seen the accounts.

“But at the age of thirty, he finally settled down to the principal obligation of his title. Which was, of course, to produce the next Duke of . . .”

“Mothfairy,” she supplied.

“Yes.” Duncan cleared his throat. “He singled out the most sought-after debutante of the London season and declared his intentions to court her. The two were engaged soon thereafter.”

Izzy’s jaw dropped. “Ransom was engaged?”

Now she understood why he’d panicked at her foolish utterance of the word “marriage” earlier.

“No.” Duncan threw her a stern look. “
Bransom
was engaged. The Duke Who Doesn’t Exist. He was engaged to a young lady by the name of Lady Emi-” A distressed look crossed his face. “Lady Shemily.”

“Lady Shemily?” Izzy smiled to herself. He was getting into the spirit now.

“Yes. Lady Shemily Liverpail. Daughter of an earl.” The valet returned to his work. He uncapped a small bottle of something that scented strongly of lemon. “When the engagement was announced, the duke’s long-suffering servants were delighted. Some of the house staff had served the family for thirty years without a duchess. They were eager for a new lady of the house.”

“Including his trusty and distinguished valet?” she guessed. “Who went by the name of . . . Dinkins?”

“
Especially
his trusty and distinguished valet. Dinkins was looking forward to removing fewer remnants of rouge from the duke’s garments. Devilish tricky to remove, rouge.”

“I can imagine.” Izzy wondered what kind of woman could tempt the duke away from all that debauchery. “This Lady Shemily Liverpail . . . What was she like?”

“What you’d imagine a successful debutante to be. Beautiful, accomplished, well connected. And young. Just nineteen years old.”

Izzy suppressed a plaintive sigh. Of course. Of course Lady Shemily would be all those things.

“What went wrong?” she asked.

He hesitated.

“Fictionally. In this completely fabricated story that you’re only concocting to amuse me because you know how I love a tale of star-crossed love.”

“Everything was arranged,” he said. “Wedding, honeymoon, a well-appointed suite for the new duchess. And then, less than a fortnight before the wedding date, the bride-to-be vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“Yes. She disappeared from her bedchamber in the middle of the night.”

Izzy leaned forward, propping her chin on her hand. This story was getting rather exciting. And it seemed Duncan was relishing the chance to tell it at last. Poor man, confined here for months with all this melodrama and no one to talk to. And very few stains.

“Lady Shemily,” he said, his voice oozing dramatic tension, “had eloped.”

“Eloped? But with whom?”

“A tenant farmer from the Liverpail country estate. Apparently the two had been concealing their affections for years.”

“What a scandal. What did Ro—” She shook herself. “What did Mothfairy do?”

“Nothing prudent. He should have let the silly chit run off and ruin herself. Loudly disdain her upbringing to all who asked, joke cleverly about his close escape. And then next season, find a new bride. But his pride wouldn’t allow it. He rode off in furious pursuit.”

“Without his trusty and distinguished valet?”

He sighed testily. “Dinkins followed in the coach. And Dinkins fell, sadly, more than a day behind. Too late to stop the tragedy unfolding.”

She bit her lip, already cringing. “Did the duke fall from his horse?”

“Oh, no. Some twenty miles south of the Scottish border, Mothfairy came upon his would-be bride and her lover in a coaching inn. A confrontation ensued, blades were drawn . . .”

She winced, as though she could feel the full length of Ransom’s scar burning from her scalp to her cheekbone. “I think I can imagine the rest.”

“You will have to imagine it. I can’t tell you precisely what occurred. I wasn’t there.” Duncan dropped all pretense of storytelling. He braced his hands flat against the worktable. “When I found him, he’d spent two nights in a closet at that damned coaching inn. No surgeon had been called. The innkeeper was simply waiting for him to die. I had to stitch him myself.”

“Unconscionable,” Izzy said. “What about his intended bride?”

“Already gone. Little flibbertigibbet.” He shook his head. “He wasn’t well enough to risk traveling back to London, so I brought him here. It’s been more than seven months. He refuses to leave. He refuses to even let me perform my duties as a valet. His appearance is an embarrassment.”

Izzy hedged. “I don’t know that I’d say
that.
” She rather liked the duke’s rugged, unkempt appearance. And a dozen sighing handmaidens couldn’t be wrong.

“Half the time, he refuses to wear a cravat. It’s shameful.”

“Shameful indeed,” she echoed. She could agree on that point. The duke’s open collars gave her quite shameful thoughts.

Duncan set the iron aside and held up her pristine shawl for examination. “This little task has preserved my sanity for another day,” he said. “Thank you. You can’t know how unbearable it is to spend your life on one profession and then be forced to abandon it.”

Izzy didn’t reply. But she could understand that feeling better than he might think. When her father died, her work had died, too.

He folded the shawl and handed it to her. “I’ve been so out of sorts, it’s driven me to . . .”

“To what?”

“I don’t even know. That’s the problem, Miss Goodnight. I’ve tried a half dozen different vices, and none of them satisfy. Cheroots are revolting. Snuff isn’t much better. I can’t abide the taste of strong spirits, and I don’t like to drink alone. What’s left? Gambling? With whom?”

She shrugged. “I suppose there’s always women.”

“Unoriginal,” he declared. “In this house, that particular vice is taken.”

An idea came to her. She dug into her pockets and handed him a clutch of paper-wrapped sweets. “Here. Sweetmeats.”

He looked at the sweets in her hand.

“Go on,” she urged. “You’d be doing me a favor. People foist the things on me in handfuls. After my morning with the handmaidens, I have more than I could possibly want.” She pointed to one. “I think this one’s a honeyed apricot.”

He took the sweet, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth. As he chewed, his shoulders relaxed.

“Better?” she asked.

“Better. Thank you, Miss Goodnight.”

“It’s the least I can do.” She left the remaining sweetmeats on his worktable. “Thank you for rescuing my shawl and for telling me the truth. I mean, not the truth. A fascinating
story.
”

Everything made more sense to her now. Naturally, a man who’d been jilted so callously and nearly died in the bargain would take a dim view of love and romance. But was his pride the true casualty, or had his heart been broken, too?

“Duncan?”

“Mm?” he murmured, unwrapping a second sweetmeat.

“Did . . . ?” She screwed up her courage and asked. “Did he love her?”

No answer.

Oh, drat. That would teach her to ask a delicate question just as someone stuffed a sweetmeat in his mouth. Duncan made a wait-a-moment gesture, working his jaw. Meanwhile, Izzy’s gut twisted itself into knots.

Worse, she had time to question herself.

Why did it even matter whether the duke had loved his intended or not? Why did she care so much? It wasn’t as though he was ever going to marry
her.

An eternity later, Duncan swallowed the morsel. But apparently she’d waited all that time for nothing.

He said simply, “I don’t know.”