His obsidian eyes were as dark as his hair, and he was tall, broad, and arresting. Although dressed as smartly as any gentleman in a superbly tailored suit of black complemented by a gray waistcoat, he possessed an inherent aura of danger.
Of calamity as his hawk-like glare took in the vignette.
Of distrust as his eyes dropped to the pistol she still held clutched in her hand.
Georgiana’s eyes narrowed on him. The feeling was mutual. She had never crossed paths with the Duke of Carlisle, though she had heard of him. He was a sybarite who hosted indecent, hedonistic parties that were only whispered about in polite society. What business had he with her husband, or with Ludlow, for that matter? And what, if anything, had it to do with her husband’s mysterious business in America?
“Good God, madam,” he snapped. “Do put down the weapon before you injure yourself.”
How condescending. How expected. She trained the pistol on him, stopping him in his hasty stride across the chamber. “Forgive me for being an insipid female, but unless I am mistaken, the only person in danger is the one on the business end of the barrel. That would be you, Your Grace.”
“Do not shoot him, for Christ’s sake, Georgiana,” ordered her husband, his voice taking on a thinner, reedier quality. It would seem his rush of strength had been sapped by his tumble with Ludlow.
She glanced back at Leeds, instinctively, and even though he had spoken in harsh command, she could not deny that some foolish part of her enjoyed the sound of her name rolling on his proper English tongue.
Before she could linger on that thought, the Duke of Carlisle’s hand caught her wrist, and his other hand smoothly removed the pistol from her grasp. She turned back to the interloper who had disarmed her with such quiet, quick ease, and she knew at once that he was not at all what he wished the world to believe him to be. That commanding air she noted, the slick manner in which he had taken her weapon from her, bespoke a man who was familiar with far more than tawdry fêtes and excess.
“Who are you?” she asked him.
A slight smile flitted over his lips as he tucked her pistol into his jacket. “The man who relieved you of your weapon before you did something foolish.”
“An arrogant jackanapes,” she translated, unimpressed.
She was tired, worn to the bone after having been bombarded by a husband who had suddenly returned only to nearly expire from infection, a butler who was not at all what he had seemed, and only the Lord knew how many secrets. Not to mention the hours she had spent without sleep, catching no more than a hasty nap in the blasted uncomfortable chair at the duke’s bedside.
Carlisle’s dark gaze pierced her like a sword. “There is no need for insults, Your Grace. Now, why don’t you retire downstairs and amuse yourself in some other manner while I—”
“No,” she interrupted, not bothering for him to finish the sentence he uttered in the same tone she would have expected him to use upon a child. “I will not leave. This is my home, and those two sapskulls—” she paused to wave a hand in a most undignified and unduchessly fashion in the direction of Leeds and Ludlow—“are my concern. Whatever business you have with them, you also have with me. I will not leave.”
“You may go, Georgiana,” her husband said.
“Take your exit in good conscience, Your Grace,” Ludlow added. “Someone must check on Lady Philomena Whiskers. The litter will drop at any moment now, and I know you would not wish her to be alone in her time of need.”
Her heart clenched at the thought of poor Lady going into labor without her there, but there was no help for it. Something dastardly was afoot in her own home, and she meant to unravel the truth. “Ludlow, I assure you that all such attempts on your part to manipulate me into leaving will not succeed. I will stay.”
“As your husband, I demand that you go,” ordered Leeds, sounding indignant that she had ignored his previous attempt altogether in favor of responding to Ludlow.
She glared at him as well. “Are you my husband? I confess, I am rather confused on that matter, since we have spent far more time apart during our marriage than we have ever spent together.”
Leeds lips tightened. He was ashen, and he looked as if he must be in a great deal of pain and discomfort, but she ruthlessly tamped down any pity she felt for him by reminding herself that he had lied to her. Abandoned her. That he was cold and aloof, and that even now, when she had spent the last few days intimately tending him on his sickbed, he would dismiss her as if she were a mere chamber maid.
“Wife,” he bit out, “you will remove yourself from this chamber at once.”
Nothing he could have said could have convinced her to plant roots and stay more. The devil. If only she was still in possession of her pistol.
“While I admire your pluck, Your Grace, I am afraid that I must insist,” the Duke of Carlisle intoned.
Did he truly imagine that she would leave because he demanded it of her? She wasn’t about to go anywhere, not with two miscreants she could no longer trust about to spill each other’s blood. (In Ludlow’s case, that was, for she had never trusted Leeds one whit.) And when she had just gone to such trouble to nurse the duke back to health, too.
She graced Carlisle with a slow smile, the one she reserved for wheedling herself out of untenable situations. She was aware that she was capable of charming the opposite sex, and that this particular smile did not often fail to have an effect. “Duke, I must insist equally upon remaining. You are not known to me, and my husband is ill and my butler is…indisposed. Your appearance is most inopportune, as was your refusal to leave, followed by your subsequent demand that I vacate the very chamber where I have been tending to my husband’s every need these last few days.”
Yes, she thought to herself, that would do nicely. Let Carlisle see that she was no meek miss who would cower before him or gleefully trot off to do his bidding. She was feeling quite pleased with the situation, certain the man could not argue her sound logic. So certain that it took her off guard when the Duke of Carlisle stalked toward her.
She caught a glimpse of a rigid, clenched jaw for a moment before he bent and scooped her over his shoulder as if she weighed no more than a sack of feathers. Her world turned upside down. The breath fled her lungs as his hard, wide shoulder connected with her midriff.
A strangled sound emerged from her. The blood rushed to her cheeks, heating them. For a beat, she could do nothing more effectual than stare as the Duke of Carlisle spun on his heel and carted her from the chamber. The nerve of the man! It only took her about two of his methodical steps, the carpet dancing below her, before she came to, hammering her fists into his back.
“Put me down, you barbarian!”
“Carlisle,” called Leeds faintly. “I realize she’s sorely trying, but there’s no need to haul her about.”
“There is every need.” Carlisle’s voice was a grim rumble.
“There most assuredly is not.” She hit him with greater force, but the man was as rigid as a boulder. Her blows did nothing to deter him as he stalked from the chamber.
“Madam, you are doing yourself a disservice. If you continue to carry on, I cannot be held responsible for the consequences,” he warned.
How dare he? And wasn’t this just like Leeds to return home at last, after all the months she had spent hoping he would come back to her, wounded and in need of aid, turning her lovable butler into a lunatic, and bringing rude, arrogant dukes into their midst? Of course it was. If she had ever needed a reminder that her husband was a sorry varlet, here it was, in the shape of the cold, angry stranger moving her about as if she were a chess piece.
She thumped harder on Carlisle’s back. “You would dare to threaten me after accosting me in my own home? Truly? I should call for the police and have you hauled off to gaol.”
He laughed, the sound dark and mirthless. “No one would dare haul me away, Your Grace. Now do be sensible and remain where you are placed.”
He deposited her on her feet in
the hall with a gentleness she would not have expected. With a perfunctory bow, he was gone, disappearing into the chamber as she gaped after him. Belatedly, she rushed forward, but the miserable cur had slammed the chamber door behind him and thrown home the lock.
She was stranded. Locked out of whatever was about to happen inside her own chamber. Curse the men within, one of whom she had admired up until this evening. Ludlow, the traitor, pretending to be something he was not. Had it all been an act, even the tender care he had shown the animals? Georgiana hoped not.
She knocked on the door, tried the knob though she knew her efforts were futile. She had been outmaneuvered by the Duke of Carlisle. For the moment, at least. Because she was nothing if not determined, and as she stood in the hall, soundly thwarted, a new tactic emerged.
A triumphant smile blossomed on her lips. Of course. Why had she not thought of Alice sooner? It was the perfect solution. Her next battle formation decided, she turned away from her chamber door, in search of one intimidating, exceedingly territorial mastiff.
“Remain where you are placed,” she grumbled to herself. “The sheer gall.”
No one could tell Georgiana to remain where she was placed, as though she were an inanimate object carefully arranged on a table. The Duke of Carlisle was going to face a reckoning for his treatment of her.
Of that much, she was certain. And who better to deliver said reckoning than Georgiana? With a little assistance from her friends, of course.
Fucking hell.
Kit slumped back in Georgiana’s bed, drained and as tired as if he’d been on a ten-day march through the bloody desert. His leg throbbed. He was not yet certain he had fought off the infection that had laid him low. Indeed, he was not yet certain if he would ever again regain the full use of his limb, if he would ever walk again unassisted by a cane or a limp. The bastard who had attempted to kill him was a scant foot away. His superior officer—former superior officer, thanks to his disgrace—had manhandled his wife, damn it.
And he was helpless to do anything about the maelstrom unfolding around him. He could not defend his duchess physically, could not even muster the strength to rise again from his bed. If that hulking giant cutthroat of a butler wished to do him in now, he would have an easy go of it, for Kit had expended any energy his body had once possessed in his initial defense.
Now, things were going to the dogs.
He was going to the dogs.
Strike that. He already had. But he was determined to clear his name and reputation if nothing else. He would prove his innocence if he died trying.
Carlisle slammed back into the chamber sans the duchess, locking the door behind him. Here was the accounting. Kit braced himself. He had thought, after the excommunication, that he would never again speak to his superior in any capacity other than civilian. Perhaps in passing at a ball or the opera. Certainly not here, when he was weak and wounded, with the man who wished to end him as audience.
A man who had claimed to know the Duke of Carlisle as well.
Kit scowled. No part of what had befallen him in the last fortnight made sense. Not the setup, not the wounding, not his subsequent ignominious return home at the behest of the League, not Carlisle’s sudden appearance, and especially not the attempt on his life made by the butler who was not a butler but who was undeniably in love with Kit’s own bloody wife.
A wife he had not wanted. A wife he did not want. Hell, Kit should not care if she had fucked the not-butler. The assassin. The…
His jumbled, illness-blurred mind halted at the notion, instincts kicking in, and he was certain he had hit upon something.
Assassin.
It all made sense.
He challenged Carlisle with a piercing stare, more than aware that he was at the mercy of the other two men in the chamber. He would defend himself to the death, but there was only so much one injured, weakened man could do against a healthy mountain and the blackest-hearted bastard he’d ever met.
“You’ve sent an assassin after me now, Carlisle?” he demanded. “Tell me, did you require him to fuck my wife as well, or did he commit that sin of his own volition?”
The mountain turned toward him with a growl, and Kit braced himself for the inevitable attack. He wasn’t even sure if he cared any longer. Everything he had worked for—everything that mattered to him—had been robbed from him the day he’d been shot.
“How dare you speak of Her Grace in such a crude fashion?” The not-butler demanded. “I should kill you for that offense alone.”
“Sheathe your sword, Ludlow.” Carlisle’s directive dripped with icy command. “You cannot kill the man you’re sworn to protect.”
“Protect.” Kit would have laughed had he the energy. As it was, he could scarcely manage to move his mouth to form coherent words. “Are you having a lark, Carlisle, or is this a devious new form of torture you’ve invented specifically for would-be traitors within your own ranks?”
“Stuck birds don’t sing,” the not-butler muttered. “I was never going to kill you. I wanted information, and you aren’t exactly the charitable sort, are you?”
Kit summoned the strength to point a finger in the mountain’s direction, meeting Carlisle’s gaze all the while. “This bastard held a knife to my throat not an hour ago. You cannot convince me he was tasked with guarding me when he has been here in London, playing the swain to my bloody wife whilst I have been in New York, risking my life for Crown and country.”
Ordinarily, Carlisle’s face was as expressive as a mask, but his brows snapped together into an uncharacteristic frown. “Damn it, Ludlow. I warned you.”
The not-butler appeared unconcerned by Carlisle’s dark displeasure. He was either brave or stupid. Kit couldn’t be sure which. He had witnessed the Duke of Carlisle remove a man’s thumbnail with the sort of cool detachment one might have expected over a game of vingt-et-un.
The mountain shrugged. “I didn’t even nick him. I wouldn’t have minded making him bleed a little, but an oath is an oath.”
“Carlisle,” Kit bit out, feeling tired, nauseated, drained, and irritable as hell, “if you aren’t here to torture me, what is the meaning of this? As you can see, I am unwell.”
Carlisle nodded, stalking nearer. “You took a bullet to the thigh, I understand.”
He made the statement with the same dispassionate air he always cultivated. The Duke of Carlisle could be speaking of assassination, bombs, torture, or gunshot wounds, but his tone and manner would have remained the same as if he were speaking of the price of wheat or the weather. He was equally at home at one of his licentious house parties or torturing an anarchist.
“Yes,” Kit drawled on a grimace as a sharp twinge of pain radiated from his wound. “You are aware of the particulars. I was immediately dismissed from my position and ordered to return to London.”
Carlisle raised a brow. “The Home Office has a weaker disposition than I. They also have a habit of making decisions with far too much haste, not to mention overstepping their bounds. The League is mine. I dictate who stays and who goes.”
The not-butler made a vicious sound of outrage deep in his barbaric throat. “You cannot mean to reinstate him?”
Though a spark of hope flared to life, Kit’s patience waned. “Before this dialogue continues, perhaps you could enlighten me, Carlisle. Who the hell is this homicidal behemoth?”
Carlisle flashed a rare smile, showing a row of even, white teeth. “He is my brother.”
The barbarian in question grunted. “Half brother.”
“Just so,” Carlisle agreed, his tone smooth. “My brother. He is also the man who has been tasked with protecting your duchess and, with your return, you as well.”
Kit’s lip curled. He hadn’t realized Carlisle had a brother, and given that the bastard was masquerading as a butler, the only rational assumption to make was that this brother had been born on the wrong side of the blanket. No second son of a duke would ever be able to ape a butler without detection.
Carlisle’s lips compressed. “My sources suggested the necessity.”
Ambiguity was one of Carlisle’s fortes. Kit had never dared gainsay his superior officer before. But he was no longer his superior, and Kit was no longer a member of the League. The Home Office had made that abundantly clear. Unless Carlisle intended to reinstate him as he’d implied?
Christ.
Kit needed a drink. Or some morphine. Or some uninterrupted slumber.
Mayhap a pistol to the temple for a final solution?
He stared at the duke. “Your sources suggested the necessity. For the fucking or the protection?”
“You lout,” the mountain snarled, lunging toward Kit. “That is bloody well enough insulting of Her Grace!”
But Carlisle stopped his forward momentum with a staying hand to his shoulder. Carlisle himself was a large man, and now that Kit saw the two of them side by side, he could see the resemblance. Except for the scar. He wondered for a brief moment how the bastard had gotten his face carved up. An angry husband?
“Damn it, Clay, control your temper. Leeds, I am choosing to attribute your surly disposition and unfounded accusations to the fact that you are a man on your sickbed.” Carlisle’s voice was cold as Wenham Lake ice. “You look like shite, and if what my brother has told me is any indication, you can thank your maker that you are somehow still here.”
But Kit was tired to his bones, body ravaged by pain. He feared that he had once again torn open his stitches in his attempt to defend himself from the murderous not-butler who also happened to be Carlisle’s bastard half brother. Something hot and wet trickled down his thigh. And his mind reeled. His eyes did not want to remain open. His mouth seemed to have turned to porridge for all that it refused to cooperate and form a proper vowel without the strictest attention to detail on his part.
Her Deceptive Duke (Wicked Husbands Book 4) Page 6