“Stop right there. You’re going nowhere.”
Victory. Halfway to the bed now, and with her back to him, Yancey allowed herself a covert smile before turning to the duke. Feigning surprise, and with a hand to her bosom, she said, “I beg your pardon?”
His solid body framed by the window at his back, her host had crossed his arms over his impressive chest. “You heard me. You’re going nowhere.”
“Do I take your meaning correctly? You intend to keep me a prisoner here?” She raised her chin for effect. “Perhaps, then, I should take myself off to the tower I saw from the coach and wrap myself in chains?”
The duke’s sober expression remained so. “I assure you that such dramatics are not necessary. I simply meant I have more questions to ask you, Miss Calhoun. And if I don’t like your answers, you will be leaving. Very soon.”
It wasn’t exactly the invitation to stay that she’d hoped to wangle. But apparently she wasn’t to be tossed out on her nose, either. At least, not just yet. All she knew was that her continuing proximity to the duke could be very dangerous. And for more than one reason. Yancey adopted an expression of innocence, widening her eyes in a way that she knew from experience could disarm men. Most men. “Well, I can now say I understand the rules. But, my goodness, you make this all sound like a mystery.”
“I think it is. And the mystery is you.”
Yancey’s abrupt chuckle reflected practiced disbelief. “I assure you that there is nothing of the mysterious surrounding me. I am indeed Sarah Margaret Calhoun.”
“So you say. Yet I have only your word for that.”
“You have no reason to assume that I would lie to you.”
“In fact, I have every reason to assume that you would.”
Only too aware that she was suddenly more excited by this dangerous game of words than it was wise to be, Yancey nevertheless upped the stakes. “Meaning, I take it, Your Grace,” she said pointedly, finally using his title despite his not having introduced himself to her, “that I am not the Sarah Margaret Calhoun you expected me to be?”
The man’s gray eyes blazed. Had his stare been a weapon, Yancey figured she would already be dead on the floor. “I expected no one. But what I suspect is that you are fully aware of that, too.”
Yancey matched the duke—a more than worthy adversary—stare for stare and word for word. “You assign me many motives, sir. I assure you that I am a simple woman who—”
“The one thing you are not is a simple woman. I would be disappointed if you were.” Having said that, he relaxed his posture, rubbing his chin with his thumb. “Now, allow me to begin my questioning, keeping in mind that if I don’t like your answers, you and your baggage will be set on the side of the road.”
What could she say? “Fair enough. Begin.”
“Thank you,” he said with exaggerated grace. “Tell me, Miss Calhoun, how did it come about that you presented yourself on my doorstep? As far-flung as Stonebridge is, I hardly think you acted on whim or caprice.”
Just listening to him talk, to hear how he used words, excited Yancey beyond anything she’d ever felt before. She fought to stay in character, that of an aloof woman. “Neither caprice nor whim, as you stated. Instead, I arrived here only after considerable direction and planning.”
Yancey’s reward was the look of surprise that crossed his features. “How so? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I was asked to come here.”
He straightened up. His was no longer a casual pose. “By whom were you asked?”
With a smile, Yancey played her ace. “By the Duchess of Somerset, Her Grace Rosamond Sparrow Treyhorne.”
Again, surprise flitted across the duke’s features, raising his eyebrows. “My mother?” He quickly followed this with a scoffing sound that dismissed Yancey and her answer. “I find it hard to believe that my mother would ask you, a virtual stranger, to Stonebridge.”
He’d called her a liar, which at the moment and on this score she wasn’t. Not really. Behaving as if insulted, Yancey raised her chin a notch. “I can see how that would be hard to believe. But do you suppose I merely pulled your mother’s name out of the air—and all the way from America?”
“No, I do not. My surprise and disbelief, however, arise from the fact that my mother is the dowager duchess, not the titled duchess. That honor is reserved for my wife, who is in no condition or position to invite anyone anywhere. So whoever invited you here—”
“The ‘whoever’ was your mother. She invited me. Forgive me my mistake in thinking her the titled duchess instead of the … dowager, did you say?”
“Yes. Put simply, a duchess becomes a dowager when her husband dies and the title passes to her son. His wife then carries the title of duchess.”
“I see. Thank you for that lesson.” Of course, she knew what a dowager was, and she knew that the woman who’d written to her was the dowager. It just better suited the half-true story she was telling him to pretend otherwise. “I plead being an American not fully versed in the protocol of the British peerage.”
He said nothing, only silently considered her. His gray eyes moved restlessly, as if in time with his rapidly developing thoughts.
Forced to await his conclusions, Yancey watched him, only belatedly realizing that her gaze had slipped to the dark, crisp, and curling hair on his muscled chest that his shirt, open at the neck, revealed. She forced her gaze upward to his face and her mind back to his answers. Specifically, he had spoken of his wife in the present tense. So either the duke believed his wife to be alive, or wanted Yancey to think he did. Yancey realized she hoped it was the former. Why? Was it because she didn’t want him to be guilty of murder?
“Then she wrote to you, I presume? My mother, I mean.”
He spoke so suddenly that Yancey blinked, having to first replay in her mind his question before she could answer him. “Yes. Of course.”
“Then you have with you the letters from her?”
“Her letters?” A sudden alarm sounded in Yancey’s head. Lightning-quick conclusions flitted through her mind, one after the other. He hadn’t known until just now that his mother had written to his American wife. As Yancey had already suspected, this confirmed that the dowager had kept her letter-writing a secret from her son. Was he dangerous? What if he was the mastermind behind the events in America that had seen one woman dead and her own self attacked? What if his mother hadn’t known that?
But all that aside, how could Yancey let him read one, given their contents—the dowager’s desperate pleadings and the unfavorable allusions to her son? There was no telling what sort of response that might spark in the man. The truth was the dowager had written secretly for some good reason. Yancey concluded that she too should keep the woman’s secret until she could speak with her.
When Yancey spoke, it was with a show of sincere regret. “Oh, I am so sorry. Having no idea I would be required to defend myself like this, I didn’t keep the letters your mother sent me.”
Yancey barely kept her guilty gaze away from her handbag on the bed. The letters were in the handbag. Mere feet away. So was her gun.
“I do apologize, Miss Calhoun, for causing you to feel a need to defend yourself. But you have to admit that this is a most unusual circumstance.”
“Unusual? In what way?”
“Please don’t play at ignorance. It’s insulting to us both. For one thing—and as I suspect you well know—you bear the same name as my wife, if that is truly your name. And for another, you say my mother wrote to you. If she did, it’s obvious her letters were somehow misdirected. Otherwise, how exactly would my mother know someone like you?”
Offended by his last statement, and ignoring his other correct conclusions, Yancey narrowed her eyes. “Someone like me? You mean an American? Or the fact that I’m what you would call a commoner?”
His smile broadened into an absolutely treacherous grin that had nothing to do with humor. “Both … of course.”
The insult on
ly increased. Yancey felt her cheeks growing warm. “If nothing else, I do applaud your honesty. How difficult this must be for you to have to deal directly with someone so far beneath your usual notice.”
He shrugged his magnificent shoulders. “It’s not as dire as all that.”
“It isn’t? Well … lovely, then. Still, I don’t see why we need letters. If you could simply ask your mother if I may have an audience with her, I feel certain she can verify my invitation to come to Stonebridge. After all, it was her I came to see. And her I asked for when I arrived.”
Yancey meant to reveal to his mother, in private, that she was a Pinkerton agent. She would then question the dowager to ascertain what the trouble here was and if she, the dowager, was in any danger from her son.
But the duke ended that hope. “Like you, I would like nothing better than to question my mother. However, she is presently not in residence, and I don’t expect her to be for two to three more days.”
Yancey frowned, worrying that the duke may have already done away with his own mother, too. “Oh, dear. Well, that does make things awkward, then, doesn’t it? Perhaps you could send a message to her apprising her of my arrival?”
“I could. But it would be pointless. She is visiting her sister, a trip of two or more days, depending on the weather. As luck would have it, she planned to be starting for home at about this time. So, you see, a messenger from me would merely meet her on the road.”
Yancey pronounced herself heartened by the amount of detail in his narrative. His mother was alive. The details he’d offered lent truth to her conclusion. Or maybe the duke knew that, too, and was as accomplished a liar as she was. Yancey smiled and, knowing they were at a pivotal juncture, looked directly into the duke’s eyes. “I see. Then I find I don’t know how to proceed from here.”
“Luckily, I do. I will endeavor to get to the bottom of your presence here, Miss Calhoun. And at the end of my inquiries, I think it is safe to say that I will be sending you away.” He narrowed his eyes. “And you can count yourself lucky if that is all I do.”
His open threat charged the air between them. Yancey half expected to hear thunder roll and to see lightning blaze across the room and strike her dead. As it was, she found it hard to breathe. With her heart in her throat, she was unable to give him an answer … not that one was required.
“However, in the meantime,” he said, with a mercurial change in demeanor and tone of voice, “and as you are, to all appearances, an invited guest of my mother’s, I will honor her invitation and welcome you to Stonebridge. A lady’s maid will be up presently to assist you in settling in to your room. When you are refreshed, I ask that you attend me in my study in one hour. Is that clear?”
Yancey’s gaze narrowed, and her jaw tightened. He had a funny way of asking. But what this man, this powerful duke, didn’t know was that those things that scared her only made her more determined to see her way past them—a lesson her father had finally and fatally learned. Yancey nodded. “It is perfectly clear.”
* * *
Pushed back in his chair, with his feet up on his desk and his legs crossed at the ankles, Sam sat brooding in his first-floor study. He hadn’t changed his attire from an hour ago when he’d left the lady upstairs. That didn’t make him much of a gentleman, he supposed. But then again, he hadn’t ever been accused of being one. No, he was not one to stand on ceremony, much to his mother’s chagrin, since he’d returned from America. A smile hovered at the corners of Sam’s mouth. America. His taste of independence while there remained sweet on his tongue. He’d embraced the freedom offered him, the freedom to live out his life as he chose instead of being a slave to his birthright.
His birthright? No. Not his. Geoffrey’s. Sam’s smile faded and he shied away from that recent hurt. Instead, holding a crystal glass of whisky in his hand, he focused his gaze across the way at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and gave free rein to his wayward thoughts of his unexpected guest.
She was very intelligent. And no innocent. Everything about her said she had her own secrets and harbored those of others, as well. She was also too damned beautiful by half to be anything but dangerous. Never before had Sam seen such green flashing eyes. Never before had he seen hair the color of hers … a rich, deep red shot through with burnished gold. Beyond that, he hadn’t the skill to do her crowning glory justice. Only an artist with an extensive palette of colors stood a chance of that.
Still, Sam tried to imagine her hair unbound, with sunlight glinting off it. The vision shortened his breathing. He slowly shook his head in sensual wonder, recalling now how he’d found her peering out the window. Magnificent. The truth was she excited him beyond measure, even as his senses warned him away from her, telling him that she was danger personified. After all, she had presented herself here using his wife’s name. That told him she was up to no good. Perhaps she was an opportunist bent on extracting money from him for her silence. Maybe somehow she knew about his wife and what he’d done.
Sam frowned. Who was she really, this woman ensconced upstairs in the rooms next to his? Not for the first time since he’d come downstairs did Sam remind himself that it was the specious story behind the American’s appearance here that deserved his attention. And not her womanly attributes … which she indeed had in good measure. Very good measure. Not too tall but shapely—not lushly so, slender yet curvaceous.
There. I’ve done it again. Exasperated with his mind’s masculine though thoroughly understandable wanderings, given the heady subject, Sam exhaled, shaking his head as if that would rid his mind of lascivious thoughts of the woman going by the name of Miss Sarah Margaret Calhoun.
Instant guilt tightened Sam’s chest. That name. Sarah Margaret Calhoun. His wife’s name. He closed his eyes against the memories of her, even pinching the bridge of his nose in hopes of expelling the images in his mind. Poor Sarah. You left me no choice but to do what I did, what I had to do.
When that old and familiar ache threatened to tear at him, Sam muttered a curse and sipped at the strong spirits in his glass, concentrating on the whisky’s pleasant burn as it slid down his throat and warmed his stomach. He glanced at the ornate shelf clock atop the mantel over the fireplace, noted how much time had elapsed … and smiled his grudging respect. So the American woman thinks to keep the British duke waiting.
Every tick of the clock past the one-hour deadline he’d given her further raised Sam’s ire. Not so much because she’d defied him, but because she’d given him too much time to think—and mostly about her. Sam narrowed his eyes, recalling how he’d first found her. Her slender back had been turned to him and he had not yet seen her face. Even so, a shock of numbing force had traveled through him, leaving him speechless. And then, when he’d spoken to her and she’d turned around, his breath had damned near left him.
He’d known in that instant that this woman would be his undoing. Or perhaps she would save him.
That thought had Sam tensing. Save me from what? he demanded to know of tormentors unseen. I’m not lost. I know exactly where I am. Yes, he knew—in his brother’s house and bearing his brother’s title and carrying his brother’s responsibilities. Sam clenched his jaw. What a turn his life had taken. First, and because of Sarah, he’d lost everything in America that he’d been working so hard to achieve. Then he’d had to abandon America and Sarah altogether because of his brother’s death. In essence, he’d been forced to walk away from life as he had chosen to live it to come back here to a life he’d never wanted.
Grimacing, Sam closed the mental door on that path. He’d already traveled it until it was worn with worrisome ruts. There was nothing he could do about what had happened in America, so this brooding was getting him nowhere. Impatient now, he marked the present time yet again and frowned. Has the damned clock stopped? The hands didn’t appear to have moved since the last time he’d looked at them.
Well, of course they hadn’t, he chastised himself. He’d only just glanced its way a few seconds ago. And i
n the woman’s defense, Sam now argued with himself, little more than the allotted hour had passed. Still, patience and excuses be damned. His muscles bunched as if urging him to jump up, storm out of the study, charge up the magnificent sweep of stairs to the third floor, drag his uninvited guest out of her room and back down here to his study—
And then what? he asked of himself.
Why, exact some answers from her, of course. Sam tried to convince himself that the only reason he didn’t act accordingly and accost his guest was because such behavior would hardly be worthy of a duke. A scoffing chuckle put the lie to his caring how it would seem. He didn’t give a damn. But such a scene would upset his staff. And this irony amused Sam. His own servants were more expectant of proper behavior on his part than he was. So, that being true, and the proprieties being what they were, he would sit here and wait.
Sam narrowed his eyes … he didn’t wait well. And a certain American woman was about to find that out if she didn’t put in an appearance soon. He didn’t know whether to applaud the very striking Miss Calhoun—if that was really her name, and he still had his doubts—for her pluck or to berate her for being so headstrong. A grin toyed with the edges of his lips. Probably applaud.
Sighing, forcing himself to relax, Sam looked about, finally settling his gaze on his desktop, or more exactly on the cluttered stacks of papers under his nose. He knew that he should be using this time to go over the accounts and contracts that needed his attention. Earlier he’d abandoned these same onerous obligations for the simple delights of a rainy day out in the horse barn. Well, he hadn’t gotten far, had he? Here he was right back where he’d started and here his obligations were, dutifully awaiting him.
The Marriage Masquerade Page 6