Anything But a Duke

by Christy Carlyle

  As two of the men hovered and murmured apologies, the third, the one whose coat she’d ripped, hunched beside her.

  “Forgive me, miss. I didn’t intend—”

  “I know!” Diana drew in a shaky breath to keep from barking some more. Her nerves were frayed, and she still hadn’t found her notes. “I think it will be all right.”

  When he stood, the man cast a long shadow, blotting out the light from the colored-glass dome overhead. Diana tipped her head to get a look at him.

  Heat flooded her cheeks as she stared.

  The stranger.

  She’d memorized the lines of his face, heard his voice in her head, and recalled his scent far too many times.

  She’d never forget the man, and yet today he looked strikingly different.

  That night a year ago, he’d been cast in cloud-shrouded moon glow, a palette of grays and dark shadows.

  But here, in morning light, he was all color. So many colors.

  Auburn hair. Piercing green eyes. Flushed lips. A waistcoat the shade of butterscotch under a suit of sapphire blue.

  In her memory he was tall, but now he seemed almost hulking compared to the men around them. And just as she’d remembered, his size was distributed well, proportioned in equal measure—broad chest, enormous shoulders, muscled thighs. Thighs that from her position in front of him, kneeling on the floor, she found herself staring at as her cheeks flared to an inferno.

  She fought the urge to still, as she sometimes did when emotions churned too wildly, and glanced up at him again.

  “You,” he said wonderingly.

  He watched for what felt like too long. Long enough for her to note that his gaze was markedly different from those of the other men she’d encountered that morning. He didn’t look at her as if she was an oddity to be assessed and dismissed. His gaze was seeking, as if he was pondering a question and wondered if she might be the answer.

  During a lengthy perusal, his gaze skimmed each feature of her face. Then he reached out a hand.

  Just like the night they’d met, Diana wasn’t wearing gloves. Neither was he. His palm was shockingly cool against her overheated fingers. Far cooler than the look in his eyes.

  She gave him her weight so that she could rise with some small measure of gracefulness despite the protest of her corset, and then she bent and carefully gathered her model in her arms. Subtle scents wafted off him, mint and coffee and fresh, clean linen.

  “We’ll be meeting again soon,” he told her. “In the Den. I’m Aidan Iverson.”

  Diana was used to her mind working quickly, sifting facts and sorting out problems every moment of the day, but suddenly details felt like mismatched puzzle pieces. Her stranger, the man she’d found injured in a Belgravia mews, was one of the men who would soon decide her fate. She knew she should speak, offering him a civil greeting. Even a warm one. His goodwill could change the entire course of her life.

  Instead, she stood mute and clung foolishly to his hand.

  “Good luck, Miss Ashby,” he said, his voice deep and as cool as the touch of his palm. Then he turned and strode away.

  Of course he knew her name. He might have had a part in selecting her to appear before the Den. She was the only woman who’d been selected this round.

  Perhaps that would help her somehow.

  He’d wished her luck. It’s what her brother believed in. It’s what their father had relied upon. But Diana didn’t believe in luck, only in herself and her ideas.

  Now she just needed to convince a duke, a marquess, and a man with searching green eyes whom she’d once kissed impulsively in the rain.

  Good grief, perhaps that would doom her altogether.

  “Miss?” The porter who’d spoken to her earlier approached. “I believe this is what you were looking for. Young gent says he picked them up by accident but has been reunited with his own papers.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She took the folio and offered the old man a smile, then quickly made her way back to the reception rooms. Her brother was awake but bleary-eyed.

  “You found your papers?”

  “I did. And you found a restorative.” She gestured to the cup of steaming tea sitting on the table beside him.

  “Would you like some?”

  “No, thank you.” Diana assessed him as she settled nearby. He looked more alert, but the pallor of his skin indicated that his need for tea was far greater than her own.

  She lifted her notes and slid a single sheet out for him to review. “Those are the words I wish to say. Let’s hope I remember to recite them all and in the right order without getting stuck somewhere in the middle.”

  While Dom squinted at her handwriting, Diana flipped through the other documents she’d brought with her. Beyond notes on her device, she’d collected details about the investors. She’d studied each man as if he were a design problem to be solved, scouring newspapers, gossip rags, and public documents to discover as much as she could about their interests and investment habits. Only one, Tremayne, was actually a duke. The other, the Marquess of Huntley, would someday inherit a dukedom.

  The third man was something else entirely.

  She curled her fingers against her palm, recalling the slide of his skin against hers.

  Though Aidan Iverson possessed no title, he’d built an enormous fortune in shipping and commerce, earning a reputation as a champion of progress. The Duke of Devices, they called him, due to his passion for investing in grand industrial projects.

  A shaky sigh escaped as she reviewed her notes on the Duke’s Den. The odds were most decidedly not in her favor. In the eight months since its inception, only twelve inventors had received funding. A mere dozen successes out of hundreds who’d come before them. And, of course, none of them had been lady inventors.

  The door to the lower level of the club opened and a hush fell over the room. Leather creaked and chair legs shifted as everyone turned anxious gazes toward the man who’d entered.

  Diana recognized him as one who’d accompanied Iverson earlier. The Marquess of Huntley possessed a handsome face of perfect symmetry topped by a head of chaotic golden waves. He’d acquired a reputation worse than her brother’s. Nearly everything she knew of the man came from scandal rags, much of it unrepeatable in polite company.

  The notorious marquess scanned faces until his gaze settled on Diana. His mouth twitched before sloping into a wickedly appealing grin.

  “You must be Miss Ashby.”

  Diana nodded and took a breath so deep her stays pinched at her chest.

  The marquess turned his gaze toward Dom and glanced down at a paper clutched in his hands. “Mr. Ashby and Miss Ashby. Won’t you both come and join us?” He gestured to the open door he’d just stepped through.

  Dom hovered a hand at her back and whispered, “You can do this, Di.”

  She nodded and started forward.

  She’d planned for this. She wanted this. She alone truly understood the stakes. It wasn’t just funding she sought, but recognition, an opportunity to alter the future course her mother had set out for her.

  She absolutely could not fail.

  Chapter Five

  Aidan watched, fascinated, as Miss Diana Ashby attempted to manage both her brother and the complex flow of her presentation.

  “Just hold it steady,” she whispered to him.

  He held up a painted diagram of the cleaning apparatus she’d designed, but the edge kept slipping, along with the young man’s concentration.

  “Got it,” he whispered back, but his hands shook and perspiration clung to his brow. He attempted to smile and only managed to look miserable.

  Even from across the room, Aidan noted how Mr. Ashby’s skin had taken on a sickly shade. Aidan knew of him as a gambler, one who’d briefly been a member of Lyon’s. Lack of funds had driven him from the higher stakes games, as Aidan recalled. He also remembered Ashby as one who spent as much time imbibing as testing his luck at the tables.

  “We’re almost f
inished,” Miss Ashby promised.

  Oddly, though they’d met with half a dozen inventors over the course of the morning, Aidan wasn’t eager for her presentation to end.

  The first lady to ever present to the Den was acquitting herself well, despite rushing through a few details and tripping over words he suspected normally caused her no grief. Her passion for her invention was what mattered most and it shone through. Unfortunately, Aidan couldn’t fathom the viability of a machine that required so much assembly and potential maintenance. Not to mention that its success would rely on the very unpredictable buying power of London’s household consumers.

  He suspected Miss Ashby’s device might be popular for a time but then fall out of faddish favor.

  She tripped over a word and started her sentence again. Her brother dropped the diagram he’d been holding and scrambled to retrieve it. Miss Ashby’s cheeks reddened.

  Aidan felt a ridiculously chivalrous impulse to come to her aid, yet the lady’s confident air suggested she’d refuse any kind of assistance. After the incident in the lobby, he doubted she’d trust him to help at all.

  He understood her nervousness and unease.

  The men of the Den could be an intimidating trio. They each possessed wealth few had achieved. But Aidan recalled a time when he was the one seeking opportunities and investors, desperate for someone to believe in his instincts.

  Miss Ashby took a deep breath as she drew to a close. Then she pressed a hand to the side of her neck, where Aidan suspected her pulse was racing madly. The room was warm, and her cheeks had become increasingly flushed during the past quarter of an hour.

  He tried desperately to listen as if she was someone he’d never met before. When the application to appear before the Den had come from a Miss Diana Ashby, he had no idea it was the same woman who haunted his dreams. The woman who’d saved him from being left in a bloody heap in a Belgravia alleyway.

  In the past months, he’d willed himself not to think of her. But she held a unique distinction of being the single person to whom he owed a debt.

  And meeting her again today did nothing to diminish how much she fascinated him.

  The lady was a bit of a conundrum.

  She dressed like a debutante, spoke like a scholar, and had a flare of hunger in her gaze that he recognized, but hadn’t felt in years.

  Every inventor who came before them wanted money, validation, but he saw something more in Miss Ashby’s eyes. Determination. Desperation. Drive. The same impulses that had once fueled him.

  His passion for success had cooled over the years. But Diana Ashby’s was fresh. Her desire felt raw, almost palpable. When he’d touched her hand in the lobby, she’d been enticingly warm, as if some fire lit her from the inside.

  He’d known that kind of fire once.

  His had been stoked by anger. Guilt. Desperation.

  Shifting in his chair, Aidan willed himself to stop ruminating and listen to Miss Ashby’s words. He clasped a hand over his mouth and cast his gaze down at the floor.

  A moment later, she paused as if she’d misplaced her next thought. When she fell silent, Nick spoke up.

  “Is that all, Miss Ashby?” Tremayne had a voice that sounded far gruffer than Aidan knew the man to be.

  “That is the sum of my presentation, Your Grace. But I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.” Her tone rang with confidence, even eagerness. Clearly she was prepared for inquiry. She’d been very thorough in describing her cleaning apparatus.

  “Do you have something in that box beside you?” Huntley pointed to the object Aidan had accidentally caused her to drop.

  “Yes, of course. How could I forget? It’s a scale model of my device with a mechanism that works on the same principle as the completed prototype.”

  “Well, let us see your machine in action,” Huntley suggested.

  Aidan cast a sidelong glance at his friend and business partner. Huntley was the least likely of the three of them to part with his money unless it was to secure the company of free-spirited women and expensive liquor. For the first time since they’d started the Den, the man sounded downright intrigued.

  Miss Ashby’s brother jumped to attention as if realizing his moment had finally come.

  Diana nodded to her brother and worked the latch at the top of the container, letting the sides fall open to reveal the model she’d described. One of the tubes of the mechanism lay at an odd angle and she reached inside to adjust its trajectory. She let out a hiss of breath when the ringed metal cylinder crumpled in her hand.

  Mr. Ashby’s eyes bulged wide. He nudged his chin toward the box. “There’s something amiss.”

  “It’s broken.” She let out the two words on a horrified gasp.

  “How bad?” her brother inquired gently.

  “Ruined.”

  Aidan winced. Their mishap had been brief, but her wooden container had hit the marble floor hard.

  “Is there a problem, Miss Ashby?” Huntley leaned forward. “Is your machine not working?”

  “My invention does work, my lord.” She looked up, scanning their faces. Her gaze came to rest on Aidan, and she shot him a stare as pointed as an accusing finger placed right between his eyes.

  “I regret to say that my apparatus was damaged during this morning’s collision.” Each word fell from her lush mouth with hard emphasis, as if she was repeating a curse and wished to get every syllable right.

  Aidan stared into Miss Diana Ashby’s pretty blue eyes and didn’t doubt for a moment that if she could have called him up before a magistrate, she would have.

  He couldn’t blame her. Such an opportunity came once, and he had taken part in damaging her prospects.

  “That’s a terrible shame, Miss Ashby.” Huntley pitched his voice an octave lower.

  “It’s my fault.” Aidan waited for all eyes to turn his way. “When we encountered Miss Ashby this morning, I inadvertently caused her model to tip—”

  “To crash,” she corrected.

  “The box fell.”

  “Slammed onto the polished marble of the main lobby.”

  “I did apologize.” He squared his gaze on her narrowed one. “I regret the accident, Miss Ashby.”

  “Not as much as I do, Mr. Iverson.”

  Aidan swallowed hard as she glared at him. He wondered if she regretted all of it. Rushing in to help a stranger. Holding on to each other for far too long on that year-ago rainy night. The brush of her mouth against his.

  He turned his gaze toward Huntley and then Tremayne one chair down. “This should not impact our judgment regarding Miss Ashby’s device. The blame is mine.”

  Tremayne nodded and Huntley pursed his mouth thoughtfully.

  “Perhaps we could just—” Her brother pulled various tubes and cables out of the box.

  “No.” Miss Ashby spoke the single word like a judge issuing her final edict. “We mustn’t waste any more of your time, gentlemen.” She snapped the lid shut on her contraption, then turned to face them.

  Her expression made something pinch behind Aidan’s middle waistcoat button. The intensity had dimmed. She offered no more bold stares. In fact, her gaze seemed to fix on the wall at their backs.

  “If there is anything else you wish to know about my mechanism, I’m willing to answer any question put to me.”

  “Where does it all go?” Aidan asked her. The one matter she hadn’t addressed was disposal of all the dirt her device would so efficiently collect.

  Instantly, her gaze met his, her eyes lit with a blaze of irritation that tightened her heart-shaped face, sharpening the soft curve of her jaw.

  “Can you be more specific, Mr. Iverson?”

  “You’ve spoken quite eloquently of the benefits of your cleaning mechanism. Ideally, you envision a tube system in every household, which can be used for disposing of dust and other refuse. But where does it all go?”

  “Did you not read my notes, sir?”

  “Not every word, Miss Ashby.” He gla
nced at Tremayne and scoffed. “We are petitioned by hundreds of applicants.”

  “I imagine you are. This is the opportunity of a lifetime and I am grateful.”

  The moment Aidan started to speak, she cut in.

  “Yet how can you adequately judge the merit of our inventions if you do not read each word of our applications?”

  Aidan inhaled sharply and narrowed an eye at Diana Ashby. He’d just been chastised.

  He sat up in his chair and resisted the ridiculous urge to straighten his necktie.

  “To answer your question, Mr. Iverson, I propose a central facility with furnaces that would incinerate the refuse.”

  “That’s quite brilliant.” Huntley edged forward on his chair again.

  Aidan rolled his eyes.

  “Furnaces,” Huntley continued, “create more dust, which will cause Londoners to need a system like yours even more. It’s almost diabolical.”

  Huntley was the one Diana Ashby had looked to with hopefulness. He’d expressed the most interest in her design, though Aidan feared the man’s eagerness had as much to do with the lady’s beauty as her invention’s profitability.

  Now she looked at him in shock, eyes wide, her expression pained.

  “You mistake me, my lord.” Lines formed on her pinched brow, and the pink ruffles lining the pleats across her shoulders drooped as she let out a sigh. Softly, she added, “I wish to help people.”

  The five words landed like a blow. Miss Ashby’s drive to succeed, he understood. But her desire to help others, that was a need—almost a compulsion—that rode his shoulders every day.

  Their reasons could not be the same. She was probably an inveterate do-gooder. He was a man with a terrible sin to make up for. But he understood her goal, nonetheless.

  Nick cleared his throat. “Thank you, Miss Ashby.” He looked past Huntley to catch Aidan’s gaze. “Unless any of you wish to pledge funding for Miss Ashby today, we will move on and send her our final determination via letter.”