One for the Rogue

by Charis Michaels

  “But what else could he want?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say he wants the same thing that I do. My father’s money.”

  “And the solution is to keep you under lock and key?”

  “I believe he thinks it’s the most prudent way to insinuate himself into my life and Teddy’s life and establish that he is guardian over us.”

  “But you are a grown woman, and a widow to boot. Do you require a guardian? And he’s not related to Teddy at all.”

  “I am a twenty-three-year-old female with no obvious male to oversee my affairs. His Grace would gladly rise to the occasion. Especially if Teddy is in my care. My brother’s mental challenges will mean he is the ward of someone all of his days. If I am that person—which I am determined to be—Ticking is naturally motivated to see himself as my guardian. In this, who do you think will control all of Teddy’s money?”

  “No.” Beau marveled at the thought. “He wouldn’t.”

  She turned the knob on the door and opened it. They were hit with a gust of cold, damp wind. Miss Breedlowe and Teddy trundled out into the fog and down the steps. “He would and he is,” she said. “But not if I can leave the country and make my own money first.”

  “The books. My brother told me you intend to open your father’s publishing company in America.”

  “Well, I don’t know about all that. One step at a time. I’ve come upon a heap of my father’s old books. The titles have sold all they ever will in England, but I believe I can sell the remaining lot in New York.”

  “Quite an ambitious first step.”

  “The first ones always are, I’ve discovered.” With those words she smiled, a sad, earnest smile, and descended the front steps into the icy December afternoon.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The first official etiquette lesson took place one week later, on Beau’s boat, while he fished off the bow.

  Emmaline had arranged the session through Miss Breedlowe, who had informed the viscount of the time and date when she next saw him in the street in Henrietta Place. To Emmaline’s relief, he had not objected (nor had he consented, according to Jocelyn), and she was uncertain that he would cooperate until she found him on the deck of his boat at the appointed time, making repairs.

  “Good day, Lord Rainsleigh,” she called. Her cheerfulness sounded forced, and she bit the inside of her mouth. Keep calm. Deliver the tutorial. Be on your way. This was a transaction, and nothing more. It made no difference what she thought of the viscount—good or bad, attractive or unsavory.

  It only mattered that she paid this debt to his brother.

  He looked up from his work on the deck. “Duchess,” he said. Not a greeting so much as an identification. He returned his attention to his work.

  “Perhaps a review of greetings and polite conversation should be our first order of business,” she called back purposefully. In her head, she thanked God that he hadn’t said, “Bugger off.”

  Still, he was hardly ushering her on board. In fact, he had not even stood.

  She waited.

  His dog plodded over to sniff her hem and wag her tail. Emmaline looked right and left. As before, there were few people on the canal path. Two boys batted a rock with a stick beneath a tree. An old man on the next boat smoked his pipe and read the newspaper.

  It occurred to her that perhaps the viscount chose the canal for privacy. This, she understood. Even now, after easily giving her grooms the slip, she was wary of discovery. She would not be safe for long, standing on the deck in open view of the path.

  With no more greeting or invitation forthcoming, Emmaline patted the dog and picked her way to the spot where the viscount knelt with his tools. He was dressed in buckskins and tall boots, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up his thick, tanned arms. With powerful, efficient movements, he shoved an iron rod deep into a crack on the boat’s deck.

  Emmaline ventured, “Do you intend to . . . make repairs to your boat while we review?”

  The viscount tossed down the iron with a clatter. “No. I intend to fish.”

  “Oh,” she said, watching him shove to his feet and wipe his hands on his trousers.

  He asked, “Do you intend to instruct me while I fish?”

  “I suppose that could be made to work.” She harbored no illusions that he had transformed into an eager student since they’d last met. His consent to abide her was . . . enough.

  She wondered if he regarded their interaction only as something to “abide.” He had not been suggestive with her in the Courtlands’ hallway—not like he had in the alley—but she thought she’d felt an awareness . . . a watchful attention to her face as she spoke, to her hands in her gloves. She had felt him watch her from the window long after they’d trudged down the street.

  Now he seemed determined not to look at her. He led the way to the bow of the boat over a thin strip of deck between the cabin and the railing. The area was so small that Emmaline was forced to hold in her skirts to scoot by.

  “Can you manage?” he called back.

  “A gentleman would extend his hand and kindly offer to assist me,” she said. She was not helpless, but it occurred to her to pack as many kernels of information into this session as she could.

  Teetering only a little, she edged onto the small triangle of a foredeck and dropped her skirts. They immediately expanded to dominate the already small space, and she made a noise of frustration and gathered them up again. “His Grace was adamant that our mourning clothes be as ostentatious as they are dark,” she said.

  “The duke selects your clothing?”

  “He commissioned all of our dresses for full mourning and for half,” she said.

  “All of who?”

  “He has ten daughters, plus his wife and me. Hundreds of pounds in black and gray garments, if you can imagine. I should add here that a gentleman might issue a mild, unspecific compliment to a lady’s appearance but never demand to know who bought her dress.”

  “A mild, unspecific compliment,” he repeated, shaking his head. “And this is effective? Do you enjoy mild, unspecific compliments, Duchess? Because this has not been my experience.” He bent to a tangle of what appeared to be fishing line, poles, and a bucket of bait.

  “Well, I should think I appreciate any well-intentioned compliment.” The back of his shirt pulled across his shoulders as he stretched and untangled the wire. He could not see her, and she allowed herself to watch the play of muscles through the fabric.

  “My experience is that the more specific and vivid a compliment, the more effective. For example . . . ” He stood up and propped a pole and line against the railing. “What if I were to say, Why, Duchess, I see you’ve worn another gray frock. You know, I consider these a vast improvement over the black. But both colors beg the question: what colors do you really favor? When you can wear whatever you want?”

  “That is a not a compliment,” she said.

  “I’m not finished. I would further ask: Do you prefer the whimsy of lace, I wonder? Or the richness of unadorned fabric? Do you favor gold and purple, which would bring out the hazel undertones in your brown eyes, or burgundy and moss green to make your skin glow? Would you choose layers and layers of petticoats or just enough to be decent?” He glanced at her skirt and then took up the hook on the end of the line.

  Emmaline’s mouth fell open just a little. It took a moment for her to formulate a response. “A gentleman would never, ever mention a lady’s petticoats.”

  “Well, that depends on his intended result, doesn’t it?”

  “No. Not if the result is to be simple pleasantness. As it should be.” She cleared her throat. She remembered the late Duke of Ticking’s first compliment to her. I thought you’d be bigger, he had said.

  The viscount told her, “I cannot imagine a single instance when my intention for a compliment was to be pleasant.”

  “What is your intention?”

  “Well, that depends, doesn’t it?” He reached into the bucket and pulled out
a piece of bait and worked it on the hook. “Sometimes it’s to charm. Sometimes to delight. Sometimes it’s to get something I want very badly indeed.” His voice had gone soft and gravely. “Sometimes it is to distract. Many times, it is to . . . compel.”

  What has been your intention for me? The words were on the tip of her tongue, and she barely managed to contain them. Her heart pounded. He was watching her again. His blue eyes casually were on her face as his hands tested the weight of the pole.

  “Lord Rainsleigh,” she managed to say, “are you aware that a viscount may embody the title in many ways?” When she’d organized topics for the lesson, she’d planned to begin with this.

  He sighed and muttered under his breath, “And we’re off.”

  She went on. “You need not be a humorless sort of paragon, or a leader of society, or whatever it is you find distasteful. You may compliment ladies, albeit respectfully. You may fish for sport. You may be a gentleman farmer. Or a traveler who sails the world, like Lord Falcondale. A scholar. A crusader, even.”

  “A sodden lay-about?”

  She chuckled, and before she could stop herself, she said, “Well, my late husband was certainly that.”

  He looked up. She had not organized any personal insights. But he appeared to be listening for once, so she added, “Ticking was believed to be a perfectly respectable duke. But he drank to excess.”

  He turned back to his pole. “Did your parents know he was a drunk before they married you to him?”

  “I cannot say.” She turned away. After the wedding, when she’d discovered the extent of Ticking’s drinking and carrying on, she had wondered this herself. Had her parents understood the union into which they had, for all practical purposes, sold her? Marriage to a man who drank so much he soiled his clothes?

  She glanced at the viscount. “Would your title be more palatable to you if, er, sobriety was not expected? Because truly, it has more to do with the way you behave in front of certain people, in certain places, at certain times of day. Outside of these expectations, you may do whatever you wish. This is how Ticking carried on.” She thought a moment more. “I believe this . . . this duplicity is what my parents did not know. Certainly, it came as a shock to me.”

  He raised his eyebrows, acknowledging what she said, and then cast his fishing line into the canal. They watched the hook and bait sink into the black-green water. After a moment, the viscount said, “I have no wish to behave one way in front of some people and another way for others. There is only one way I can be.”

  Emmaline felt a small, unexpected pulse of admiration at this. Her eyes snapped to his profile. It occurred to her that of course manners did not necessarily equal integrity. Such a simple truth—and one that had become so painfully obvious in the last three years.

  “Good manners do not necessarily mean you are a good person,” she recited. “Rather, bad manners may distract from good qualities. My late husband could charm the doublet off the bishop in church and be falling down drunk by Sunday tea.”

  The viscount pulled his line from the water and grimaced at the bare hook. He pierced a fresh grub and tossed it out again. “Took you to church, did he? Where else did he take you?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your late husband. The duke. I wonder what a man fifty years your senior could possibly have in common with a girl from Liverpool. Where did your interests meet? The theatre? Parties? Opera? Balls?”

  She paused.

  Nowhere, she thought. We had nothing in common.

  But it was not a good use of their time to discuss her arduous marriage to the duke. In fact the abject misery of her marriage was an argument against aristocratic life, which likely the viscount already knew. “The Duke of Ticking has been dead almost as long as we were married. Honestly, I don’t remember.”

  This lie was accompanied by a strong tug on his fishing line. The pole bent, and the viscount widened his stance and yanked, jerking the hook and a small perch from the water. Emmaline sucked in a breath at the sight of the flapping, fighting fish. He swung the line and caught it in his hand, splashing both of them with water. Emmaline laughed and clapped her hands, genuinely impressed. Without thinking, she hopped up to get a closer look. He smiled at her, showing off the shiny, squirming creature, and then he worked the hook from its mouth and tossed it back into the canal.

  “Too small,” he said. “We’ll let him fatten up, and then I’ll try him again in the spring.”

  Emmaline watched the fish arc through the air and then plop into the water.

  “He swam away,” she said.

  Just like I will do. I’ve been cut loose, and now I will swim away.

  “Lord Rainsleigh,” she said, turning to him, “would you mind terribly if, while we worked on your manners, you taught me how to fish?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It occurred to Beau that perhaps Bryson had enlisted this girl not so much to teach him but to test him.

  Would you mind if you taught me to fish?

  As if the fishing ploy hadn’t been the first thing that crossed his mind when she’d settled on the bow of the boat and watched him bait his hook with those big, brown fascinated eyes.

  Instructing any female on the art of practically anything was a tried-and-true method for seduction, one he’d employed countless times.

  Allow me show you how to mount this horse . . . or shoot this rifle . . . or drive this carriage . . . or smoke this cheroot. The opportunities were endless, really, as were his personal conquests as a result. He’d never taught a woman to fish, but it took no imagination to fully comprehend the opportunities—Hold the pole just so; lean into me; cast like this; we’ll work together to pull him in, shall we?—and the subsequent reward.

  But for once in his life, the goal was not his own reward. He’d consented to the lessons because he felt sorry for her. Orphaned and widowed and responsible for a sick brother and battling a mercenary duke? Beau might be careless and selfish, but his heart wasn’t made of ice. On the contrary. He was the very soul of chivalry; everyone said so.

  He’d also asked himself what harm, really, her instruction could do? He’d been angered by his meddlesome brother, not the pretty girl with her book of pretty rules. With the correct attitude, he’d thought, he could endure the lessons while leaving the duchess to feel as if she’d honored her obligation (real or imagined) to Bryson. She wouldn’t actually change his behavior, not really, but it would allow him to look at her, and flirt with her, and enjoy her company. It wasn’t as if he could deny that he wanted to look and flirt and enjoy her. And if they wound up in bed? Well, he would not be stricken with a fit of conscience as he had been in the alley. She was a widow, after all. And she wasn’t as desperate and helpless as he’d first thought. Well, perhaps she was desperate, but she was quite capable. Tenacious and ambitious and very clever. Making love to her would not take advantage so much as . . . entertain her. He’d make devilishly sure of that.

  After he’d accepted this, Beau had enjoyed his first real peace in days—weeks, in fact. He looked down at her now, enjoying the glow of her amber-brown eyes in the winter sun.

  “Learn to fish?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Not every nuanced thing about it. If you could teach me only the basics, it would be like a trade, in a way. Your expertise for mine.”

  Beau thought of all the areas of expertise on which he would rather barter, but he said nothing.

  “I should like to know how to fish,” she was saying. “I’ve made a commitment to educate myself on any skill that I might one day find useful.”

  His expression must have said, Useful for what? because she added, “To be less at the mercy of others. The depth and breadth of my . . . well, my helplessness came as quite shock to me when I found myself widowed, with no parents. I was ill equipped to provide for myself and for Teddy. But no longer. I am determined to take advantage of any opportunity I have to educate myself. I shan’t be helpless again.”

&nbs
p; Beau tried to imagine her fishing for food in order to survive. It was a far-fetched image, but he could respect her desire to be self-sufficient. Most women in her position would have thrown themselves headlong into the business of marrying again. She’d done the opposite, far more difficult thing.

  He held the fishing pole to her. “All right,” he said and explained where to grip the pole, how to keep the tip out of the water, and the motion of casting. She listened carefully, nodding only when she truly understood. Her questions were thoughtful rather than coy. She earnestly wished to learn to fish.

  Through sheer force of will, Beau leaned in only every now and then. It was, perhaps, the first time he had ever endeavored to touch a woman less instead of more. But seducing her was a possibility, not a guarantee. If it came to that, he would not sprint to capitulation; he would savor, meander. Allow her own desire to reveal itself in time. Already, she was satisfyingly flushed. She laughed at every other thing he said. It was a sweet sort of torture, holding himself back—almost as much effort as finding excuses to touch her.

  As for the actual fishing, she caught on quickly, and Beau found himself enjoying the simple pleasure of a morning spent on the cold canal with a beautiful woman. After their hooks were baited and dropped into the water, they fished for a time in silence. When she spoke again, he thought she might comment on the landscape, which was brittle and barren in winter but starkly beautiful in his view.

  Instead, she said, “I don’t mind telling you, Lord Rainsleigh, that your manners do not seem glaringly out of line. It’s more that it’s your . . . bearing.”

  “Ah.” He frowned at the view. “This again.”

  “It was meant to be a compliment.”

  “You said compliments were to be unspecific and pleasant.”

  “Exactly, which mine was. I will now veer from that rule in order to further instruct you.” She spoke to the canal, her pretty profile pale against the black-green water. “It’s not as if you spit when you talk. Or speak out of turn. In fact, your banter with Lady Frinfrock on Saturday bordered on witty and charming. But your attire is wrong, I’m afraid.” She glanced at him, up and then down. He raised one eyebrow. She looked away.