The Duke’s Embrace: 12 Dukes of Christmas #7

by Erica Ridley

  Duenna leapt into the open phaeton and flopped at Bastien’s feet.

  “Traitor,” Eve muttered.

  Bastien held out his hand. He’d leap down to help her in like a gentleman, but there was nowhere to tie his horses. They would have to do it this way, together.

  She grasped his hand. He pulled her up and into the carriage. She settled beside him with a roll of her eyes.

  He grinned. The seat wasn’t empty anymore. It looked perfect.

  She arched an eyebrow. “Who are you racing today?”

  “No one. We’re not professional racers,” he explained. “We dash around at breakneck speed at five o’clock in the morning down the side of a mountain just for sport.”

  “Men,” she grumbled, with a haughty sniff. Her twinkling eyes gave her away.

  All the same, he settled the horses into a sedate rhythm, letting the phaeton amble along the winding road with all the haste of a tortoise.

  Duenna placed her paws atop Eve’s lap in order to gaze over the sidewall with her tongue lolling from her mouth.

  Bastien stuck out his tongue and pretended to do the same thing.

  Eve smacked his leg. “Don’t mock my dog, or I’ll besmirch your character in the article I’m writing.”

  “I wasn’t mocking her,” he protested. “I was aspiring to be her. Feel free to put that in the paper. I’d wager lots of people wish they were dogs.”

  She pulled out her journal and made a note.

  He scratched behind Duenna’s ears. “How is it going?”

  Eve narrowed her eyes. “Me, or my dog?”

  He put a hand to his chest in embarrassed surprise. “Oh, Eve, salut. I didn’t see you—”

  She held her fingers out like claws. “Are you ticklish? I will tickle you.”

  “Nooo.” He leaned toward the opposite side of the phaeton. “Never tickle the driver!”

  She inched closer. “I’ll tickle you right out of this carriage.”

  He kissed the tip of her nose before she could move away.

  Duenna pawed at his knee.

  “All right, all right, no touching,” he assured her.

  Eve leaned back into the seat and closed her eyes as the cool breeze teased new tendrils free from her chignon.

  Bastien could watch her all day.

  She opened her eyes and smiled. “The paper is coming together. The back and inner pages are finalized. I’ll arrange the front once I’ve finished the last article.”

  His article.

  After so many years of accepting his status of not good enough to be more than a passing fancy to the English ladies that came through the village, a strange feeling blossomed in his chest whenever Eve’s interested gaze met his. She not only found him “good enough” to come back for more, she even felt his smithy was amazing enough to write about in a paper that went out to thousands of subscribers.

  “Thank you for helping.” The words came out steady enough. “I suppose I should also thank your father for creating the Gazette in the first place.”

  “No.” Her eyes were on the road, her voice almost too soft to hear. “That was me, too.”

  How had he not realized that? “It’s your paper?”

  “No,” she said again. “It’s Father’s paper. It was my idea. It took months to convince him. I would have done it on my own, if I’d had the means and authority. I was too young to own anything and didn’t have a penny to invest.”

  “Can’t you buy it back from him now?”

  “I still don’t have a penny. It’s Father’s paper.” She continued to stare at the road. “It doesn’t matter.”

  It did matter. He could see it mattered. It was her idea, her work, her paper.

  “I’m just happy he believed in me enough to try it.” Her lips tightened. “We needed to do something. We had no income. Unpaid accounts were piling up, and my dowry was just sitting there doing nothing anyway…”

  Bastien stopped the carriage. “Your father used your dowry to start the Gazette?”

  She shrugged. “As I said, no one else was asking for it.”

  Eve had asked for it, Bastien would wager. The Gazette was her idea. She would have wanted to start it using her own investment.

  “So,” he said slowly, “your father stole your dowry and your idea—”

  “I gave him the idea, and the dowry came from my mother. It was never mine.” Her eyes blinked quickly. “If you’re implying that we would have lost everything if it hadn’t worked, you’re right. But it did work. We’ve made the money back and more.”

  Bastien guided the horses toward the park in silence. “We” hadn’t reaped the profit. Her father had.

  “Every penny we earn goes to both of us,” she said as if reading his mind. “Just as it would if I owned the paper.”

  Probably true. Bastien still wouldn’t characterize the proceedings as fair to Eve, but he understood her stance of family first. He lived by the same tenet.

  “I’m glad it worked.”

  “Me, too. Before we began, we could no longer afford our utterly exhausted maid-of-all-work, who barely slept four hours a night—and that was with me putting in the same hours. Now we have two maids and a footman, and everyone sleeps through the night.”

  He slanted her a look. “All you have to do is run, write, print, ship, and maintain the Cressmouth Gazette?”

  “It’s almost too easy.” She grinned, then arched her brows knowingly. “It’s not work if it’s something you love to do, is it, blacksmith?”

  “I wasn’t born to scorch my sleeves in a forge,” he protested. “I was born to spend six hours a day primping at my toilette.”

  Her lips quirked. “One more hour than Brummell?”

  “Amateur,” Bastien scoffed.

  “If you could, you’d spend six hours a day in front of your looking-glass and then seven helping people in your smithy.”

  “Probably.” He stroked his chin as though in deep thought. “Do you think I could talk Lucien into hanging the smithy walls with mirrors, in order to do both at the same time?”

  “He would love it,” she assured him. “All those reflections would give him even more objects to sulk at.”

  “Brilliant! You do have the best ideas.” He steered the horses through the park.

  Duenna let out a bark just as Eve pointed toward the lake.

  “The swans are migrating south. They’ll be gone before the paper goes to print. It looks like there are only seven left.”

  He lifted the reins. “Should I stop so you can interview them? Where’s your notebook?”

  To his surprise, she neither laughed nor smacked him on the head with said notebook. Instead she glared at the beautiful pond in an uncanny resemblance to Lucien.

  “I was teasing,” Bastien said quickly. “Those swans don’t look newsworthy.”

  “They’re not. That’s the problem.” Eve spun to face him, her green eyes flashing passionately. “Cressmouth is so much more than swans and partridges, shortbread and biscuits, holly and mistletoe. We’re people. We all have stories. I want to be the one who helps tell them.”

  He frowned. “Aren’t you doing so?”

  “I’m trying.” She let out a deep sigh. “Father thinks the Cressmouth Gazette should only talk about Christmas. When will the snow fall? How much for sleigh rides? What is on the bill at the winter theatre? Are there printed lyrics for caroling? It’s the same questions every year, and he’s right—they’re good questions that deserve good answers. But the Gazette is a newspaper, not a seasonal manual. That can be a part of it, but shouldn’t be everything.”

  “I assume you’ve mentioned your concerns?”

  “Ad nauseum.” She drummed her fingers atop the side of the phaeton. “He doesn’t agree.”

  He sent her a pointed look. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  The corner of her mouth curved up.

  “Write it anyway,” she admitted. “He has to approve the type before we print, so I can’t
turn the Gazette into a forceful wellspring of exposés and emotional, heart-warming sagas overnight, but I’m going to chip away at it bit by bit, article by article, until the Gazette truly represents all that Cressmouth is and can offer.”

  She was going to be phenomenal at it. Her love for this village and her passion for telling its stories came through with every word. Bastien wished he would be there to see it happen.

  “Can you inquire whether the management will ship copies to France?” he asked.

  She pretended to think it over. “I know the woman in charge of the arrangements. I’ll see what she can do.”

  There. That should make him happy. Remaining a name on her subscriber list ought to be good enough.

  But it wasn’t.

  “Good morning, Beau,” chorused a pair of young ladies beneath matching lacy parasols.

  “And Miss Shelling,” Eve sang out under her breath in a saccharine tone.

  Bastien picked up the pace and steered the phaeton out of the park.

  “They’re just…”

  Just what? Flirting with him? Right in front of another woman whom they didn’t bother to acknowledge, because they assumed Eve’s interest was just as opportunistic and fleeting as theirs?

  “They’re just… practicing French because they think it’s exotic,” he finished. “‘Beau’ is one of the maybe ten French words they know.”

  Eve lifted her shoulder. “Then they know nine words more than me.”

  He cursed himself and gripped the reins tighter. Instead of dismissing the unwelcome interruption, he’d made her feel worse.

  If Lucien were here, he’d point out that Eve’s lack of French was yet another reason why she and Bastien were ill-suited.

  Bastien didn’t care that Eve wasn’t French, but not speaking it posed problems. It was the language he used with his family. The language everyone used in the country he called home. She wouldn’t belong there just like he didn’t belong here.

  “It’s all right,” he forced himself to say. “I never expect anyone to learn my language.”

  Usually people didn’t even ask him about France. What he liked, what he missed most, what made it feel like home.

  Eve tilted her head. “The baker claims you le Duc brothers are so vain about your nationality, he expects you to paint a French flag on the bonnet of your carriage.”

  “The baker is an imbecile.” Bastien pointed skyward. “Phaetons don’t have roofs.”

  She nodded gravely. “He’ll be very disappointed to learn that.”

  Bastien’s jaw worked. The baker wasn’t the first one to make comments implying otherness was something to be hidden, to be embarrassed of, to apologize for. Bastien wasn’t the least ashamed of himself, where he was, or where he came from. He was happy to prove it.

  “Let’s not disappoint him.” He flashed a dangerous smile. “I’ll paint the flag on the carriage myself. You can come to the smithy tomorrow morning to bear witness, so you can report to the baker that le Ducs are the Frenchest, most French-speaking, France-loving French people you’ve ever seen with your own eyes.”

  “This sounds like breaking news.” Eve shot upright with excitement. “I don’t want to bear witness. I want to come and help.”

  Chapter 9

  Bastien and Eve swung their stools to the other side of the phaeton in the middle of the smithy. Morning sun poured in the open doors, bathing the all-black phaeton door with light.

  It wouldn’t be all black for long.

  In exchange for reducing the outstanding amount on a blacksmithing IOU, Bastien had managed to procure several different vials of pre-mixed paint from the local colorist, who was responsible for the bright cheeriness of the village doors and exteriors.

  These weren’t precisely the right colors, but nor was Bastien precisely an artist. Or even sort of an artist. Luckily, the primary requirement was no more complex than the ability to draw a rectangle.

  Eve leaned forward. “Which one is this?”

  “This,” Bastien replied, “is the Tricolore. It became the national flag in 1790, the year after my family fled France.”

  Although only distantly in line to a title, by 1789 his parents had become alarmed at the direction and frequency of the executions around them. They’d bundled up seven-year-old Lucien, four-year-old Bastien, and two-year-old Désirée, and came to England to visit Uncle Jasper until the revolution blew over.

  “Did you never see it?” Eve asked.

  “I did.”

  In 1791, there had been a brief time during which his family thought they might save their lands. They’d traveled back for that express purpose, but winter slowed them, and their arrival was too late. Désirée was too young to remember the look on their parents’ faces, but Lucien and Bastien would never forget.

  Soon after, their distant relation Louis-Philippe became the duc d’Orléans. But there was no time to petition for favors. Le duc d’Orléans was desperately trying to secure his brothers’ release from captivity. The revolution was ongoing.

  So they waited for the right moment.

  They should have stayed in Cressmouth. If they had, the whole family would still be alive.

  “How is the paper coming?” he asked to change the subject.

  Her face lit up, as she began explaining about the finished pages whose designs she was already setting into type. Bastien tried to keep his focus on the blue stripe, the white stripe, the red stripe, but no matter how hard he tried, his gaze kept returning to Eve.

  He loved how animated she became when she talked about the words she wrote, and the emotions she hoped they engendered in her readers. She was already beautiful, but her enthusiasm and obvious joy made her even more magnetic.

  She let out a sigh. “Am I foolish to hope I can mold the Gazette into something meaningful?”

  “Not at all.” He finished the last stroke. “Sometimes hope is the most precious gift we can have.”

  “I just want to be taken seriously.” Her eyes grew distant. “Then maybe I could stop bad things from happening.”

  He put down his brush and frowned. “Is something bad about to happen?”

  “I don’t know.” She bit her lip. “Bad things always happen.”

  Bastien tilted his head. He’d been immersed in his own loss and the repercussions of tragedy for so long that he hadn’t stopped to consider that other people suffered loss, too. People like Eve.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said softly.

  At first, she stared down into the jar of red paint in her hands as if the answers were contained within.

  “My mother.” She did not lift her head. “She was ill; we knew she was ill. We should have got her a physician, a real one. We thought we did, but… All he wanted to do was bleed the fever and apply more leeches, always more leeches, but no matter how engorged they became, Mother never got better. I told Father I didn’t think…”

  “You didn’t have faith in the physician?”

  “I did at first,” she admitted. “We all did. Mother and Father, too. But she kept growing weaker, and I began to have doubts. I pulled Father aside and told him I feared our savior was a sham.”

  “What did he say?”

  Her smile was bitter and did not reach her eyes. “What would I know about such things? I was a girl. They were men. Had I attended St. Bart’s medical school? My opinion meant nothing. I should leave things in the competent hands of professionals.”

  His stomach tightened with dread. “What happened?”

  “She died.” Eve’s voice was flat. “And as it turned out, our doctor had no experience at all. It was a swindle.”

  “That is horrifying. But it’s certainly not your fault.” Bastien reached for her hand. “If anything, it’s another fine reason for me to grab your father by the—”

  “The physician was going to marry me.” Her countenance was pale, her green eyes tortured. “I was sixteen and had never left Cressmouth. He was thirty and from London. He seemed impossibly wi
se and elegant and sophisticated. He wanted me and my dowry. So I invited him into our lives.” Her voice broke. “And he took one.”

  Bastien hauled her to him. “That blackguard deserves to rot in gaol.”

  “He is.” She took a shuddering breath. “Father believes in following rules and paying the consequences. He would have scorched the earth raining vengeance upon anyone who had a hand in Mother’s death, if the law allowed it.”

  Bastien held her tighter. Now he understood. Her mother had lost her life, and Eve had lost her dowry, and everything it represented. The ability to make choices, to control her own life. The possibility of marriage, of finding love. Any hope of ever fully regaining her father’s trust.

  And she thought she deserved it.

  He tilted her chin to face him. Her gaze was glassy and hollow.

  “It is not your fault, do you hear me?” he said fiercely. “Your mother’s death was not your fault.”

  “I invited him in,” she whispered. “Insisted upon deferring to his medical expertise. Father said I was too young to know my own mind, and if I would have listened…”

  “No.” Bastien’s voice was harsh because he’d lived through this self-torture himself. “You were young. You didn’t know. This charlatan deceived your entire family. You cannot flay yourself alive over a past you cannot change.”

  Like all the tiny decisions that had ended with his parents’ heads rolling away from their bodies. What if they’d stayed in Cressmouth? What if they’d gone home sooner, repossessed their land, hid in a secure location? What if they’d sided with the revolutionaries, or at least pretended to long enough to stay alive?

  That way lay madness. He should know.

  “Listen to me.” He cupped her soft face in his hands and brought his gaze close to hers. “If there’s one thing I know for certain—”

  “What is the meaning of this?” thundered an angry male voice.

  “Father,” Eve gasped, and jerked out of Bastien’s arms. “We were just—”

  “I can see what you were ‘just,’ and you shall do no such thing.” A dour white-haired man with a walking-stick and a scowl strode forward and grabbed her by the arm.

  Bastien leapt to his feet. “Sir, if you’d let me explain—”