In Bed With the Duke Read online

  Michael despised Sandre for what he was, and for what he pretended to be.

  “But I don’t understand,” Lady Lettice insisted. “How do the de Guignards dare to hold an English nobleman against his will?”

  “The de Guignards have always dared, and gambled.” Cloutier was bitter; his family hadn’t come through the last two hundred years nearly as well.

  “In the case of Moricadia, they won, exterminating King Reynaldo’s line . . . or so they claim, although the rebels claim differently. But for that, they seized”—Escobar waved his hands toward the window, where brightly lit villas, gambling houses, and lavish spas sprinkled the Pyrenees—“all this. But we dare not talk of it.”

  “Why not?” Lady Lettice’s eyes grew round with excitement.

  “Because Prince Sandre has spies everywhere, and he does not tolerate dissention in his country.” Escobar bowed. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I see an old friend I must greet.”

  Michael stepped out from behind the column and nodded to the man as he hurried past. Wise Escobar. He would seek another wealthy widow, one not at the epicenter of a possible upheaval.

  Mr. Graf, a well-dressed youth of twenty-two with golden curls styled across his forehead, stepped into his place.

  Mr. Graf had had a run of bad luck at the gaming tables last night; he needed a wealthy bride, and quickly, before his father in Germany discovered the extent of the damage.

  Of course, he granted no attention to the paid companion, still vigorously fanning Lady Lettice’s neck. Nor did any of the other suitors.

  Fools. The girl was nervous as a rabbit. The drab gray wool of her plain dress did nothing to complement her pale complexion, and the cut completely obscured what might have been a shapely figure, but she was thin to the point of frailty. She had typically English features, and might have been pretty, but she kept her chin down, her eyes down, her shoulders hunched as if expecting at any moment a slap across the cheek.

  In Michael’s opinion, any of the lords and gentlemen who hoped to capture Lady Lettice in wedded bliss would be well-advised to look to her cowed servant. Michael didn’t know if the girl had always been timid, but he would wager Lady Lettice had completely broken her spirit. The girl looked as if Lady Lettice kept her on the verge of starvation. Certainly she was frightened half to death.

  Yes, Lady Lettice might hide the whip from her suitors, but once wed, she would never relinquish its control.

  The unlucky Mr. Graf jockeyed for position with the ambitious Count Rambaudi of Piedmont and the English Lord Bedingfield, and the result was disaster—for the companion. They bumped her arm. The fan smacked the back of Lady Lettice’s head, making the curls over her ears bounce. And she turned on the girl like a rabid wolf. “You vexsome girl. How dare you hit me?”

  “I didn’t mean . . .” The girl’s voice matched her demeanor, low and fearful, and it trembled now.

  In a flurry, Lady Lettice adjusted her hairpins, and when the girl tried to help, she slapped at her hands. “Go away, you stupid thing. I should throw you out on the street right now. I should!”

  “No, ma’am, please. It won’t happen again.” The girl looked around at the men, seeking help where there was none. None of the impoverished aristocrats and gentlemen, certainly not the ones who had caused her problem, could be bothered to care about the fate of a servant. “I beg you. Let me stay in your service.”

  “She isn’t really sorry,” Lady Lettice told the others. “She says that only because she’s an orphan with no family, and she would starve without my kindness. Wouldn’t you, Emma?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Emma adjusted Lady Lettice’s shawl across her shoulders, then took the handkerchief Lady Lettice clutched and dabbed at her cheek.

  “All right, fine, stop.” Lady Lettice pushed her away. “You’re annoying me. I’ll keep you on, but if you ever hit me again—”

  “I won’t! Thank you!” Emma curtsied, and curtsied again.

  “Actually . . .” Lady Lettice took back the handkerchief and stared at it. Michael could almost see the spark of some dreadful mischief start in her brain. “I’d like this dampened. Go to the ladies’ convenience and do so.”

  “As you wish, Lady Lettice.” Emma took the handkerchief and scurried away.

  “Watch, gentlemen,” Lady Lettice said. “Here’s entertainment. The stupid girl has no sense of direction. She turns right when she should turn left, goes north when she should go south. The ladies’ convenience is to the right, so she’ll turn left.”

  The men around watched as Emma walked to the door, hesitated.

  Michael silently urged her to the right.

  But as promised, she turned left.

  The little circle of sycophants guffawed.

  Michael winced.

  Lady Lettice tittered. “Would you gentlemen care to wager how long it will take my stupid companion to find her way back to me?”

  “Good sport,” said Bedingfield. “And I wager your handkerchief will still be dry!”

  The little group clustered together, making fun of a girl who had done them no wrong.

  Michael, ever the fool for the underdog, quietly went to rescue the poor companion from her own folly.

  Chapter Two

  Emma was lost. She wandered up and down well- lit corridors, stumbled into darkened rooms where couples strained to make love, then stumbled out as quickly, mumbling apologies and wishing she were back in England, where mating rituals were more restrained and less animal.

  Finally she found a door to the garden, stepped out on the terrace, and looked back at the château. From here, she could hear the music from the ballroom, see the light spilling from the windows. Surely, if she studied the location, she could find her way back there and start her search again.

  But then what? She still wouldn’t have accomplished her mission, and she knew very well the price of disobeying Lady Lettice’s commands.

  Moricadia was a gorgeous little gem of a country, set high in the Pyrenees and blessed with spectacular views, bucolic meadows, and hot springs reputed to heal the sick. But Emma stood there under the stars, staring at the splashing fountain, wishing she were rich, noble, and beautiful instead of poor, common, and well educated. What good did common sense and a sharp intelligence do for a woman when her main duty was to fan a perspiring beast and, at night, to massage the beast’s corn-laden feet? And if God answered no other prayer, she would think He’d at least give her some means by which to find her way from point A to point B without getting lost so that she could dampen the beastly handkerchief.

  As her father had always said, she might be a timid child, but she had an analytical brain, and that was a gift from God that she should utilize to make her life, and the lives of others, better and more fruitful.

  So, walking to the fountain, she dipped Lady Lettice’s handkerchief into the pool until it was thoroughly dampened, then lifted it and wrung it out.

  When she heard a warm, rasping chuckle behind her, she jumped, dropped the handkerchief, and turned to face Michael Durant, the tragic English nobleman.

  “I came out to direct you to the ladies’ convenience, but I see you found a better solution.” He nodded toward the fountain.

  “It’s not what you think.” This was her worst nightmare. He would report her to the beast. She was going to be thrown onto the street in a strange country with no resources, nowhere to turn. She was going to die—or suffer a fate worse than death. “I didn’t come out here on purpose—”

  He held up one hand. “Please. Lady Lettice made clear your amazing ability to get lost. What she didn’t realize, I suppose, was your ability to improvise. Miss . . . ?”

  “Chegwidden.” She curtsied as she’d been taught in Miss Smith’s School for Young Gentlewomen. “Emma Chegwidden.”

  In the ballroom, she had watched Michael Durant and thought him not at all lordly. Rather he was a handsome brute of a man, big-boned, tall, and raw. His black suit was of the finest material and in supreme
good taste, and she would wager he visited only London’s best tailors. Yet the clothes didn’t fit well: The formal black jacket was tight across his shoulders, the pants were loose at the waist, and the whole ensemble gave him the appearance of a warhorse dressed in gentleman’s clothing. His hair was red, untouched by gray. His eyes were bright, piercing green. His skin was tanned; he seemed like a man who followed the sun.

  He bowed. “A pleasure, Miss Chegwidden. Of the Yorkshire Chegwiddens?”

  “Exactly.” Silly to feel relief that Durant knew of her family, respectable and impoverished though they were, but she warmed to him. “My father was a vicar at the chapel in Freyaburn near the St. Ashley estate.”

  “I know the area well. Very beautiful. Very wild. Do you miss it?”

  “Oh, yes. In the spring, when the winds sweep across the moors and ripple the purple heather, I—” Her breath caught abruptly. She made it a point to never think about home, and this was why. A rush of silly tears could only lead to mockery.

  But he said merely, “I find Moricadia is very different from England, is it not?”

  “Very different.” She swallowed hard, gained control, and gestured toward the east. “The city is cosmopolitan, so bright and full of wealthy visitors seeking fun and gaming.”

  “Actually, Tonagra is”—he took her finger and pointed in the opposite direction—“that way.”

  “Oh.” She wasn’t embarrassed by his correction. Rather, she realized how long it had been since she’d had contact with another human—or at least another human who was not intent on humiliating her. And his touch was warm, penetrating her thin cotton glove, a gentle, light directional clasp.

  “But I interrupted you.” He removed his hand from hers, and when she didn’t immediately speak, he said, “Miss Chegwidden?”

  Obscurely discomfited by her wandering mind, she hastened into speech. “Here in Moricadia, the gambling houses are large and beautifully decorated, and again, so many visitors! So much wealth! And the châteaux dot the mountain ridges like so many stars in the sky. But at the same time . . . the people are so poor, and I feel as if no human habitation or feeble effort of man can tame these towering mountains or the primeval forest that blankets them.” Remembering the narrow, winding road Lady Lettice’s rented carriage had taken to bring them here, the way the woods had pressed close, the glimpses of rocky peaks she had seen when they crested a ridge, Emma shivered and pulled her shawl around her shoulders.

  Realizing suddenly that he watched her closely, she flushed.

  In the ballroom, she had thought him a phony, another nobleman flirting with tragedy for the outpouring of sympathy and the residual gossip.

  Out here, he seemed different, amused and more than a little sympathetic to her plight. Yet he saw too much, understood too well her emotions, and in the night, with only the stars for light, he had a quality of stillness about him, like a tiger lying in wait for its prey. In her position, paying attention to details like that meant the difference between surviving unscathed by pain and scandal, and being an unwilling victim.

  So she must step carefully. For all that Durant appeared kind, he could be every bit as nasty and mocking as the other gentlemen surrounding Lady Lettice, and a good deal more dangerous, for he invited confidences.

  “Pay no attention to me, my lord,” she said in her most self-deprecating tone. “Those are merely foolish musings on my part.”

  “Not at all. You show great insight.”

  “You have been here for a long time, then?”

  “A very long time indeed.”

  “Is your family unable to send the ransom?”

  “What ransom?”

  “The one to get you released so you may return home.”

  “My family would be quite shocked by that request. They believe me dead.”

  “How horrible for them! Can you not send a message secretly to relieve their grief?”

  “I don’t choose to.”

  Shock and revulsion held her frozen in place. “You have a family—a mother, a father—”

  “And two brothers.”

  “And you choose not to return to their bosom?”

  “I would never ask them to send money to line the de Guignards’ pockets.”

  She would have given anything to have her father back, paid any amount of money, would have begged and pleaded—and this man refused to send word to his relatives because . . . because . . . “So it’s pride that holds you back? You don’t wish to escape Moricadia, and you care nothing for their sorrow?”

  He stepped toward her.

  Abruptly she remembered that she was out in the garden. No one knew where she was. Michael Durant was a powerful nobleman. And she had just obliquely criticized him.

  She retreated. “I have overstepped my bounds—but you should be ashamed of your selfishness.”

  “You’re correct on both counts.” His voice was courteous and remote. “Shall I help you retrieve Lady Lettice’s handkerchief?”

  Glancing down into the clear water, she saw the white square floating just below the surface. “Thank you, I can do it.” Without turning her back to him, she leaned down, caught it in her fingertips, and wrung it out over the pool. “So Lady Lettice did this to humiliate me.” That was a bitter pill to swallow, to know everyone was laughing at her, and she could do nothing.

  “She is not a gentlewoman, I believe.”

  “No.” She wrung the handkerchief again as if it were Lady Lettice’s neck.

  “Nor a particularly pleasant woman.” He walked up the steps and looked back at her. “Shall we go back to the ballroom?”

  By that, she assumed he meant to guide her, and cautiously she followed him.

  He held the door for her, observing her as she walked through.

  She straightened her shoulders.

  “This way.” He gestured down the corridor, and as they walked, he continued. “I recall something about her being the only daughter of a manufacturing family, married for her fortune to Baron Surtees.”

  “When she was seventeen, she was reputed to be a great beauty.” Emma did not say that now Lady Lettice was a great beast. She suspected Durant, with his direct gaze, already had deduced that fact.

  “I also heard that after a mere twenty-some years of miserable married life, Surtees escaped wedlock by dropping dead.”

  “You are uncharitable, my lord.” She took a breath to avoid laughing while she spoke, and when she had herself under control, she said, “But essentially, you are correct. So Lady Lettice determined to do as she had always wished. She took his title and her fortune, which was relatively intact, hired a respectable companion from the Distinguished Academy of Governesses, a companion who had no resources, no family, and no way to leave her—that’s me—and has been taking the Grand Tour of Europe.”

  “In hopes of meeting and marrying her next victim . . . er, husband.”

  His height made her uncomfortable, and as they walked, she watched his hands. Big hands. Big bones. Big knuckles. Broad palm. Hands weathered by fighting experience. A white scar sliced across one knuckle on his left hand. He had hit something, or somebody, and split his hand. And she was walking alone with him. And determinedly talking. “Originally, Lady Lettice sought out young Englishmen, thinking it would be a good idea to wed someone who could take her higher in English society, but the young men were skittish and not particularly flattering.” Emma ran her finger over the raised ridge on her chin. “So she wisely moved on to gentlemen of the Continent. They have a much more sophisticated attitude toward women of her age and wealth.”

  “I can imagine. This way.” Durant took a turn to the right, then again to the left, leading her down corridors lined with closed doors and dimly lit by sparsely placed candles.

  “Are you sure?” She could have sworn they were headed back to the garden again.

  “I never get lost.” He sounded so sure of himself.

  Irksome man. He might not get lost, but he was certainly in tro
uble. With more sharpness than she intended, she asked, “What did you do to get yourself arrested as a political prisoner?”

  He stopped walking.

  She stopped walking.

  “In Moricadia, it doesn’t do to poke your nose into local troubles.” He tapped her nose with his finger. “Remember that.”

  Affronted by his presumption, she said, “I certainly would not do something so stupid.”

  His eyebrows, smooth and well shaped, lifted quizzically. “Of course not. You’re supremely sensible.”

  The way he spoke made her realize—she’d just called him stupid. “My lord, I didn’t mean—”

  “Not at all. You’re quite right. Now.” He opened a door to his right.

  At once, the sound of music and laughter filtered through, and, peeking in, Emma saw the dining hall where Lady Thibault’s servants were setting up for a midnight supper, and beyond that, through open glass doors, the ballroom.

  She couldn’t restrain a sigh of relief. Relief that she had made it back in a reasonable amount of time, and would not have to face Lady Lettice’s wrath. Relief that she didn’t have to spend any more time alone with the enigmatic Michael Durant.

  “Do you still have Lady Lettice’s handkerchief?” he asked.

  “I don’t lose things, my lord.” She showed it to him, still twisted between her palms. “I only lose myself.”

  “Now you are found. I’ll leave you to make your own way to Lady Lettice’s side.” He bowed. “It’s been a pleasure, Miss Chegwidden.”

  She curtsied. “My lord, my heartfelt thanks.” She watched him walk away, and wondered at the man. He seemed alternately kind, rescuing her from trouble, and heartless, in allowing his family to think he was dead. But still she was grateful; thanks to him, she had returned to the ballroom, the handkerchief was wet, and Lady Lettice and her nasty game had gone awry.