Bringing Down the Duke

by Evie Dunmore

  She came to her feet, making him stand also.

  “This is regrettable,” she said, and, pettily, she added, “I thought you were a fair man.”

  His face went blank. “I am,” he said coolly.

  “Perhaps you can explain it to me, then,” she said, “how is it fair that my utterly inept cousin is in command of me, for no reason other than that he’s a man and I’m a woman? How is it fair that I master Latin and Greek as well as any man at Oxford, yet I am taught over a baker’s shop? How is it fair that a man can tell me my brain was wired wrong, when his main achievement in life seems to be his birth into a life of privilege? And why do I have to beg a man to please make it his interest that I, too, may vote on the laws that govern my life every day?”

  Her voice had turned hectic and sharp, and she was clutching her pen in her fist like a dagger, but she had somehow become incensed beyond caution, her blood a dull roar in her ears. Montgomery was watching her blatantly unfazed, and that made her want to pick up his shiny paperweight and hurl it against the wall, just to hear something crash.

  “Oh no, you won’t,” he said, and moved with surprising speed; before she blinked, he was in front of her, crowding her back against his desk.

  She glared up at him. His nearness should have irritated her, but this close, she could smell him, his scent familiar and exhilarating, and she wavered. Anguish began creeping into the cracks of her anger.

  Her hand with the pen fell useless to her side.

  Montgomery made a soothing sound. “That is better,” he said.

  “What is?” she said warily.

  He took a small step back. “You speaking your mind,” he said, “instead of maintaining that pretense.”

  “I assure you, it was not a pretense,” she said stiffly.

  “Don’t try to manage me like a fool,” he shot back.

  “I—” She closed her mouth again.

  He was right. She had not been honest with him.

  If only he knew that until today, she had felt more like herself in his presence, had been more true in her actions around him than with any other man.

  She became aware of how close he still stood, how his chest rose and fell with every breath he took. How awfully right it felt to be close. How right it would feel to just bury her face against his competent shoulder and feel his arms around her.

  “I believe we are finished here,” she said.

  “You and I should talk,” he replied.

  “Perhaps you would be so kind to set out your recommendations for us in a letter,” she said, and squeezed past him to reach her reticule.

  “Annabelle.” His hand closed over hers, warm and certain.

  She glanced up and met his eyes, clear and deep like a glacial lake, and God help her she wanted to fall in and sink to the bottom.

  She swallowed. “There’s nothing to say about you and me, Your Grace.”

  “That is what I thought,” he said, “but then you unexpectedly showed up in my office.”

  Her heart began beating unpleasantly fast again. “I was sent here in an official capacity.”

  “You could have declined.”

  “I assure you, I tried.”

  “Who would know if you hadn’t followed through with the meeting,” he challenged, “had you gone to a café instead of coming here?”

  “Are you suggesting I should have lied to my friends?” she asked, incredulous, and damned if she hadn’t considered doing exactly that. Somehow, she had still ended up in his office. “Lies have a tendency of getting exposed,” she informed him.

  Annoyance and amusement warred behind his eyes, and the fact that it showed so plainly meant that he wasn’t half as unmoved as his calm voice made him out to be.

  She realized he was still holding her hand. His thumb had begun stroking back and forth over her palm, the friction creating a warm, tingling sensation that made her head swim.

  And of course, he noticed. His eyes heated. “Annabelle,” he said softly. “How have you been?”

  She pulled her hand away, grasping for the tattered remnants of her resolve to be indifferent.

  “I’m well, thank you.” She began stowing her notebook and her pen in her reticule.

  “Good,” she heard him say. “I admit, I am not. You are constantly on my mind.”

  Her gaze flew to his face.

  There was his sincerity again, etched in every feature.

  She hadn’t expected him to speak about feelings. She hadn’t been sure he had any feelings.

  Her throat tightened with an overwhelming emotion. Of course she’d known, somewhere deep down. She’d been lying to herself. It had been easier to ignore the whole sorry affair as long as she could pretend he cared nothing for her. Now he was taking even that away from her.

  “Such sentiments pass,” she said tightly.

  He tilted his head. “Perhaps. But unlikely. Once in place, my inclinations are rather persistent.”

  Indeed, they would be. He did nothing half-measure, so the object of his inclination had better be prepared for a long and thorough stint of his attention.

  Her shoulders sagged. “How could you,” she said. “How could you believe that I . . .” Her voice frayed. The scorching, frantic intimacy they had shared in his library flashed before her eyes and derailed anything she had ever learned about rhetoric.

  “How could I believe what,” he coaxed gently.

  “In the library. How could you think that I would negotiate terms,” she said, “and at such a moment.”

  Understanding dawned in his eyes, surprisingly slowly for a man known as one of the country’s sharpest strategists.

  “I see,” he said. “The timing did take me by surprise, but it was never a question that we would talk terms, Annabelle. A man takes care of the woman in his life.”

  His life. Not his bed. She was trained to pay attention to the choice and nuances of words for her academic work, and this was a glaring, significant choice of one word over the other.

  She felt hot and weak, too weak to move away when he raised his hand to her face. His fingertip stroked lightly over her bottom lip, and the tender contact unleashed a shower of sparks through her body.

  Unthinking, she turned away and started toward the nearest window.

  His study was on an upper floor, granting him an unobstructed view of Westminster Abbey. The steep spires and turrets were pointing like arrows toward the clear sky.

  Footfalls approached and he halted next to her, his hands clasped behind his back, and so they stood side by side, wordlessly, acutely aware of the air pulsing heavily between them. On the street below, people carried on with their lives, a soundless teeming like ants across a forest floor.

  “Were you married in the abbey?” she asked.

  “No.” There was a sarcastic smile in his voice. “But they will bury me there.”

  Her head jerked toward him. Lit by the pale winter sun, his strong profile looked vital, if not indestructible. The idea of him cold and white in a crypt, his perceptive eyes forever closed, squeezed her throat like a fist. For a beat, the world careened around her in complete silence, as if she’d gone deaf.

  She wrapped her arms around herself.

  He turned to her, forever sensing her shifts in mood. Surely he knew that she was still wholly in his thrall. Possibly for years to come.

  “All right,” she said quietly. “How would it work? Us.”

  His eyes narrowed. “How would you want it to work?” he finally said, his calm tone not fooling her for a moment. His body was tense as a panther’s coiling to pounce.

  She gave a sullen shrug. “I wouldn’t know. I have no experiences with that sort of business.”

  “Neither do I,” he said evenly. “Either way, the rules are for us to make.”

  She gave him a skeptic
al look. “You haven’t kept a mistress before?”

  “Once. A long time ago.”

  Well. He did have his other arrangements, a certain countess for one.

  He had stealthily moved in on her. She slipped out of his reach and began to pace on the rug in the center of the room.

  “These are the things I do know,” she said. “If I were to accept your offer, I would lose all my friends. No decent woman would be seen with me.” His jaw tensed, and she continued quickly: “Second, I would lose my place at Oxford, and Oxford was my father’s lifelong dream. And third, once you tire of me, with my friends gone, who would keep me company? Other fallen women and the next man with deep pockets?”

  His pupils flared. “Other men be damned,” he said, and stepped forward, “and I’m not going to tire of you.”

  “How can you say that with certainty? Men often do tire of their companions, and walk away without as much as a backward glance.”

  He halted. “Is that what you are afraid of,” he said, “that I will abandon you?”

  “I’m not afraid,” she protested. “I’m not afraid. I just stand to lose a lot.”

  He didn’t reply. Because he couldn’t deny any of what she had said, and, worse, because he had no solutions to offer. She had expected this, but it was undeniably disappointing.

  “And what about the things you would gain,” he said, “all the things I can give you?”

  She would have to be a fool to not have considered it. With him in control, survival was certain. The worries that followed her everywhere, unshakable like shadows, the constant scouring for opportunities to keep herself warm and fed and safe—everything that drove her mind in circles at night—Montgomery could take away with the stroke of a pen. And none of that tempted her half as much as the prospect of being with him. Within weeks he had gone from a stranger to someone whose presence she craved; she wanted to fall asleep in his arms with his scent in her nose. She wanted to be the keeper of his worries and joys until his hair had turned white and they were old.

  But what he offered was built on sand.

  The sin of it all aside, outside the walls of her fancy house she would become invisible. Montgomery would become her world, and he’d own her body and soul. She’d spend her days waiting for him, alone in an empty house, and the gaps between his visits might grow longer, and longer . . .

  Unbelievably, her heart still dithered. And so she said something she would have liked to forget completely: “What about your wife?”

  His body went rigid. “What about her?”

  She had to shove the words out of her mouth. “Everyone expects you to take a new wife within the year.”

  His face shuttered. “It would have nothing to do with us.”

  “How would it be?” she pressed. “Would you come to me although you have been with your duchess? Go back to her after you have shared my bed?”

  “That would be inevitable,” he said, a cruel note entering his voice. Never say he’d try charm and deception to get what he wanted; if only he did, it would be easier to give him up.

  “And if your wife objected?”

  “She would not, as you well know,” he said.

  Yes, she knew. Wives of men like him had to turn a blind eye.

  The mere thought of him sharing himself intimately with another woman tore through her gut like a clawed, snarling beast. “What if it caused her great unhappiness?” she whispered.

  Montgomery gave a bitter laugh. “Touché, my sweet. I cannot possibly win with that question, as any answer would make me either a liar or a careless bastard of a husband, and I doubt you’d respect either type of man.”

  Oh, if only he didn’t know her so well. “This is not a game to be won.”

  “Well, it certainly seems like a tremendous defeat to let you go,” he said, his eyes glittering with barely checked frustration.

  Don’t let me go.

  He would, though, and it felt like a free fall. Grasping blindly, she said: “If I were a highborn lady—”

  “But you are not”—he cut her off—“you are not, just as I am not a headmaster or a man of trade.”

  And if she needed any proof of that, she’d only have to look out the window, where eight hundred years ago in the abbey, Montgomery’s distant relative William the Conqueror had been crowned king.

  The finality of that rose like a wall between them. And she couldn’t bear to look at him a moment longer. She moved to the desk to finally pick up her reticule.

  Montgomery helped her into her coat. He politely opened the door and stood aside.

  She only had to make it into a hackney, and there she could crumple . . .

  She was almost past him when he stayed her with his hand at her elbow.

  “I know you are planning a march on Parliament Square.”

  Her gaze flew to his face. Perfectly unreadable.

  “Will you hinder us?” she asked after a pause.

  “No. But others might.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.”

  His hand dropped from her arm. This was the last time he will ever touch me, she thought.

  “If we were of equal station,” he said softly, “I would have proposed to you when we took our walk in the maze.”

  Oh.

  The magnitude of this was too enormous to sink in, with her standing on a doorstep, about to walk away. She felt strangely suspended in time, her breathing turned shaky. “I wish you would not have told me this.” Because she could never, ever be anyone other than plain Miss Annabelle Archer, and now she’d forever know how dearly that had cost her.

  His eyes had the brittle shine of crystal. “If you were to take only one piece of my advice, call off the march,” he said. “It will only cause you trouble.”

  Her smile was steely. “Perhaps this is not a question of staying out of trouble, Your Grace. Perhaps this is about deciding on which side of history you want to be.”

  Chapter 21

  A letter from the Greek excavation team in Messenia had arrived in Jenkins’s office, and from the lengthy, convoluted paragraphs, Annabelle was able to deduce a number of books and tools Jenkins should pack for his excursion. She had spent the past half hour tiptoeing up and down the ladder to locate said books and equipment on the shelves while her mind had ventured a few thousand miles south. Spring came to Greece early. Right now, the skies over the sea would be cloudless, and the air would soon smell of rosemary and thyme.

  On wings of song,

  My love, I carry you away,

  Away to the fields of the Ganges,

  Where I know the most beautiful place . . .

  “Do you like Mendelssohn, Miss Archer?”

  She glanced over her shoulder, one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. Jenkins was looking at her quizzically from behind his desk, the tip of his pen still on the paper.

  “My apologies, Professor. I had not realized I was humming out loud.”

  He noticed the growing ink blotch on his article and muttered a profanity under his breath. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “It’s no trouble.”

  That niggled. The clicking sound of knitting needles turned him rabid. Surely, humming would trouble him.

  “So, do you?” he prompted.

  “Yes. I like Mendelssohn.”

  He nodded. “Very thorough people, the Germans, very precise. Did you know the same precision that makes a good engineer also makes a good composer?”

  “No, but I can imagine.” Though how the sum of precision could generate magic was beyond her.

  Jenkins returned his attention to his paper. “Professor Campbell, his daughter, and I are going to a concert in the Royal Albert Hall this Friday,” he said. “A duo will sing a selection of Mendelssohn songs.”

  Well, that had her struggle for her next breath. “That sounds lov
ely.”

  “You are friends with Campbell’s daughter, are you not?” Jenkins said as his pen scratched onward.

  “I am, sir.”

  She soon gave up waiting for any further elaborations. Jenkins tended to sink back into his vast inner world and forget all about her very existence.

  * * *

  The next morning, a small envelope was waiting for her in her pigeonhole.

  Miss Archer,

  Would you do me the honor of accompanying our party to the Divine Duo in the Royal Albert Hall this coming Friday? If it is acceptable, I shall arrange for you to travel to London together with Lady Catriona.

  C. Jenkins

  Annabelle pensively ran her thumb over the card. It was neither satin-smooth nor embossed with gilded letters. But she had not spoken to Catriona much ever since their return from Claremont, and it could be interesting to see Christopher Jenkins outside his natural habitat. And, frankly, to put it in Hattie’s words—she deserved some amusement.

  * * *

  After ten years as the head of Scotland Yard, Sir Edward Bryson had plumbed the bleakest depths of the human soul, and he’d readily describe himself as a hardened man.

  The unblinking stare of the Duke of Montgomery still filled him with an urge to writhe and explain himself. “We may not have found him yet, but we have narrowed the area down to middle England with great certainty, Your Grace.”

  Sebastian knew he was making the man uncomfortable. He wanted to make him uncomfortable. He was spending a hundred pounds a week on this mission, and for all he knew, his brother could be dead. Kidnapped, or stuck in a bog, or clubbed over his blond head and robbed.

  He took a deep, deliberate breath to ease the pressure in his chest. “What makes you certain, Bryson?”

  “The men stationed in the ports on the south coast report no movement,” Bryson said quickly, “and we have men monitoring all major roads and guest houses to the north—”

  Sebastian held up a hand. “I’m aware of that,” he said, “but how can you look me in the eye and tell me that you know with great certainty the whereabouts of a lone man in a country the size of Britain? The possibilities are endless.”