Ludlow’s gaze turned dark and flinty. “Fuck you.”
“I should sack you for such insolence.” Kit paused, trying to read his opponent. “It was a woman, wasn’t it?”
The not-butler bared his teeth in a primitive growl. “Ask the Duke of Carlisle if you can sack me, you soulless prick. And ask about my face again, and I’ll personally oversee the addition of arsenic to your dinner.”
“Tut, tut sir. No need to threaten me with murder. You’ve attempted that once and failed dismally.” He tsked, but his primary objective was not to goad and infuriate the not-butler, regardless of how entertaining and enjoyable it was. He wanted to know everything there was to learn about the attacks against his wife. “From this point forward, you will deliver daily reports to me concerning safety measures being put into place to ensure Her Grace’s wellbeing. Understood?”
The not-butler snarled. “I am more than capable of protecting Her Grace.”
“How many men do you have devoted to the task of securing the perimeter?” he asked, ignoring the man’s protestations, which meant less than nothing to him. He had just learned that his wife had a price on her head. That attempts had been made upon her life. He trusted no one’s instincts the way he trusted his own. And while he had not been physically present or even cognizant of the threats against her before, he was damn well here now.
“Three,” Ludlow responded.
“Quadruple it to a dozen,” Kit insisted. “Spare no expense.”
The not-butler looked as if he were about to argue, but he seemed to recall his place at the last moment. “I will increase it this very evening.”
Excellent. The matter settled, he turned his attention to the fact that troubled him almost as much as news of the attempts against his duchess did.
He didn’t like the path he was on any more than he liked the path the not-butler currently trod. Because if the man had withheld information from his own brother, who also happened to be the Duke of bloody Carlisle—the most ruthless, heartless bastard who’d ever lived—that could only mean one thing.
Kit’s suspicions about the mountain’s feelings for his duchess were correct. The man was in love with her. There was no other reason why he would act as he had, putting Georgiana’s wellbeing before his own. He swallowed, feeling ill anew. “You’re in love with her.”
“I care about her,” the bastard had the gall to correct him, as if it mattered. “She is a good woman. The rarest breed. She doesn’t deserve to meet her end at an assassin’s blade because her papa is a brutal degenerate who would sacrifice his daughter’s life for filling his coffers even more than they’ve been filled.”
Something primitive within him could not bear to hear this man’s protestations of devotion for the woman who was meant to be his. Never mind that he had never thought of her in those terms until he’d stumbled over the threshold of his London home, wounded and on the precipice of his own expiration. Never mind that she had only ever been a means to an end, a wealth of funds to sluice into his bankrupt familial vault. And by all means ignore the fact that he somehow wanted to stake his claim upon her now, by any measures he could manage.
If it had not been for the perspicacity of Carlisle and his brother, Georgiana would have been long gone. Her light, her beauty, the undeniable fervor and tenacity that she fairly vibrated with—all of it would have been silenced and vanquished forever. And Kit knew in that moment not just rage but an ungodly jealousy that he had not been the man to recognize the danger to her, that he had not been the one to protect and save her.
“I will kill the son-of-a-bitch,” Kit growled, all he could manage to force past his numb lips.
That his wife’s own father would have hired a bevy of assailants to kill her, all in the name of adding more coin to his disgustingly abundant wealth…why, it was not just sinful. It was despicable. Disgusting. Alarming.
Unforgivable.
Yes, that was the word he’d sought.
The mountain met his gaze with a singular intensity and precision. “You will kill no one. I protect this home, and like it or not, I protect Her Grace. This is the safest place for her, and there is no man you can trust more for the job than myself. Doubt me on every other front as you wish, but on this, I will not falter.”
Kit ground his teeth together as he contemplated his response. Carlisle only chose the best. He was man enough to accept that if the not-butler before him would look after Georgiana, he needed to take the fellow up on his offer. “I will protect my wife. You may be the second guard for as long as I see fit. And you will not touch her again. I do not give a goddamn what happened before I returned from New York. From this moment forward, she is mine. Are we understood?”
The mountain bowed, and the action was both respectful and mocking, unless he missed his guess. And he didn’t think he had. He stepped forward, cane gripped in hand.
Some niggling irritant made him pause. “Ludlow? The day I arrived, you did not know it was I. How could you have been unaware of my impending arrival, possessing the information you must from Carlisle?”
He had the gall to grin. “I was expecting you, Your Grace.”
Four teeth, he decided grimly. That was the perfect number for his fist to claim. All the front ones, leaving a gaping black hole. The ladies would not look upon the mountain twice then.
“You, sir, are going to hell,” he muttered.
“Just so.” The not-butler stared back, unrepentant. “I reckon I’ll see you there.”
Gritting his teeth, Kit limped haltingly from the chamber.
The bastard rather had a point.
eorgiana was on her knees in the morning room when the door flew open with such force that it slammed into the paper-covered porcelain, shaking the paintings hanging from the wall like autumn leaves in a wind storm.
Lady Philomena Whiskers howled and struggled to her feet, hissing. Her six kittens mewled at the loss of their mother’s nourishment and comforting presence. Georgiana jolted at the impact of the door, her startled gaze finding her pale, scowling husband leaning heavily upon a cane.
His exacting blue gaze settled upon her. “Madam. We need to have a dialogue.”
She hastened to run a hand down Lady Philomena’s raised hackles, soothing the ruffled fur. “Hush now, Lady P.” She kept her voice low and calming, solely for the benefit of the temperamental feline, whose nature was skittish, without lunatic dukes who burst through doors and demanded words. “Your babies are hungry.”
“Madam?” His tone was insistent and petulant. “Have you no response?”
Lady P. hissed again for good measure before settling herself back down with her brood. Georgiana glanced up at him, disturbed by the fact that he was out of bed against Dr. Gage’s strict orders and vexed at his lack of respect for the cat and her litter of kittens.
She rose to her feet, facing him, her lips compressed with her displeasure. “Your Grace, why are you here?”
His stare raked over her form, stopping somewhere in the vicinity of her hips, which she knew were clearly delineated by her tailored trousers. “What in the hell are you wearing?”
Even weak and injured, his large hand gripping the head of his walking stick so tightly that each of his knuckles shone in white relief from halfway across the room, he had a commanding air of ducal authority. But she would not kowtow to him. Quite the opposite.
She raised her chin. “If you please, Your Grace, lower your voice. You are causing unnecessary disruption.”
Ludlow appeared then, just over her husband’s shoulder, his expression grim. There was a question on his face, as if he wondered whether she wished him to remove the duke’s unsettling presence. She shook her head slightly, meeting her butler’s eyes for a moment before flicking them back to Leeds. Though she was certain Ludlow could overpower the duke, she had no wish to witness the two of them engaged in a fight to the death.
A sound of irritation emerged from the duke’s throat. His lip curled back in an almost feral snarl. “I know you�
�re behind me, you arrogant sod. Unless you wish to be thrashed bloody with this cane, you will leave me to speak with my wife alone.”
“Your Grace?” Ludlow persisted, addressing Georgiana.
She sighed. While his true intentions—and perhaps even true identity—remained unknown to her, he had never wavered from his protectiveness. Even now, her heart softened just a bit toward him. “You may go, Ludlow.”
She crossed the chamber, taking her husband’s elbow in hand to offer him assistance as her butler bowed and dutifully disappeared. Leeds stiffened at her touch, cocking his head toward her so that their faces were perilously near. A spark of awareness flared within her belly.
Which he promptly dashed when he opened his mouth. “I do not require your aid, Duchess. Now kindly do me the favor of telling me precisely what the fuck it is that you’re wearing.”
She flinched, as much from his coarse words as from his frigid tone. The Duke of Leeds was not a pleasant invalid. His vocabulary was better suited to a sailor on the docks than a peer of the realm. He needed help but was too proud to accept it. And in general, he seemed to have developed the personality of a bear about to tear the face off its prey.
“Damn it, have you nothing to say for yourself? I can see your bloody limbs. It isn’t decent to go traipsing about in such revealing attire.” His brows snapped together. “What the devil can you be thinking?”
She found her tongue. “I am clothed, Your Grace. Would you care to enter the chamber, or do you wish to remain on the threshold, airing our private discourse before the domestics?”
“There is a feline within,” he said with ill-concealed disgust. “And an alarming number of baby rats. Jesus, woman, I understand that you have no ability to control your voracious appetite for housing creatures, but surely even you ought to see that a line must be drawn at bloody rats. Why is that worthless cat not doing away with them as it ought?”
A laugh escaped from her, small at first, and then it grew. Louder and longer, and she could not control it. She pressed a hand to her mouth in an effort to quell it, but that only made her laugh more. The longer she laughed, the more her merriment doubled and tripled and quadrupled.
“Madam?” His tone was strangled.
“You—” she attempted to speak, but another chorus of irrepressible giggles washed away the remainder of her sentence. He was so curt. So grim. So disapproving. And he thought the kittens were rats. Dear Lord, it was too much. He was too much. She had perhaps lost her mind at last, but she needed this laughter. For far too long, there had been nothing in her life worthy of cheer.
“What is so bloody humorous?” came his sibilant demand.
Pursing her lips, she fought back further levity, forcing herself to think of something that was not at all funny. Her father’s face whenever he looked at her. Seasickness during her voyage across the Atlantic. Loneliness. A kitten with a broken leg. Finally, she composed herself enough to guide him into the morning room and close the door at their backs, granting them some privacy.
“For the second goddamn time, I do not require your assistance, madam.” His voice brooked no opposition as he attempted to wrest his arm from her grasp and nearly lost his balance.
Georgiana threw her arm about his waist, anchoring him to her body. She was petite, she knew, but her frame housed a quiet strength for which she was grateful now. Her legs were short but sturdy, and they were the part of her anatomy that had always grieved her the most, but she was glad to be the support her sullen husband needed in this moment.
“Of course you do not need my help,” she reassured as she guided him to a nearby divan, careful to keep her voice neutral and calm. After all, nurturing wounded and abandoned creatures was her particular gift. From her vantage point, there didn’t seem to be much difference between the Duke of Leeds and a stray dog brought in from an alleyway. Both required gentleness; both bared their teeth and threatened to bite.
“Do not placate me,” he gritted as he lowered himself into the divan, breath hissing from him when he bent his injured leg. “I am not one of your creatures.”
It was not the first time he had accused her of seeing him as one of her animals, nor, she suspected, would it be the last. Her husband was many things, and canny observer was chief amongst them. It almost seemed to her that he could sense her thoughts.
“I never said you were one of my creatures.” But a creature, yes, he certainly was. Just not one she could ever claim as her own. She pursed her lips and gazed down at him. His pallor was unnatural, and for a virile man of such a strong, well-muscled form, he nevertheless seemed winded by his journey from the bedchamber to here. “Dr. Gage insisted that you rest for a sennight at least. What can you be thinking, storming down here a mere three days after he stitched you up last?”
“I was thinking that I required an audience with my wife, but that I was informed she was too busy for me.” He raised an imperious brow. “Do sit down, madam. My constitution cannot accept you towering over me in such preposterous fashion.”
She would have seated herself, but she’d had much of the contents of the room removed for storage, given Lady Philomena’s lying in. Ludlow had been correct about the cheerful disposition of the chamber. Surely other cats would adore the sunlight filtering in from the windows as much as Lady P. She knew of at least three more strays that required shelter. When one established a reputation as she had, new cases appeared at regular intervals. She could not bear to turn down an animal in need.
Georgiana frowned at her husband. She supposed that included him as well. But that didn’t mean she was going to seat herself in such disastrous proximity to him. Why, if she sat alongside him, their thighs would be touching. The divan was compact and stylish, not meant for two occupants.
“I prefer to stand, Your Grace,” she countered. “But rest assured that the rats are, in fact, mere kittens but a day old.”
Hands, large and masculine and strong, bracketed her hips. He commanded her attention, and in spite of his paleness and the dark beard that hid half his face, she found herself breathless.
He spun her about then and pulled her toward him. She swore she could feel his touch through all the layers of her satin and linen garments. His grip was so possessive, so fierce it caused an ache between her thighs, the sort she had never before experienced. When had the chamber become so stifling? Why had she not noticed before now that the air was far too heated for Lady P. and her kittens? Was it the morning sunlight blistering through the eastern windows?
“Sit, Duchess.” He did not ask or implore as he interrupted her wild musings. Rather, he ordered and tugged as though his time away from London had divested him of all proper ducal comportment. Or perhaps it was his injury? Either way, the barbarian in him had been unleashed, and some wicked, forbidden part of her rather liked it.
For a man so grievously wounded and sapped by infection, he still retained an alarming amount of strength. Georgiana allowed him to haul her into the seat at his side against her better judgment, and also partly because she did not wish to fight an injured man. It seemed somehow imprudent and altogether wrong.
His left arm remained snaked about her lower back, his hands still clamped on her hips. She lowered her hands to his, intending to remove his grip. But when she canted her head to the right and met his gaze, she fell into him. There was no other word for it. He was so near to her and ruggedly beautiful even in his wounded state. Her gaze lowered to his full, sensual mouth for a heartbeat before she forced it back to the safety of his fathomless blue eyes.
Dear God, she had been about to fantasize about him kissing her. Him, the Duke of Leeds. The man who had wedded her, not bedded her, and disappeared. The surly, arrogant stranger who had reappeared half a year later, bleeding and about to expire. Who treated her as if she belonged belowstairs rather than at his side. Who touched her with far too much familiarity given their awkward history. Who was looking at her lips just now as if they were a sumptuous feast prepared for him alone.
Oh dear. This simply would. Not. Do.
Think, Georgiana. You must not become distracted by his looks. He is a liar. He took your dowry and left you. He is cold and unfeeling. He mistook the kittens for rats!
She cleared her throat, her cheeks growing hot in her discomfit. “What did you wish to discuss, Duke?”
“Your attire is scandalous.” He slid a thumb down the outer seam of her trousers, and an answering burst of heat blossomed low in her belly against her will. “What in bloody hell are you thinking, going about garbed as a man?”
That did it. She swatted his hand from her thigh, uncomfortably aware of the wet, molten pulse that had begun between her legs. Her body’s reaction to him was as unwanted as it was unexpected. She dismissed it. Remember, only a true rotter could confuse adorable kittens with rats. “I am not garbed as a man, Duke. I am merely wearing a garment that is more freeing and suited to my work with the animals. Functional, I believe is the word.”
“Ridiculous,” he countered, removing the hand at her other hip and leaving her feeling somehow bereft. “That is the word you sought, which is the only word to describe a duchess wearing a man’s trousers. Good God, woman. Have you no sense? Harboring a litter of rats, wearing the costume of a gentleman…”
“Kittens,” she corrected, straightening in her seat and pinning him with a glare. “They are kittens, you oaf. And I am not dressed as a man, as anyone with a pair of eyes can plainly see. There is nothing indecent or shocking about my trousers.”
His eyes remained as flat as his lips. “Madam, only think of what you have just said, and surely you will see how mad you sound.”
“They are practical,” she insisted. “I do not wear them in public.” Her mind spun then, and she recalled an instant, not so long ago. Oh dear, she did not wish to make a liar of herself. “Ahem. On further thought, there was the ball I attended with the Duchess of Trent, when we both wore trousers. But that was a special occasion, and we were attempting to lure her husband from the ethers, as it were. We had good intentions, you see. It is a very long story, and one that is not mine to tell.” She halted, aware that each word she said only dug the proverbial hole deeper. And also seeing the odd, intent manner in which he currently looked upon her. “Why are you looking at me as if I’ve sprouted a second head?”
Her Deceptive Duke (Wicked Husbands Book 4) Page 9