The Undercover Duke

by Michaels, Jess

  “I think she could still do me good,” he said. “Ten days with her and I am already feeling closer to whole again.”

  Stalwood leaned back in his chair. “Just have a care.”

  Lucas ignored the warning and handed over his superior’s tea before he took a place in a chair across from him. “I’ve been looking over the case files.”

  Not as much as he wanted to, of course. Diana had been a distraction, but he’d taken the time where he could find it. The thrill of the hunt had returned immediately.

  Stalwood leaned forward, his eyes lit up with interest. “And?”

  “I have some questions and some observations,” he said. “First, did…did George Oakford ever get assigned cases?”

  Stalwood blinked and the confusion on his face answered the question even before he stammered, “Oakford? He was a surgeon—why in the world would I put him on a case?”

  Lucas drew a sharp breath. “So I thought.”

  “Why would you ask about that?”

  “Diana said something about her father having a visitor. She believed the man to be a spy and she thought they were working on a case together.” He said no more about her confession. That was a line he would not cross.

  “No,” Stalwood said. “I never assigned him a case. Of course, he put himself in the middle of your mission six months ago, so I cannot say for certain that he hadn’t done the same in the past. But he never confessed as much to me. Could she have been mistaken?”

  “I suppose so. After all, it was an impression she had, not something her father actually said to her. Still, it stood out to me. Made me wonder…” He trailed off. He had a nagging feeling in his chest. Something that felt incomplete.

  “I can look further into it,” Stalwood suggested. “Check my records. When did she say this occurred?”

  “Two years ago,” he said. “I don’t know more specifics and the story was not relayed to me in a fashion that would allow me to press her.”

  Stalwood’s gaze narrowed. “Very well. I trust your instincts on that. I’ll investigate further. What else?”

  “The more I look at the case file, the more I think that not only was the man on the estate that day our traitor, but that he might not have worked alone.”

  Stalwood jerked. “You think I might have more than one bastard in my ranks?”

  Lucas nodded. “Perhaps. Though this man’s partner may have been of lesser rank. When he killed Oakford and injured me, probably believing I would also die, it spooked him. That is why it has taken so long for him to return to his wicked ways. But now that he is…”

  He stopped himself. He’d been pondering something in the past few days. Now Diana’s change of attitude made him think even more about it.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been hidden for months, protected so that I could not be found by this person, yes?” he asked.

  Stalwood nodded. “I felt you might be in danger. You still likely would be.”

  “I agree. But that could be just the way for this man to be drawn out.” Lucas stood and paced the room slowly. “Think of it, Stalwood. Returning to the field in the shape I’m in would be out of the question—I know that, even if I hate to admit it. But there is nothing that says I could not return to some kind of public life.”

  “As bait?” Stalwood asked.

  Lucas faced him, unable to keep the excitement from his voice. “Bait is one way to put it. Torment is another. Think of this man, feeling he’s in the clear, uncertain what the one potential witness to his crimes is capable of doing. Then I return. He might not be able to resist me.”

  Stalwood pressed his lips together. “It’s not a bad idea, really.”

  “You sound surprised,” Lucas said with a chuckle. “My good ideas are exactly why you brought me the case files in the first place.”

  “Modest, as always,” Stalwood said, his tone dry as dust. But his smile belied any annoyance his tone might have conveyed. “We’d have to tread carefully, though. If it is known you are staying here with Diana—”

  Lucas shook his head. “No, I’ve thought of that too. This place is too isolated, too small to be safe if my location is made public. It would be better if I…if I returned to the ducal home here in London. Took up my duties as Willowby.”

  Stalwood lifted both eyebrows in surprise, and Lucas couldn’t blame him. He had never had, nor expressed, any interest in the title. Quite the opposite, though no one knew why he had pushed his dukedom and all that went with it so far away. Not his friends, not his colleagues, no one.

  “You are driven if you are willing to be Your Graced for a case,” Stalwood said softly.

  Lucas lifted his chin. “George Oakford is dead because of me and Diana deserves justice. Answers. So do I. I’m willing to do almost anything for that.”

  “Your mother is staying in the London home, you know,” Stalwood said, holding his gaze. “Will she be a problem?”

  Lucas tensed. “My mother. I’m certain she’ll be a problem for me, but for you, for the case…no.”

  “If you think it for the best, then I approve,” Stalwood said. “I’ll arrange for guards for your estate, ones I trust implicitly. Is there anything else you need?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Not at the moment, though if that changes I’ll inform you. I’ll just need to tell Diana and arrange for her to move with me.”

  Stalwood’s eyes widened. “You intend to take Diana with you,” he repeated.

  “Of course,” Lucas said. “She is helping me greatly with my recovery. But it’s more than that.”

  “More.”

  Lucas’s lips parted at the knowing tone of Stalwood’s voice. “Yes,” he grunted. “More. Diana will have to come and go if she is not staying with me. She’ll be seen and that could put her in danger if the man who did this to me, to her father, is watching. And we want him to be watching. If she is with me then she’ll be under the care of your guards, as well as me.”

  Or course, there was so much more to it than that. He had no intention of saying so to Stalwood. Perhaps he didn’t need to, if his superior’s pinched expression was any indication.

  “And how will you explain her?” Stalwood asked. “This beautiful young woman who has come to stay with you unattended?”

  Lucas froze. He hadn’t actually thought that far ahead. Here their arrangement had not been public. In his home…well, he knew he was considered a bachelor—a catch, thanks to his fortune and his title. The traitor to their cause would not be the only one watching his home, his every move.

  “I’ll talk to her,” he said. “And let her decide how she’d like things presented.”

  Stalwood rose. “I agree that is the best way of it. Let me know what you two come up with and if there are any additional things you need. I will speak to you after you are settled.”

  “Very good,” Lucas said, and motioned his superior into the foyer. They shook hands and he watched as Stalwood headed out the door and into his waiting carriage.

  Now that they had a plan, Lucas’s mind was racing. This wasn’t quite back in the field, but it was working a case, truly working it.

  And he couldn’t wait to get back into the thick of things and remember what his life was truly about.

  Diana moved about Lucas’s chamber, tidying up. That was all she could think to do while Stalwood and Lucas talked downstairs. She had no place there with them. She had no place with Lucas at all. Yet reminding herself of that was somehow difficult.

  “You are being so utterly foolish,” she bit out, letting the words hang in the air around her. She heard them, she knew they were right. They still stung.

  With a quiet curse, she yanked a pillowcase from the pillow, tossing it into the basket on the floor beside her. When she did so, a book fell from within the folds of the fabric, bounced off the edge of the bed and clattered to the floor, sending folded sheets of paper sliding across the wooden surface.

  She
sighed and bent to retrieve the items. “Spies and their secrets,” she muttered, thinking of the pistol she had already carefully set aside when she stripped the other pillow of its cover.

  Lucas certainly had enough of those secrets. Things he hid about his past, his life, his vocation. She knew what it was like to live with a man like that. Her father had been much the same. Close-lipped and careful, steering her away from anything that mattered to him. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been angry with her for coming into his study at their country estate and reorganizing some of the items on his desk.

  That was their last conversation, for he’d left soon after and never returned.

  She winced and turned over yet another paper. She was ready to stuff them all back into the book and put it on the side table for Lucas when she caught a glimpse of her name, written in a shaky hand on one of the sheets.

  She frowned and held the paper to her chest. These were Lucas’s private things. No amount of sex or whispered secrets from the past gave her any right to go rifling through them.

  But it was her name, on this paper he had placed in a book and then hidden in a pillow. How could she not be curious?

  She glanced at the door. Although she could not hear the men talking in the closed parlor below, she had not yet heard Stalwood leave either. Until he did, she was safe to…to…

  “Snoop,” she said out loud, completing the sentence in her head.

  But as much as she hated the description, and the fact that it was entirely apt, she still lowered the paper and stared at it. This was Lucas’s hand, she would bet her life on it. His injury made it shaky, but there was still a flourish that fit him.

  What was on the paper was far more interesting. It appeared to be a long series of notes, bullet-pointed and neatly organized. He was writing about her father’s murder, listing off a long line of facts about the case.

  She staggered to the chair before the fire and sank into the cushioned seat. Her heart was pounding, her hands were shaking. She knew a little about that day. Bare skeletons of facts, told to her by Stalwood and Lucas. But this was detailed. This was horribly detailed. Lucas had written down every moment of that day, including exact words that had been said, and the collection of them swam before her eyes as they filled with tears.

  “Diana.”

  She jolted and jerked her gaze up to find Lucas standing in the doorway. His face was hard, lined with anger and betrayal as he limped to her and snatched the page from her hand.

  “What do you think you are doing?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Lucas winced as Diana stared at him, her green eyes dark with grief and pain. Her hands shook as she lowered them into her lap, and she let out a sigh that seemed to shake her all the way to her very core.

  But when she stood up, the pain was gone and it was replaced by an anger he had not expected. “What am I doing? What are you doing?” she snapped.

  He drew back, surprised by the power of her raw emotions and by the reaction they inspired in him. It was sudden and formidable, a combination of wanting to rail at her for interfering and also wanting to hold her and comfort her in her pain.

  He shoved all of it away and struggled to be controlled and measured. “You are asking me when I walked in to find you going over my private papers? I did not think you’d take the time you had while I talked to Stalwood to rifle through my room.”

  Her lips parted on an outraged, huffy sigh. “How dare you! That is not what I did. I was tidying up your chamber while you were busy, changing your sheets so the laundry could be sent out.”

  She motioned to the bed and he noted that it was, indeed, half unmade and his room was less cluttered. Things he should have observed immediately upon entry to the room. Noticing details was engrained in him, the first thing he’d been trained to do as a spy. Yet he hadn’t because he’d been distracted by Diana.

  “So when you found something hidden, you decided that gave you a right to look at it?” he asked.

  She folded her arms. “No. The book fell and the pages folded inside scattered. I thought you were being ridiculous hiding so much, just a spy so obsessed with his secrets that he thought everyone else was, too. But when I was picking up the papers, I saw my name on them.”

  She pointed to the one he held in his hand. He slowly turned it over and winced. Of all the things for her to find, this was one of the worst. It was an accounting of every detail he had gathered or gleaned from the case. Her name was in it because she was part of the case for him now, tied to it and to him in a way that would never be undone.

  But he would never have had her read some of it. Like how her father had looked lying dead on the ground. Like the details of their last conversation or the sound of the shots when Oakford was gunned down.

  From her face, she had read it all. And now it would never leave her mind, just as it would never leave his.

  “You have been investigating this case all along,” she whispered. “And you hid it from me.”

  “Since the last time Stalwood came here,” he admitted as he folded the paper and put it into his jacket pocket. “And I wasn’t hiding it. I didn’t tell you what I was doing because it has nothing to do with you, Diana.”

  Her face crumpled at that statement and she backed away from him like he had struck her physically. “He may have loved you more, Your Grace,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “But he was my father.”

  He recoiled at not just her words, but at the emotion laced in them. He moved to her in three long steps and caught her hands. She struggled against him, but he refused to release her. Indeed, he tugged her closer.

  “He loved you, Diana, of that I have no doubt. And when I say that my investigation has nothing to do with you, I meant that you should not have to think of your father this way. That you should not think of his last moments, but of what you shared with him while he was alive.”

  “You think I didn’t think of his last moments long before I read the details of them?” she gasped, yanking free at last. Tears had begun to stream down her face and her breath came in painful hiccups. “I wonder if he was afraid. I wonder if he was in pain. I wonder if he knew that these were his last moments and if there was any peace for him. I wonder if he…if he thought of me.”

  Lucas stared at her, this woman made of intelligence and kindness and iron. This woman who was utterly alone in the world now that her father was gone. How well he knew that feeling.

  He stepped forward and gathered her into his arms. This time she didn’t resist him. She let him pull her against his chest as he smoothed her hair gently. She shook as she wept, a pouring out of all the grief she had been holding back.

  When her tears had slowed a little, he whispered, “Diana, yes, I am investigating his death. We all deserve justice. Him, me and you.”

  She lifted her face toward his, and he was struck with the thought of that first night he’d been here, when he’d held her like this and comforted her in similar grief. Now he knew her better. Now he wanted even more to soothe the wounds she carried so quietly and bravely. The ones the world didn’t see.

  He wanted to soothe the ones she hadn’t shared, too. The ones he sensed below the surface, where she so jealously protected them.

  “If I deserve justice, then I also deserve the truth,” she whispered. “And I want it, Lucas.”

  He hesitated. “You want to know about my case?”

  “I don’t expect you would agree to that,” she said, pulling away from him. Leaving him cold. Bereft in ways he didn’t want to analyze. “But stop hiding it from me. This is too small a house for you to do so.”

  He jolted. Here he’d come upstairs, ready to give her the news of their move and he’d forgotten it all when faced with her tears. Yet another example of how deeply she distracted him.

  He bent his head. “I’m…sorry.”

  She wrinkled her brow. “You’re actually apologizing to me?”

  He nodded. �
��Yes. Not for investigating. That is my nature and my duty and I will not change for anyone. But perhaps I should not have been so secretive. You are right that Oakford was your father—no one has been more affected by his death. To investigate under your roof, behind your back, was wrong.”

  “Thank you,” she said, though her tone was still stunned. He wondered if apologies were so rare to her that she hardly recognized one when she heard it.

  “And that brings me to the subject I wanted to broach with you when I came upstairs,” he continued. “It has to do with the investigation.”

  She tilted her head. “Very well. What is it?”

  “Stalwood and I agree that I could do more on that count if I were to move to my own home here in London.”

  Her lips parted. “What? Why?”

  He hesitated. Here he had just promised not to keep her locked out of what he was doing. But he didn’t want to endanger her, either. At least no more than he knew he would just by being in her presence.

  “Please, won’t you be honest with me?” she said, exhaustion lacing her tone. “I’m so very tired of all the lies.”

  Yes, he could see that in her face, in her eyes, her posture. She was on the edge, ready to fall. He didn’t want to be the one who pushed her, even if he didn’t think he could be the one who caught her either.

  “I’m going to tell you the truth,” he said. “With the understanding that it is not something you may repeat to anyone at any time.”

  She nodded slowly. “Very well, though who you think I would tell, I don’t know.”

  Her words reminded him once more of how alone she was, and he winced before he said, “The man who was responsible for your father’s death, the traitor…he is back at his old ways. There’s been another death.”

  Her knees buckled and she just caught herself on the back of the closest chair as she stared at him in horror. “No. No!”

  “I’m so sorry, Diana, but yes. This man, he no doubt knows I’m still alive, but Stalwood has done a very good job hiding me these past six months. We think if I come back into the public eye, it might push this bastard to a breaking point. It might make him do or say something that would reveal him for the coward he truly is.”