June blushed. “Er. Not you. I mean, Duke Blackmoore.”
“If the princess wants the duke because he’s very, very hot, she must be very, very dumb,” Ally said, her eyes meeting the duke’s with what she hoped was steely menace. She tried not to notice that his dark hair against his white skin was crushingly beautiful.
“No. She’s smart as a whip. See, she has to marry him to inherit the cash to support her oodles of siblings, and he has to marry her to get the wannabe Mrs. Dukes off his back.”
“I don’t have any siblings,” Ally pointed out, inexplicably relieved.
“I don’t have any wannabe…Wait…Oh. Bloody hell, I am the duke. But reformed? That’s not a romance; that’s a tragedy.”
Ally hadn’t read a romance in ages; there were too many high school classics to be reread with her students. But the romance novels she remembered involved very badly behaved men whom she had loved anyway, because of their rippling thighs and masterful ways that made her want to put the book down and just lie back and close her eyes and—
Ally realized with a start that she was staring at the duke’s thighs.
So much for steely menace.
She yanked her gaze away, only to meet his dancing gray eyes. She felt herself blush. This was the dilemma, wasn’t it? No matter how wickedly bad they were, the bad boys made the good girls swoon. But the truth was, you couldn’t reform a person. People were what they were. Ally’s life had confirmed that a million times over. She would never fall for a rogue the way her mother had fallen for her gambling-poisoned father, the world’s number one toxic charmer. Never.
But the duke was hardly the point. Ally had bigger problems. She needed a plan. One: Lose the duke. Two: Get Granny Donny to the doctor and find out what was going on. Three: Postpone her move until she figured out what to do next. Self-pity caught in her throat, but she forced it down. She was her grandmother’s only relative, unless her parents magically showed up. And that didn’t seem to be happening anytime soon.
“Granny Donny, I’ll take you home and stay with you tonight. I’ll send your, er, your coachman home, and we’ll catch a cab back to your place and put you to bed.” Peering out the peephole, Ally got a fish-eye view of a thin man in a black top hat leaning against a carriage, reading a newspaper. The trouble with having too much money was the abundance of people who were willing to make any fantasy come true for a price. She wondered what she’d find at her grandmother’s apartment. A matching set of eight liveried footmen? A pig roasting over an open fire?
Peasants?
She had to sit down.
“I’ll escort your grandmother home,” the duke assured Ally. “Isn’t that the sort of thing I’d do? Being rich and idle, yet on my way to reform under your good-hearted, stern guidance? I won’t even stop to duel on the way.”
Ally considered telling the duke to beat it, but something about his accent and Granny Donny’s dress and the coachmen waiting outside made her say, polite as could be, “You’ve done enough. Thank you.” Sheesh, she sounded like she was reading for the role of Elizabeth Bennet.
Disgusted with herself, Ally stuck her bare feet into her slippers, pulled on her pink robe, and went to the sidewalk to settle matters with Granny Donny’s coachman.
It was scandalous to go out with only her coachman; but it was possible, so Princess Alexandra did, daring the world to contradict her. Luckily, being considered good occasionally had its advantages. Just yesterday she overheard Lady Southerland assert, rather too loudly, “When one looks as plain and serious as Princess Alexandra, sadly there is little chance of her attracting trouble of the masculine kind for which she’d need a more suitable escort.”
—From The Dulcet Duke
Chapter 3
It was not love at first sight. Not even lust.
Not even close.
His duty done, Sam saw his chance to beat a hasty retreat. He bid the dear old lady and the nubile, engaged roommate a fond farewell and followed the rather plain and irritated woman named Ally out the door to the coachman.
The granddaughter had been thoroughly disappointing after the delightful grandmother. That Ally was in pajamas at eight in the evening, obviously still suffering a hangover from the previous night, had been initially promising, true. But this woman’s pajamas were just that: pajamas. Men’s pajamas. Vintage, green striped, silk lounging wear circa 1957. Clearly, she wore them for sleeping.
Time to move on.
The coachman looked up from his New York Post. The headline screamed, “yankees whankees.” Sam didn’t get baseball any more than he got American football. English football, that is, soccer, was his game. He was an amateur midfielder; speedy, dirty, and agile. Baseball was one of those curious American afflictions that made no sense at all to him. Slow, plodding, and thick, without any of the grace of cricket.
He turned to Ally. “Well then. Pleasure to have met you. Good luck with your upcoming nuptials. I do hope you find, reform, and marry your naughty duke.” He bowed low, then turned away.
She didn’t acknowledge his departure. “I hope my grandmother hasn’t caused you any trouble,” Ally said to the coachman, as if she had just been shaken from the pages of a Jane Austen novel. “If she owes you money, I’ll settle.”
Sam was three steps toward home, but the idea of Ally paying seemed unchivalrous. He spun on his heel, cursing under his breath. The old woman had given him a hand, after all. “You’ll do no such thing, Princess,” Sam interrupted. Despite her grandmother’s obvious wealth, it was clear from Ally’s almost empty, dark, too-far-uptown home that Ally didn’t have enough money for a decent life in Manhattan, much less a few spare twenties for a horse and carriage. He wondered at the disparity between the two generations of Giordanos. “I’ll settle anything that needs settling.”
He studied her as she refused his money with a lecture about god-knew-what. Her eyes were pretty enough, but it was hard to appreciate them, as they were separated from the world by black granny glasses. The light brown of her eyes was a slight improvement over the dark brown of her dull hair, which was pulled back in a messy bun. A few straight strands escaping around the edges made the effect of dowdy school marm so complete, he realized with considerable alarm, that her old-lady, man’s jams, vintage look was by design.
She is a schoolteacher. He shuddered. He’d been thrown out of enough boarding schools to recognize a schoolteacher when he saw one. No wonder she was into lectures and obscure facts. He had a theory about spinster schoolteachers: They were surrounded by so many nubile adolescents, they had to shut down their own libidos just to make it to lunch. She had moved on to a soliloquy about her grandmother to the coachman that somehow segued into horse husbandry. He listened in silent horror.
When Ally finally paused for breath, the coachman held up his hand to stop her. “I’m Mateo,” he said in heavily accented English. “And you must be Princess Alexandra. There’s nothing to settle. Lady Donatella hired Paula and me for the week.” He gestured to the horse, who must have been Paula. “I’m paid up till Saturday.”
Sam snapped his roaming mind to attention. He recognized that accent. Almost Spanish, but more lilting. Portuguese. Brazil? Paula was decked out with a yellow, green, and blue plume. Brazil.
Had they ever met on the turf? He didn’t recognize Mateo, but the coachman had the physical ease of a player about him. Sam could sniff out a soccer player the way he suspected a true Regency duke could peg another nobleman, down to rank and title with only a glance at his watch fob. Whatever a watch fob was. The point was, he just knew a player when he saw one.
Ally cringed. “By the week?”
Sam tore his attention from the far more interesting coachman to Ally. The distress on her face touched him, and he reminded himself that he had no sympathy for hard-nosed schoolteachers. He’d been tortured by enough sadist teachers to last him a lifetime. “Really, you ought to pay better attention to your delightful grandmother,” he scolded. “I’m not so sure you’re
cut out for the role of the good woman if you treat her so shabbily.”
“I am not the good woman,” Ally protested.
“Your glasses say otherwise. And your pajamas and your hair and your—”
Mateo interrupted their bickering. “Escorting your grandmother is an honor for Paula and me. Beats hoofing tourists around Central Park.” He patted the horse.
Paula did not look honored.
Ally stroked the horse’s side. “She’s sweating.”
“Went to eighty-four today at noon. It’s not easy for old ladies in the city in this weather. Horse or human.”
“Then you should take her somewhere cooler,” Ally said.
“To the country house! She can pull your wedding carriage,” Sam cried. Clients loved what they called his reckless enthusiasm, but Paula flicked her ears in annoyance. She turned her head to shoot him an evil stare around her blinders. She was speckled gray and white and looked small in her tack, dwarfed by the gleaming white, red, and chrome carriage looming behind her.
Bloody old ladies got him every time.
He offered her his blade of grass in apology.
She ignored him with a shake of her muzzle.
He turned his attention back to Mateo. He looked eerily familiar. “Striker?” he asked.
“Center mid,” Mateo replied without missing a beat.
Sam’s competitive juices stirred. “I don’t remember ever seeing you around Central Park. But I’ve seen you somewhere.”
Mateo folded up his Post after casting Sam the most cursory of dismissive glances. “If you saw me around, you’d remember.” He turned to Ally, who was looking at them as if they were speaking Dutch. “Paula’s got Arabian blood,” he told her. “The heat doesn’t bother her as much as the Belgians or Percherons you usually see around Manhattan. It’s the cold Paula and I don’t like much. I take good care of her.” Mateo swung himself onto the carriage seat gracefully. Paula kicked at the curb with her hoof, as if she couldn’t wait to get away from the lot of them. “Tell your grandmother I’ll be at the Plaza in the morning as usual. Ten a.m. for our daily constitutional in the park.”
“She won’t be there,” Ally insisted. “We’ll be at the doctor all day.”
Mateo shrugged. “Like I said, I’m paid for the week, so I’ll be there anyway, in case you need me.” Then he jostled the reins and Paula pulled back into the empty traffic lane and down 113th Street.
Nostalgia for London overcame Sam as he watched them clip-clop away. If you squinted away the parked cars, shut out the annoying, practical woman at your side, and focused on the setting sun and the echoing clip-clop of Paula’s hooves, the scene could be, well, London, circa 1812.
He shook himself from his reverie. He hadn’t been home in ten years for good reason. Bloody fool being nostalgic for a place that he’d spent his life getting away from. A place he was never going back to. A place he’d do anything to forget.
Ally watched the carriage pull away, struck by how wrong it looked on the filthy, New York street. It was like her dear granny in Manhattan—once natural, now hopelessly out of place. The clip-clops echoed in her head like a warning.
She gathered herself to go back inside and face her grandmother, sick with the understanding that her planned move was coming undone at the seams and then sicker with the understanding that she was thinking of herself when she ought to be thinking of Granny Donny then sickest, almost gagging, with the understanding that if something happened to Granny Donny then Ally was alone in this world, completely, utterly alone.
How had she ever even considered leaving New York? What had she been thinking? Ally had been blindsided. She knew it had been stupid to think her eighty-four-year-old grandmother could go on forever, but she had been doing so well—until tonight.
Her spiraling thoughts were interrupted by the duke’s voice. He was talking into his cell. “Clive? It’s Sam. Mr. Carson, yeah. Listen, there was a woman out front, red dress. Still? Bloody hell. Do you think Misha could meet me in the alley and sneak me in the back? Brilliant. Ten minutes.” He clicked his phone shut and caught Ally staring, openmouthed. “Bon voyage!” He waved to her, then turned toward the park.
Mr. Sam Carson—Duke Sam Carson—was walking away from her. But of course, he didn’t just walk. He trotted, invisible reins held high in the one hand, as if he were on a mighty steed.
As if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Sneak me in past the woman in the red dress, Misha.
A pang of regret that Sam hadn’t been a real hero, come on his white horse to save her, shot through Ally. Really, what did she want? To reform a self-centered, irresponsible, pleasure-seeking rogue? No, thanks. In real life, people never changed their true natures. A spoiled man with too much privilege, too much testosterone, and too much money was more trouble than he was worth.
Ally opened the door to her apartment, swallowed her foreboding, and went inside.
Good help is impossible to find, and yet, a lady certainly cannot be expected to boil her own water for tea.
—From The Dulcet Duke
Chapter 4
After trips to the internist, the neurologist, and the hospital for endless tests and scans, all the doctors agreed: sudden onset of temporary (please, God, let it be temporary) dementia characteristic of that brought on by a mild but undetectable stroke. Pills and therapy and the advice to wait it out. Granny Donny might return to normal. The brain is an amazing organ, capable of remarkable repair. Only time will tell.
“Ally,” Dr. Trawlbridge, the neurologist, said in a voice Ally was coming to recognize as the You’re-in-Deep voice. “You must understand that her dementia might get better, but it might get worse. The most common forms of primary degenerative dementia are untreatable. But ten to twenty percent can be overcome with pharmacotherapy.”
“Pharma what?”
“Pills. If we’re very lucky and there was no stroke. But we don’t know, so we’ll try both approaches, physical therapy and pharmacotherapy, in case there are other indicators. But there’s a chance there will still be no movement. You have to be sure that you live your life and don’t get sucked into being a martyr. You’re young. Your grandmother is quite wealthy. I advise you to hire as much help as you can and go on with your life as planned. No one suffers more in these situations than the caregivers if they don’t put themselves first.”
Ally had gotten stuck at will probably get worse. “Worse how?” she managed to choke out. Her grandmother had always put Ally first. Now Ally was supposed to put herself first?
“For example, she knows you’re her granddaughter. She recognizes you. That’s very reassuring.”
Sixteen-year-old virgin princess granddaughter on the verge of spinsterhood, but Ally got his point.
“That might fade. She might not know who you are if there’s another episode or if things deteriorate further. When there’s one stroke, another becomes much more likely. So get help. Get ready. Then, take advantage of this time you have with her while she’s somewhat lucid. But be ready to disengage and go on with your life.”
“So here I am thinking this is a disaster, and you’re saying that maybe it’s a high point?” Ally’s skin had gone cold and clammy.
“I’m saying that if there’s anything you want to learn from your grandmother or say to her or do with her, now’s the time. Yes, dear, it could get better, but it could also get worse.”
Find my parents.
Ally couldn’t get the thought out of her head as she jogged her three miles through Central Park later that evening. She had only an hour before Brenda, Granny Donny’s housekeeper, left for the day. She wanted to run out of the park and keep going, not stopping till she was over the George Washington Bridge and deep into Jersey where no one could find her. For the first time in her life, she understood her parents’ urge to flee. I can’t handle this.
But she could. She would. I am not like them. That was the guiding principle of Ally’s life, her mantra.
But what did her grandmother want?
Ally reached the end of the park and slowed to a walk, crossing Central Park South. Elmore, the evening doorman, let her into the Plaza with a barely disguised I-Might-Be-Opening-Doors-for-a-Living-but-I’m-Still-Glad-I’m-Not-You smile. News of Granny Donny’s abrupt decline had spread quickly through the staff.
Ally rode up to the fourth floor in the gilded elevator, the air-conditioning making her feel like she was riding the world’s most beautiful refrigerator. She carefully opened the door to her grandmother’s apartment and slipped off her sneakers in the foyer.
In the living room, her grandmother was sitting on the couch in a blue gown, hair done beautifully, thanks to Brenda. A full meal for two was laid before her. Ally recognized Delmonico’s takeout, and her clenching stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten all day in the flurry of doctors and hospitals.
“Oh, thank heavens you’re finally here,” Granny Donny said. “But what’s happened to you? Did you fall in the creek?”
“I was jogging.” Ally toweled off her face.
“Jogging? How ridiculous! Whatever are you talking about?”
“Never mind. This is lovely, Gran.” Ally sat down on the gold couch with her grandmother. The room had always been formal and grand, and Ally couldn’t help but notice that her grandmother fit the decor as if she’d aged along with it. They could film a period movie here if they hid the telephones and got rid of Ally in her running gear.
“Let’s eat dessert first!” Granny Donny held up a small chocolate cake with a lit single red candle in the center. She mistook Ally’s surprise for offense. She put the cake down. “Oh, me! I forgot you never eat dessert first, poor dear. Wet, practically naked, and yet still proper to the end.” She mumbled something under her breath that sounded like Poor virgin child.
How to Tame a Modern Rogue Page 3