Page 3 of The Duke
“I came to retrieve a letter of mine and have failed to find it. Are you here to empty his drawers? I’ll help, if you like.” He stood and took a pile of letters from the top desk drawer, shuffling through them. “I’m sure there’ll be something you can use to survive him.”
So he already knew Bastien was bound for the guillotine, though she herself had only just found out.
His hair slid forward like pale silk. “These,” he said, holding up two letters, “are from his uncle in the Caribbean. As good a place to start as any.”
With every word he spoke, she grew more uneasy. She had a knack for understanding the basic nature of people, and there was something about this lord she hadn’t understood yet—something essential. It was the thing she was responding to, that felt like fear.
“Bastien will pay you a lot of money to take him with you when you return to England,” she said. And her as well, pray God.
“I don’t need money,” the lord said, bored by the suggestion.
“You have travelled all the way here, at great personal risk. Surely it isn’t so much greater a risk to take him with you? A little risk in exchange for a man’s life. It seems not only fair; it seems to me it is your duty.”
“And is his entire household my duty, too?” said the uncanny voice, laughing at her. “Or just one among their number, in particular?”
“You’d risk your life for a letter,” she said, her temper flaring, “but not for a man. How incredibly deficient.”
“Please, I beg of you, stop.” Amused, he made gestures of surrender. “It is not I who sends Bastien to his death. Neither was it I who brought attention to his loose tongue. I don’t, as it happens, think it my place to intervene in French affairs. But yes, I freely admit I’m glad someone is going to shut him up permanently.” His voice remained cool and amused, but for the first time, his control was imperfect: His eyes betrayed a bitter, private pain. “He helped me with a prank when I was twelve and precocious. If he’s destroyed the letter I sent him, then he’s the only person besides myself who knows what was in it.” With sudden violence, he said, “My God, such obstacles he has laid before me! This,of all things, he may not use against me!”
She had the strong sense he was speaking not of Bastien but of some far more dangerous antagonist. Bastien was an insubstantial sort of a man. What was in that letter? What could Bastien possibly know? Whatever it was, this English lord was going to let him die for it.
“Then take only me,” she said desperately. “If you’re going to sacrifice Bastien, at least take the spoils. He intended to offer me to the”—that queer, hot lurch in her stomach—“the Duke of Howard. You can’t turn your nose up at what would have pleased a duke.”
She became aware of the street organ again when it abruptly stopped. A resounding silence followed, and her heart kicked in her chest like a child’s feet against cupboard doors. She strained to listen, watching the study door.They have come, she thought, sick with fear for herself.They have already come for him.
A single violin note played; a door slammed. A burst of laughter, then conversation. The rest of the orchestra found their notes.
She didn’t need to look to know the lord had observed her fear. She had the irrational notion those eyes could not only see her fear but could follow it, that they would find the girl in the cupboard.
“You were promised to the Duke of Howard,” he said slowly. His face was utterly serious now. “The English duke who is a woman?” His voice lingered over that last word, and every uneasy sense inCeline’s body seized, like she had needed only this one word to understand what essential quality she’d missed.
Woman.
The lord said, “Did Bastien send you up here?”
She was gripped in a dumb amazement and couldn’t answer. Her ears seemed to ring with the force of the revelation.
What she had thought was fear had been nothing but brute, animal attraction.
This English lord was awoman.
Celine saw the moment the lord realised the mistake she had made. The hard mouth began, devastatingly, to smile. Wide and then wider still, until the glittering teeth were unsheathed: a mouthful of treasure sharp enough to gobble Celine up. She couldn’t look away, and she knew, she knew, she knew.
“You’re the Duke of Howard.”
CHAPTER TWO
She stared at the figure before her. The same exquisite tailoring she had admired on entering the room, the same palpable air of authority, the dexterous hands, the angular face, the cruel, emphatic mouth. The hair just long enough to hang over one eye before it was shaken impatiently back. All these things were the same and yet utterly different.
This was a woman.
The duke was tall, her shoulders powerful, her whole body held with the still, leashed focus of a predator. She was the most intimidating woman Celine had ever met.
The woman Bastien planned to gift her to; the woman Bastien would let fuck her. She heard Bastien’s voice saying,She prefers women.
The first time Celine had encountered the duke’s name, she’d been hiding in the airing cupboard in Monsieur Genet’s laundry. He was a clockmaker whose household she lived in. At thirteen, she had to bend her knees almost to her nose to fit in the cupboard, feet flat against the opposite wall and bum uncomfortably warm where it was wedged close to the boiler. She was reading a newspaper by the slatted light that came through the cupboard door, scouring it for useful on-dits.
M. Genet didn’t like to take her with him to the wealthy houses whose clocks he maintained, but his patrons had lately been asking for her. She’d caught their attention as a matter of survival, through personal charm and an astonishing grasp of current gossip. Andso, he would take her sometimes, armed with her tiny, necessary advantages. And so, she scoured the paper, filling her arsenal.
