Page 64 of To Seduce a Stranger

Despite his position, Jack managed a leer. “Seems to me the real story is what happened last night. Did she get you to swive her before she ran off?”

For answer, Edward dragged him away from the table and pinned him against the wall. Above his head, the servants’ call bells jingled quietly on their plank. “Have a care,” Edward warned as his grip tightened. He’d never yet hit a man, but Jack didn’t know that.

Jack’s eyes rolled upward, showing their whites. “I just gave her a bit of a fright, I swear.”

“A fright?” Edward hitched him higher. Now, only the toes of Jack’s boots scuffed impotently against the floor. “Why?”

“T-told her I know who she is.”

“And who is that?”

“Charlotte Blakemore,” he rasped out. “Dowager Duchess of Langerton.”

Shock made Edward relax his grip. A duchess?

Gasping, Jack sank to the floor.

The rest of the story came more easily, once he had caught his breath. “She disappeared from Bath a fortnight or so ago. Her husband left her a whacking great fortune, they say, but her stepson, the current duke, means to have his late father’s will voided—and the marriage, too, if it can be done.”

“On what grounds?”

“Claims the old man had already gone round the twist before they were wed.”

Mad? That was a serious allegation indeed.

In his mind, Edward tried to reconcile what he knew of her—her cheap clothes, her knowledge of housekeeping matters, what she’d told him of her origins—with the notion of her as a duchess. Only her impossibly erect carriage seemed to fit the person Jack had identified.

Of course, she might just as easily have told the same sad stories to some soft-in-the-head, elderly duke, won his pity, and then his fortune.

Almost.

Out of the corner of his eye, Edward saw Noir arch his back and pounce. The wad of paper with which he had been playing popped from between his paws. For a moment, the draft of the fire caught and held it, threatening to devour it before whirling it out into the room instead.

Edward snatched the cat’s plaything out of the air. “What’s this?” he asked, righting the bench and sitting down. When he smoothed the paper against the tabletop, Charlotte’s worried eyes stared up at him from the tattered page, drawn by a hand with some skill, although the pencil lines were smudged. The Disappearing Duchess was scrawled above her head.

“Proof,” said Jack, hoisting himself to his feet and joining Edward at the table.

As he stared, snatches of print surrounding the sketch came into focus. Our newest duke . . . a suit... more than a few loose threads. When he came to the crease in the paper, he unfolded it and read on.

Meanwhile, the Disappearing Duchess was last seen headed west in the company of a dark-haired stranger. No doubt she hopes he is possessed of a cure for her late husband’s “infirmities.”

“Rumor has it the marriage was never consummated,” Jack explained. “When it came out she might lose everything if Langerton could prove she hadn’t been plucked, she scampered off—in search of some chap who’d do the deed the old man couldn’t, they say. The new duke put up a pretty penny to anyone who brought her back before she succeeded. And when I recognized her, well, I figured I could use that money as well as anybody. But it seems,” he added, casting shrewd eyes over Edward’s rumpled clothes and making a show of straightening his own collar, “I’m too late.”

“Have a care,” Edward ground out. “You’re speaking of my—” He broke off before the word passed his lips; that particular lie was no longer required, it seemed.

But the omission did not go unnoticed. “Your wife?” Jack gave a wry laugh.

Edward made no answer. The details of the gossip column, and Jack’s tale, fit with what he knew. He had met Charlotte not far from Bath. She’d worn a wedding ring and claimed to be a widow. And last night, he’d taken a virgin to his bed.

Mari stepped to the table, almost tripping over Noir. Muttering, she poured steaming liquid into an empty cup and handed it to Jack.

“Bah, that’s bitter stuff,” he said, pulling a face at the first swallow of Mari’s coffee.

Edward recalled Charlotte’s anguished account of feeling torn between two worlds: French desire and English sangfroid. He could see her coy smile. Hear her beguiling accent: I want . . . you.

Well, he’d known almost from the moment they met that she was a storyteller.

His thoughts were dragged back to the present when Jack slapped his palm on the table. “Woman, what are you about? Why are you staring at me like that? Are you trying to curse me?” His eyes darted from Mari to the black cat and back again. “Are you some kind of witch?”