How to Tempt a Duke

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“Men are always ruled by petticoats when you get right down to it, Your Grace,” Phineas said, helping to ease the superbly tailored jacket from Rafe’s broad shoulders. “That’s what m’father warned me when I was just a little tyke. Be he beggar or king, m’father would say, a man is bound to find himself under some woman’s thumb sooner or later.”

“Thank you for sharing your father’s insight with me, Phineas. But I am not under any woman’s thumb. I’m merely going along with what Miss Seavers suggests because she is more familiar with—And why am I bothering to say any of this to you?”

“I’m sure I have no idea, Your Grace,” Phineas said, not turning away quickly enough to hide his smile. “I’ll just go hang up your jacket now, seeing as how you’ve only the three rigouts until that mess of fine clothes you ordered in London catches up with us.”

Rafe stood in front of the cheval glass to adjust his hacking jacket more comfortably on his shoulders. His new wardrobe was a far cry from the uniforms he’d worn—lived in, slept in, shared with lice and other vermin more often than he’d like to remember. Broiled in during the hot summers, frozen in for several cold winters.

“Phineas? Where are my uniforms?”

“Burned, Your Grace,” the Bow Street runner turned valet said as he brushed at the discarded jacket. “Couldn’t go selling the King’s uniform to no bowwow shop, now could I? The dregs of London lording it about on Piccadilly as if they were real soldiers? Weren’t any use to you anymore, Your Grace.”

“Burned? So they’re gone?” Rafe felt a sudden desire to see his uniforms one more time. Surely not a rational thought. They’d been a part of his life for so many years; he’d planned to remain in uniform until Phineas had showed up with his startling, life-changing news.

“Excepting the ribbons and the braid and the buttons and such, yes, Your Grace. Sir? Your Miss Seavers is most probably waiting on you downstairs.”

“Right,” Rafe said, checking his appearance one last time. He knew his brown-and-tan riding clothes to be fashionable as well as proper, but he did miss the scarlet. He knew who he was in the scarlet.

He didn’t know who he was now at all.

His hand had just touched the banister when he looked over the railing to see Charlie standing in the entrance hall. She was dressed in a close-fitting navy hussar’s jacket and divided riding skirt, a matching shako hat tipped to one side on her head. She was tapping one booted foot in time with each impatient strike of his hat against her thigh.

He still couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around the idea that Charlie had grown up.And grown up so prettily, too. He didn’t know where she planned to take him, but they really should have a groom riding along behind them, as a young woman so beautiful, so eligible, should not be with a man unless chaperoned in some way.

As if Rafe was planning to pounce on her in any way. Which he wasn’t.

Even if the thought had occurred to him.

“My apologies, Charlie,” he called out as he rapidly descended the staircase. “I had not received your order until a few minutes ago.”

She looked up at him, frowning. “My order?”

“Yes,” he said, crossing the entrance hall to take his hat from her. “Something about showing my pretty face somewhere?”

Charlotte winced rather comically. “I must remember that servants have an unnerving way of quoting back just what they should forget, and forgetting just what they should commit to memory. I’m sorry, Rafe. But I did think this is something best not put off for another day. I suggest we begin with the forestry operations, and then continue to the cottages of the farm laborers, and then the mill. Or perhaps you’d like to ride into the village?”

“We could have discussed this all last evening, if you had deigned to appear at dinner.”

“I was otherwise detained,” she said unapologetically, although her gaze slid away from his rather guiltily. “I had to visit my parents with my maid and collect a few items I needed. Forgive me for not realizing you’d be lost without my presence.”

“Touché, Charlie, your point is well-taken. I did miss you, as it left me staring down that long table while my sisters pointedly ignored me, Nicole talking nineteen to the dozen about some new bonnet ribbons while Lydia reinforced my initial conclusion that she’s frightened to death of me.”

“Lydia will come around. She’s rather bookish. Quiet. I think you should be grateful. They are twins, remember, and both of them could be like Nicole.”

“Heaven forfend,” Rafe said facetiously, throwing up his hands. “Lydia’s bookish? That can’t be good, not if she’s smarter than the gentlemen around her. Is she really a budding bluestocking?”

“Not quite, but she is a very serious young woman. Girl. She’s always got her nose in a book, and very nearly lives in the library most days, curled up on a window seat with her latest discovery.”

Rafe considered this for a moment. “Then she might be the one to choose some reading material for Fitz. He only a few minutes ago begged that someone come read to him.”

“Oh, I doubt Lydia would ever dare to enter the man’s bedchamber. But I can ask her to select a few books she might think Fitz would enjoy and have a servant deliver them to him.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right. I mean, not that Fitz would ever—that is, Lydia is only a child, and—oh, hell, Charlie, I don’t know what I mean. Is it cowardly of me to admit that I don’t have the faintest idea of how to take care of my own two sisters? There I sat last night, at the dinner table, wildly attempting to come up with something to say that might engage them in conversation somehow. But what do I know of what would interest a female of that age?”

Charlotte looked at him in real sympathy. “You’re worried they won’t like you, aren’t you? Oh, Rafe, that’s so sweet. I don’t think most men would care a fig what two sixteen-year-old siblings thought of them.”

“Somebody has to be responsible for them.”

“Responsible, yes. But you actually care. That’s so sweet.”

“Charlie, tell me I’m being sweet one more time and I swear I’m going to leave you standing here and go drink down half my uncle’s wine cellars.”

“Very well, we’ll get down to business. You’ve greeted the staff here, but you’ve many more souls who depend on the duke’s living for their bread and butter and the roofs over their heads. They need to see you. Mr. Cummings is a competent steward, but they’ve been too long without a real master.”

“You do realize, Charlie, that I have no more idea of what I’m supposed to do, or say, to any of these people than I do about how to handle Nicole and Lydia? I’m only a soldier.”

“And as your troops looked to you to lead them, looked to you for strength and resolve and direction, believing you would take care of them, not betray them or put them in unnecessary danger, so do the laborers on your estate. Care for them, show kindness to them even as you lead them, and they will give you their loyalty.”

“You make it all sound so simple, Charlie. Even as we both know it isn’t all quite that easy.”

The footman he now knew as Billy handed him his gloves and riding crop, and he and Charlotte headed down the wide steps to where more servants held the reins of their mounts.

“I don’t see a mount for one of the grooms.”

Charlotte looked at him askance. “You believe we need a chaperone, Your Grace? It’s broad daylight, and we’re going to the sawmill. I doubt we could get into much mischief between here and there.”

“Never mind,” Rafe said tightly, feeling heat climbing the back of his neck. “Just go get on the damn horse.”

Charlotte waited until she’d been boosted into the sidesaddle and they had turned the horses down the drive before saying, “I’ve just thought of something that might help you during this first meeting with your tenants. Do you remember what we were taught as children to do if confronted by a wildly barking dog, Rafe?”

“Yes, I remember. Stand your ground, never show fear.” Rafe smiled. “So my people are to be compared with angry canines?”

She wrinkled her nose, looking rather adorable, not that he wanted to notice; he was still faintly angry with her about the way she’d teased him when he mentioned a chaperone. “I suppose that didn’t come out quite right, did it? But the advice is sound. Really, Rafe, you have to face it sooner or later. You’re the rightful Duke of Ashurst.”

“And I only climbed over three bodies to get here,” he said, privately shocked to hear himself say the words. Was that how he really felt? Like an interloper? A ghoul come to dance on the graves of his uncle and cousins?

They rode along in silence for a few minutes more before turning onto a rutted roadway lined by dense undergrowth and trees that began only a few yards from them on either side.

Rafe felt Charlotte’s gaze on him every few moments, until she finally said, “You know, there are no bodies, Rafe. They were never recovered. Emmaline held a memorial service in the estate chapel once all hope was gone, but there was…there was nothing to inter in the mausoleum. There are only brass plaques in front of where their resting places should be. Emmaline did her best.”

“The letter she had Phineas carry to me spoke of a new yacht, and a storm. I should have realized there was a possibility no bodies were ever found.”

“It was all an avoidable accident, I’m sad to tell you. The crew wished to turn about when the distant sky turned ominous, but either your cousins or your uncle overruled the captain. The single man to survive long enough to be plucked from the waters by a passing ship also mentioned large quantities of wine and a few women aboard. Not ladies, Rafe. Women. You’ll pardon my frankness, but George was always a loose screw. I can only wonder why the duke agreed to the excursion.”

“You probably have no further to look than the few loose women,” Rafe said as he thought about his uncle, who had always had an appetite for female flesh, the less respectable the better. An appetite he already knew his cousins had shared. “That had to be embarrassing for Emmaline to hear. And for you to have to tell me.”

Charlotte shrugged her shoulders, her air of unconcern clearly forced. She obviously was only telling him what she felt he needed to know. “I don’t think about it, not really. Or of them. They’re dead now, so what’s the point?”

“True enough. We’re probably lucky to have any information at all, good or bad. I didn’t know one of the crew survived.”

“Not a member of the crew, Rafe. One Mr. Hugh Hobart. It was he who wrote to Emmaline about the last moments before the yacht sank. According to Mr. Hobart, George and Harold were belowdecks with their…um, their companions, all of them quite seasick, when the rogue wave struck, overturning the vessel. Your uncle and Mr. Hobart were still on deck, keeping an anxious eye on the coastline as the yacht belatedly raced toward the port.”

“Good God. They must have been terrified. We encountered a Channel storm on our way here. Our ship was a captured Spanish galleon, a formidable thing, and it was tossed about like a cork. I can’t imagine what an angry Channel could do to a small yacht.”

“Hence your friend Fitz’s haste to disembark. Yes, I remember. The last thing Mr. Hobart wrote he remembers before he came to himself in the small boat they were towing is feeling the lurch of the yacht, and seeing the boom swing around to catch your uncle full in the chest and head, dealing him what was certainly a mortal blow. I’m sorry, Rafe.”

“Yes, so am I,” he said as Charlotte turned her mount onto the even narrower roadway he knew led to the lumber mill. Ashurst Hall was situated near enough the Sussex Weald to make forestry a lucrative part of the estate activities, seedlings planted wherever mature trees were harvested. Rafe could remember hearing his uncle lecture to George that to cut once is greedy and shortsighted, that a penny sown back in the earth for every pound that is reaped is the way to true wealth. The late duke was a hard man, but he’d been a fine steward of his lands.

“Mr. Hobart was invited to attend the memorial, but he was forced to decline, as he’d yet to recover from his own injuries. Emmaline truly wished to meet him, and learn more about her family’s last hours.”

“I suppose I should speak to the gentleman myself,” Rafe said, watching as men began running from seemingly everywhere to line up alongside the roadway. “He was, I’m assuming, a friend of George’s?”

“I don’t know, you’d have to ask him. I’d never heard the name until his letter arrived and Emmaline shared it with me. Emmaline was equally unaware of the man, but that meant nothing, as your cousins had a large acquaintance. Ah, and here is Mr. Cummings now,” she said as a horse and rider approached along the lane. “You don’t know him, as your uncle took him on after Mr. Willard left for Hampshire to spend his declining years with his grown daughter, so don’t worry that you don’t recognize him. Still, you will address him as John.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rafe said facetiously. “Here, now, I’ve just had a thought. Wouldn’t it simply be easier for me to turn him off and hire you to run both Ashurst Hall and the rest of my life?”

He thought he saw a quick flicker of something unreadable in Charlotte’s soft brown eyes. Anger? No. And not quite hurt, either. Something else. But what? Guilt? No, it couldn’t be.

“I’m only trying to help, Rafe,” she said quietly.

“Yes, Charlie, I know. Please forgive me,” he said, reaching out a hand to touch hers as they held the reins. “I’d be lost without you and I know it.”

Her smile didn’t seem to quite reach her lovely brown eyes. “Oh, you’ll not need me for long. I have every confidence in your ability to be a fine duke. Remember, Rafe, that some are born to greatness, some achieve greatness, and some—”

“And some have greatness thrust upon them. Yes, Charlie, I remember my Shakespeare, having studied it along with George and Harold while living here on sufferance. But I was not born to greatness, have achieved nothing remotely great, and I have had a title thrust upon me through no effort of my own.”

Charlotte rolled her eyes in exasperation. “You really have to stop that, Rafe. It’s both tedious and annoying. Did George or Harold deserve to be born as they were? Is anyone born to what they deserve? It’s how you behave that determines how the world sees you, and how you see yourself. Now turn your hat around a bit. The dent is showing, and lends nothing to your consequence.”

Rafe threw back his head and laughed in real amusement. “You would have made a top-notch master sergeant,” he said, and then dutifully readjusted his hat. “And my boots, master sergeant. Do they pass muster?”

Her answer to his spontaneous outburst was a lift of her chin and a definite “Hruumph!”

“Your Grace,” Mr. Cummings said as he drew his mount to a halt some ten feet away and doffed his cap. “We were told to expect a visit this morning. Welcome home, sir.”

“Thank you, John,” he said, urging his own mount forward and extending his right hand. “May I be honest with you? I’m here to throw myself on your mercy. Is there anything you’d like me to see here today?”

“Well, uh, Miss Seavers could…” Cummings shot a quick glance toward Charlotte, who, Rafe noticed, quickly shook her head. “That is to say, it would be my pleasure, Your Grace, to show you our much-improved sawmill. We’ve…uh, I’ve instituted some changes since His Grace’s sad death, and accidents have been reduced more than half. I’m happy to inform Your Grace that we haven’t lost a finger or a hand in more than six months.”

Rafe looked toward Charlotte, whose cheeks had gone faintly pink. What the devil was going on here? “Is that so, John. Very commendable on your part, I’m sure. I should very much like to see these improvements.”

“I’ll leave you two to get at it, then,” Charlotte said, already turning her mount.

Rafe grabbed at the reins. He needed to find out what the devil was happening here. “Oh, no, please, Miss Seavers, I wouldn’t dream of allowing you to return to Ashurst Hall unescorted. I fear I must insist that you accompany us.”

She smiled with her mouth as she skewered him with those intelligent eyes. “I’d be honored, Your Grace.”

They followed John Cummings to the sawmill, passing the long single line of workers who variously waved their caps in the air or tugged their forelocks, depending on their age and station in the pecking order, Rafe imagined. “Your Grace, welcome home.” He heard that all along the way; polite greetings, if not enthusiastic.