Nothing Compares to the Duke

by Christy Carlyle

  He lifted his head. Both men deserved more than a simple apology. All of society knew he was a man who sought recreation rather than rectitude every day of his life, but perhaps it was time to stop playing a role and assume the responsibilities he’d become so good at outrunning.

  Casting a glance at Tremayne, he caught his own reflection in the gilded mirror on the wall. Dark circles smudged the skin under his eyes. His hair wasn’t its usual artful tumble. It was downright disheveled. And the snow-white collar of his shirt was dotted with blood.

  Iverson took two steps closer and surprised Rhys by placing a hand on his shoulder. “Whatever’s troubling you, we wish to help.”

  It was tempting to confess the truth to both of them. But if his father had taught him anything, it was to never admit weakness.

  Sensing his friends’ stares, Rhys wielded the familiar skill of scoffing at whatever challenge came his way.

  “If you’re any example,” he told Tremayne, “a man can become a decent duke in a matter of weeks.”

  The smile came slowly, inch by inch, but eventually softened Tremayne’s grim expression. “I became a duke as you did. Unexpectedly and long before I was prepared to assume any such responsibility. Embracing duty didn’t come easily. I credit my wife with whatever decency I’ve managed.”

  “Having known you for years before you met her,” Iverson quipped, “I agree she deserves a great deal of credit.” He turned a sardonic look Rhys’s way. “I suppose you’ll be needing a wife soon yourself. Any likely prospects in the countryside?”

  An image filled Rhys’s mind, a memory so sharp, he felt a stab of pain under his ribs.

  Auburn curls, green-gold eyes, a contagious laugh, and a smile that came rarely with others but easily with him. She would be there when he returned to Essex, but Miss Arabella Prescott would have no smiles for him anymore.

  He pushed the thought of her away. As he had for five years.

  “Let me find my feet before I get myself leg shackled.” He gestured vaguely and drew in a deep breath. “I must go to Edgecombe. Whatever I find at the estate is mine to sort out.” He pointed at Iverson and then Tremayne. “I will repay you both. The dukedom’s debts could not have drained my accounts entirely. I maintain others. I may be a reckless pleasure-seeking fool, but I know a man shouldn’t put all his coin in one purse.”

  Iverson stared at him for a long silent moment, assessing him, then turned his back on Rhys and filled a glass from the drinks cart. Several glasses. One for each of them.

  “Safe travels, Claremont,” Iverson said as he handed Rhys a half-filled tumbler.

  “I have some notion of what awaits you.” Nick stepped forward to take his glass and lifted it in a toast. “Good luck, my friend.”

  Rhys swigged back his finger of whiskey and savored the trail of heat racing from his throat to his middle. He needed a bit of fire in his belly. Nothing but his own selfish indulgence had motivated him for years. Exhaustion still nipped at him, worry still rode his shoulders, but he managed a grin.

  “They do say I’m a very lucky man.”

  Chapter Two

  August 1848

  Hillcrest estate, Essex

  With a satisfying swipe of her pencil, Arabella Prescott struck another task off her list as she strode toward the dining room. Her family’s long-planned house party was imminent, and Bella’s list had been a long one. She loved helping her mother with party preparations, or any project that involved order and structure.

  She should have set herself to conquering her list earlier, but she was so close to finishing the first draft of her book. She’d barely left her room in days. Just a few more details and she would be ready to consider submission to Mr. Peabody, the London publisher her mother had introduced her to the previous summer.

  The past months had brought a reviving change. After a series of failed Seasons, she no longer had to worry about social rounds or spending months in London while her parents put her in the way of every eligible nobleman on the marriage mart.

  There’d been no talk of matchmaking all summer, and she could finally focus on her dream of publishing the conundrum book she’d been adding to off and on for years. The project had nothing to do with duty or her parents’ expectations. Some in society would no doubt frown upon her harboring ambition for anything other than marrying well, but the book mattered to Bella. She needed to prove to herself that she could be something more than the doted upon daughter of Lord and Lady Yardley. A book of cerebral puzzles and logic problems written by a nobleman’s daughter might be difficult to sell, but she was determined to try.

  Now that her parents accepted her status as a spinster, her choices were her own. She only needed to get through a fortnight of being sociable to family friends and then her time would be her own too.

  In the dining room, Bella discovered the staff had outdone themselves. Porcelain and silverware glinted in the late afternoon light and a centerpiece of flowers scented the air. Peonies, lilacs, and freesia blooms overflowed the edges of etched silver bowls.

  She circled the table, moving from chair to chair to admire the perfectly arranged place settings. She loved symmetry, evenness, order. Every plate and glass and implement were in their right place. She let out an appreciative sigh, but then the name cards caught her interest. Stark white rectangles with gilded edges and names written in a bold hand. She examined the next and the next. The more she looked, the further her heart dropped.

  Gripping the back of one polished wooden chair, she scanned the table again, her mind whirring.

  Bella had always been good at solving puzzles. From childhood she’d excelled at mathematics and all the logic problems her governess devised to test her. She’d become so adept at unwinding riddles, she’d even published a few of her own in ladies’ magazines.

  The Puzzling Miss Prescott, one newspaper called her during her third Season. Of course, the society columnist had been referring to the mystery of why she’d refused five offers of marriage rather than her analytical mind.

  Studying the cards the servants had carefully arranged in front of gleaming plates, she could see the trap she’d stumbled into, as unsuspecting as a rabbit rushing headlong into a blackberry bramble.

  “Too many men,” Bella whispered to the empty room.

  Her heart lodged itself in the back of her throat. Her parents were still scheming to marry her off.

  After four failed Seasons, she thought it was over, that they understood. But it seemed their patience had worn thin. She knew they were frustrated every time she refused a suitor or an invitation to London. But she couldn’t regret her decisions. The five men who’d offered for her would have made dreadful husbands, and she would have made them a miserable wife. Her parents could have insisted, but they never had. They’d married for love and wished for her to do so too.

  She’d accepted that she wouldn’t, but clearly they hadn’t given up hope.

  When her parents suggested a house party to celebrate her twenty-third birthday, she’d been pleased. Not that she wished to make a fuss about her birthday. Since the debacle of a garden party five years past, she’d wanted the date to pass with little fanfare.

  But this—plot—had never crossed her mind.

  Gentlemen. A bevy of them. Four prospective suitors. They had to be. The only ladies who’d be in attendance were Bella, her mother, and her cousin Louisa. Since Louisa wasn’t yet out, she couldn’t be the object of this munificence of men.

  At the sound of someone clearing their voice, Bella spun to find her cousin hovering at the dining room threshold.

  “How angry are you?” Louisa stepped inside the room and slid the pocket doors closed behind her.

  Bella pressed two fingers to her temple. “You knew about this and said nothing?”

  Louisa blinked and her blue eyes widened. Rather than answer, she plucked nervously at a satin ribbon on the front of her gown.

  Four years younger and far more eager for romance than Bella had
ever been, Lou was sweet natured and rarely prone to duplicity. They were as close as sisters, and Bella understood why she’d gone along with the plan. Bella even sympathized with her parents’ desperation, but she had to make them understand.

  “Where are they?”

  “I saw your mother in her sitting room a quarter of an hour ago. I suspect they’ll be in the drawing room greeting guests soon, but I’ve just come from there and no sign of them yet.”

  “I need to speak to them before this all starts.” Bella hugged her notebook to her chest, pushed her pencil into the crook above her ear, and swept past her cousin.

  Louisa called out a soft hesitant “Good luck.”

  Marching toward her mother’s sitting room, Bella rallied logical arguments in her mind. Explanations. Rationales that would help her parents accept that she was not meant to marry. Some girls, like Louisa, stacked all their hopes on matrimony, but Bella didn’t entertain those dreams anymore.

  By the time she stood outside her mother’s door, she knew exactly what to say, but she hesitated with her fingers on the handle. Voices came from her father’s study across the hall.

  Good. Both of her parents in one place was exactly what she needed.

  She approached the study but stopped short when her mother began shouting. Bella pressed her ear to the wood.

  “You must speak to her, Edmund. Tell her the truth.”

  “Bah,” her father grumbled. “Perhaps she’ll take a fancy to one of the gentlemen you’ve invited for the fortnight. Then everything will fall into place, just as we hope.”

  “My dear.” Her mother used the long-suffering tone Bella had become very used to. “Our daughter has stubbornly refused every offer put to her. Shouldn’t we tell her what you must give up if she continues to do so?”

  “She might opt to accompany us,” her father said, his voice pitched high and hopeful.

  “Bella wishes to publish her book. She won’t want to be away from England so long and I won’t leave her unchaperoned. Unmarried.”

  “My sister Iona—”

  “Is ailing in Scotland and must look after her health rather than our daughter.”

  Bella couldn’t stand it anymore. She turned the latch, pushed inside the room, and faced her startled parents. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Her father heaved a long sigh and settled into his desk chair, then popped up again and removed two books he’d apparently deposited there and forgotten about. For a moment, he struggled to find an empty space where he could rest the two volumes. As usual, his desk was covered with maps and sketches of ancient Greece. He’d tutored others in the language for years, but his true passion was Hellenistic art and architecture.

  “Mama?” Bella turned to her mother. Of the two of them, she was the most effusive. As a poet, she understood the value of words more than most. But today she was uncharacteristically quiet. Pressing her lips together as if forcing herself not to speak, she turned her gaze toward Bella’s father. Whatever they were hiding, it seemed he would have to be the one to tell it.

  “I didn’t wish it to come out in this manner, my girl.” He flattened the edge of a sketch and placed the books on top before sinking into his chair. “I’ve been offered an opportunity,” he said softly.

  “In Athens,” her mother blurted.

  “That’s . . .” So far away was Bella’s first thought, but it was a selfish one. Her father longed to visit the lands he’d been studying for decades. “Wonderful news.”

  “It’s a teaching role.” He gave her that searching gaze of his with jade green eyes the same shade as her own. “The offer is for three years.”

  Years? Bella had never been parted from her family for more than a few months when she’d gone away to a finishing school in the north, loathed it, and returned home early. And they’d never traveled farther than London or the seaside at Brighton. Travel had never been her passion, but she had no wish to keep her father from his. Her mother, she suspected, would find much inspiration for her writing among ancient ruins too.

  “I wish you to go, Papa. Both of you. But I can’t accompany you, and I don’t think the marriage plot house party will work.”

  “Hardly a plot, Arabella.” Using her given name meant her mother’s patience was wearing thin. “We invited a few gentlemen to round out the numbers.”

  “Far more gentlemen than ladies.”

  Her mother sighed and rubbed her fingers against the fob watch on a chain around her neck. “They’re decent gentlemen,” she said with a hopeful lilt. “Well-bred. Well educated. We thought in lieu of another Season—”

  “I never want another Season, Mama.” The words were out too quickly and too loudly. “You know my plans. My hopes. I’ve done my round of Seasons.” Bella let out a sigh that was more sadness than frustration. “Do you truly expect me to do it all again?”

  “My girl,” her father spoke up, his voice soft, almost pleading. “We wish to see you settled before we would ever consider leaving England. Neither of us can bear to think of you here alone.” He glanced across the room, his eyes meeting her mother’s. “I assure you marriage is not a terrible fate.”

  “Not for some, but I’ve accepted that it won’t be my fate.” Once she’d longed for marriage as much as any debutante, but she’d discovered a flaw in the whole nonsense of Seasons and balls and matchmaking. Her heart was stubborn and she’d pinned her hopes on the one man who would never fulfill them.

  “It still could be.” Her father gripped the edge of one of his books so tight his knuckles whitened.

  Bella moved close and laid her hand on his. “Are you all right, Papa?”

  “I’m well.” He nodded once, but Bella didn’t like how pale he looked. He’d taken ill the previous year and had not yet recovered his usual vigor for study and teaching.

  Bella looked toward her mother. “Is there more you’re not telling me?”

  “Dr. Bell did comment that a bit of Greece’s sun may do your father well.”

  Every emotion Bella had entered the room with—guilt, frustration, determination—turned to fear. She didn’t want her family to go, and yet she wanted her father to be well. She couldn’t lose him.

  “The house party is a hope that you might finally find the happiness we wish for you. And you must forgive us for not telling you of your father’s news. We wanted to find the right moment.”

  “You know I do.” Bella had learned the danger of holding on to hurt.

  “If I’d said anything you would have commandeered a pony cart and ridden off to some distant village where no one knew your name.”

  “I still might.” Bella quite liked that idea.

  “Bella, please.”

  “We must give her at least one good reason not to,” her father said playfully.

  Hearing lightness in his tone eased the worry weighing on her heart.

  Her mother let out a half-hearted chuckle. “Because we have house guests arriving who expect to be entertained for a fortnight?”

  And just when I have a book to finish. Dozens of slips of paper decorated the wall in her sitting room. Some were riddles, others contained word problems or logic conundrums. Every time she thought of a new one, she added it to the collection and then to the pages of her manuscript. She was so close to adding finishing touches.

  “You needn’t choose any of them,” her father told her in his rumbling baritone.

  “Edmund, we’ve discussed this.” Mama’s quelling glance would have given other men pause, but her parents had been married for two decades and her father wasn’t a man to be put off easily.

  “They’re all fine young men, of course,” he conceded. “Your mother chose with care.”

  “But without consulting me,” Bella couldn’t stop from blurting.

  Her mother strode forward. “What would you have said, dear girl? Would you have agreed to meet them? We do not wish to force your hand.”

  “And yet four men are descending on Hillcrest and I had no cho
ice at all.” Her voice had taken on a reedy quality she hated. Petulance didn’t suit her.

  “The choice shall always be yours to make.” Her father’s firm unwavering manner always made her believe him. “We only long to see you happy.”

  “I’m happy as I am.” Bella felt the hollowness of the claim even as she spoke it. Loneliness weighed on her more often than she liked to admit. She kept busy and there were always things to do. But at moments, just every once in a while, it felt as if something was missing.

  “Marriage does have its merits.” It was rare that her father fell into the softer tone he’d used when she was a child, but he wielded it now as he approached to stand next to her mother. His gaze turned soft, filled with warmth. “You are our only child. We wish to see your future secured, with a home and a man who is worthy of you.”

  Bella swallowed the protest that welled up.

  “Who are they?” Bella had learned long ago that one couldn’t form a strategy without information.

  “You will meet them soon enough. Guests have been arriving for the last hour. By six they will all be gathered in the drawing room, my dear.” The smile her mother offered was encouraging, but her eyes gleamed in that way they did when one of her plans had turned to triumph.

  Bella’s father stepped forward and offered his arm as if he meant to escort her to the drawing room immediately.

  “I will greet them, of course, as visitors to our home. But I make no promises,” Bella told them with the same vein of stubbornness that made her want to bolt from the room. “I saw no names I recognize at those place settings. These men are strangers to me.”

  “Arabella, don’t be churlish—”

  The moment her mother’s voice began to rise, her father spoke up. “We ask only that you meet them, my girl. Speak to them. Consider that they came here because they wished to make your acquaintance. No different from the young bucks you encountered at all those silly balls during your Seasons.”

  “Better not to mention those gentlemen,” her mother added.

  With a little grumbling sound, her father came forward and took her hands in his. “You deserve the finest of suitors, my girl. And I’ve yet to convince myself any of them deserve you. But do consider whether any of the lads downstairs might suit you.”