“Yes.” And he assumed she would take his side. He had done nothing wrong to his way of thinking.
“You are his son, Adrian,” she said, meeting his gaze. “It is your duty and your birthright to honor him.”
“Honor him?” he said in disbelief. “That old—”
“It is what you were born to,” she said gently. “He cannot disinherit you. It’s time to put your personal feelings aside.”
“Is that right?” He stepped into her small frame, a tactic, he knew quite well, that was usually distracting. “Scarfield told me for years I was born of a whore and that I wasn’t his. Do you expect me to put aside years of abuse?”
“Let him make amends, that’s all, and then you can decide. At least you can hear him out.”
“Why should I?” he challenged her.
“Have you ever considered what would happen to England if all our blooded aristocrats simply decided to abdicate?”
“I despise him,” he admitted, still waiting for her to agree his enmity was justified.
She vented a sigh. “No matter how bitter your feelings, you have to face him. For your sake even more than his.”
“Don’t tell me what I feel or what I must face,” he said, raising his brow. “Just help me.”
“I’m not sure how.”
“Neither am I. But there you have it, Emma,” he said, pressing his forehead to hers. “This all proves I need—”
She laughed. “What?”
“A wife. Perhaps what I need is—a wife.”
God help him. Where that notion had sprung from he could not say, but all of a sudden it made sense.
“A wife,” she said, shaking her head. “I couldn’t agree more. Yes, you do. A duke definitely needs a wife.”
They both heard the quiet knock upon the door at the same instant. Adrian swiftly moved aside while Emma returned to her chair, calling out, “Yes. Who is it?”
“It’s Charlotte. May I see you a moment?”
Emma bit her lip, glancing up guiltily at Adrian. He gestured to the side door behind the desk that gave into a private corridor. She nodded in obvious relief as he made a discreet escape.
She did her best to behave in her usual manner as she unlocked the door to admit her cousin. At first Charlotte seemed too agitated to notice anything amiss.
She prayed her cousin would not hear Adrian’s footsteps fading away in the anteroom corridor.
“What is it, Charlotte?” she asked in concern.
“Why did you lock—oh, never mind.” Charlotte glanced around the library. “It’s her. Lady Clipstone is here and demanding to see you. At this hour, without invitation or forewarning. Hamm did his best to send her away, but I thought it imperative you should know.”
Her. Her enemy. Battle flames burst to life in Emma’s heart.
Ever a Boscastle at the ready to defend her field, she straightened her back. No wonder Charlotte looked flustered. There was only one woman in London with the effrontery, with the instinct, to arrive in the wake of Emma’s personal dilemma and use it to devious advantage.
“Where is she?” she asked tersely.
“The formal drawing room. I served her tea.”
“From the best china?”
“Naturally.”
Emma gave her an approving pat and charged forth to face her rival. She held high hopes for the future of young Charlotte, whose perception and reticence had thus far protected her from their scandalous ancestry. It remained for Emma to demonstrate by example how a proper gentlewoman should defend herself without sinking to low behavior.
Hypocrite, a small voice taunted her as she strode briskly down the hall. What sort of example did you set the other night? For that matter, what unspeakable transgression were you tempted to commit only a few minutes before Charlotte interrupted?
The possibilities, however intriguing, did not bear contemplation.
Not that she was in a frame of mind to ponder the ramifications of a secret romance. Her temper flared the moment she set her eyes upon the trim, fashionably cloaked brunette awaiting her in the drawing room. She paused for a moment to admire the adorable straw hat with a jaunty ostrich feather that gave Lady Clipstone a certain piquant air.
Alice Clipstone. Oh, how her very existence taunted Emma.
It went without saying that neither woman allowed her hostility to show. Indeed, they might have been two long-lost relatives reunited at a family affair. They exclaimed over how well the other looked. They inquired after the health of their loved ones—as if they had not been figuratively at each other’s throats for months.
“May I offer you more tea?” Emma inquired when the initial period of pretense drew to its inevitable end.
“Heavens, no,” Lady Clipstone replied. “I shouldn’t take you from instruction, having so rudely arrived without announcement. Or have you canceled lessons for the day? I shouldn’t blame you what with all the recent…excitement.”
Emma’s nostrils narrowed. Ah. There it was. The first cut. A rapier tip dipped in arsenic.
The scented, high-buttoned gloves had come off. It appeared that for Alice, at least, all pretense of gentility would be abandoned for this private moment. Emma felt the calmer for sensing her adversary’s lapse into antagonism. Alice had never been able to graciously accept that Emma’s academy drew more applicants than she could accommodate and that she, the usurper, had to make do with those her rival rejected.
“There are always classes,” she said with a negligent shrug. “One studies the social graces from dawn until dinner. Charlotte, as you know, is well qualified to instruct, and I have employed the re-doubtable Miss Peppertree. Right now she and the girls are in the library enjoying a sketching lesson with Lady Dalrymple.”
Alice’s eyes lit up. “Hermia? You’d trust those tender minds to a—”
“A what?” Emma said in an ice-edged voice.
“Well, to a woman who paints unclad aristocrats for public consumption,” Alice said with a sly pause. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t avidly sketching a certain duke’s heir as we speak.”
A guilty flush stole into Emma’s face. There was the rub her rival had been waiting for. Adrian and the incident at the wedding party. It might conceivably have sunk to the bottom of the scandal broth in a month or two, had Emma immediately placed as much distance possible between herself and her outrageous defender.
Still, Alice knew nothing of that indiscretion—Emma would be forced into exile alongside an even more infamous dictator before she would allow the truth to be known. “If Lord Wolverton wishes his portrait painted, then I…I am—”
She broke off.
A sense of foreboding stole over her at Alice’s sudden, enrapt silence. In trepidation she turned to see what had so captured the woman’s attention.
Some furtive movement at the window. Her brother Heath—and Adrian, his handsome, broad-shouldered figure a silhouette against the dying sunlight. For a surprising moment Emma’s throat constricted in regret. He was fully dressed in a heavy charcoal-gray coat and black silk hat. As if, well, from what one could deduce from his dashing shadow as he walked past her sight, he were leaving.
Wasn’t that what he’d been telling her? Both of them knew it was for the best. A man of his talents could take care of himself, but—
She forced her gaze back to Alice, only to find the woman studying her in brittle curiosity. “What were you about to say, Lady Lyons?” she inquired in an innocent tone.
Emma would not allow herself to be unsettled by her opponent. “Actually, my dear, I was about to ask what brought you here this late in the day.”
Uninvited. Unaccompanied, too, unless that surly old footman Emma had spotted lingering in the entry hall meant to pass as a companion.
“Surely we did not have an appointment planned that I had forgotten?” she went on artlessly. “If not, I really must excuse myself. You see, we’re expecting a new arrival, a special student—the Earl of Heydon’s niece. I expect yo
u’ve heard of her.” Emma paused. “I believe her bags have already arrived.”
“Hasn’t everyone heard of Lord Heydon?” Alice asked. “He once considered offering the academy his sponsorship, didn’t he?”
Emma wavered, reminding herself a lady would end a conversation before it drifted into more dangerous ground. Nor would she keep stealing peeps out the window at a certain beautiful rogue. “He has been gracious enough to consider us, yes. As for—”
“Goodness,” Alice said, clapping one hand to her cheek. “What a featherbrain I am. That’s the reason I’ve come.”
Emma swallowed over the knot of apprehension that tightened inside her. “The earl sent you?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Alice gathered her gloves and reticule from the table. “His secretary advised me to collect Lady Coralie’s baggage. It seems there’s been a misunderstanding and it was delivered here by error.”
Emma watched Adrian vanish around the corner into the garden. “What sort of misunderstanding?” she asked in a stiff voice, forcing her attention back to Alice.
“Lady Coralie won’t be attending your academy after all, my dear. It appears her uncle has changed his mind about her education. I thought I should see you in person to explain on her behalf, and to pick up her belongings.”
Emma struggled against an ungentle impulse to pluck Alice’s adorable hat from her head by its feather. “She’s changed her mind?” she asked lightly.
Alice sighed with unconvincing regret. “I am sorry if this inconveniences you—I do hope you weren’t counting on her funds?”
Emma managed a shrug of insouciance, rising to her feet. “Of course not. Shall I instruct Hamm to help you out with Lady Coralie’s luggage? I assume you still have not been able to afford a footman yet…”
Alice virtually breathed fire from her nostrils. “I employ two of them, and intend to take on another two soon.”
“Shall I hire a dogcart for the two of you or will you be walking back across town?”
“I have a new vehicle, in fact,” Alice said, standing to stare directly at Emma. “I bought it with—”
A trill of delighted giggles from the garden interrupted Alice’s coup de grace. Emma could not decide whether she appreciated the timely outburst or not. One more word from her nemesis, and she would indeed have been provoked to do something nasty enough to make the morning papers.
As luck would have it, however, the disturbance in the garden, a scandal in the making of its own, absorbed her full attention. Adrian stood poised on the steps of the small summerhouse, his coat slung over one well-built shoulder, his hat at his feet. His grin, although not directed in Emma’s direction, for she doubted he could see her at all, nonetheless, took her off balance. He was a deity with a dozen female admirers at his feet.
Was he posing for Lady Dalrymple’s infamous sketches? Oh, how…how—
“Is that Lord Wolverton?” Alice asked breathlessly from behind her.
Emma drew the drapes tightly together and spun on her heel. “Do you think you should leave your school unattended, Lady Clipstone?” she said crisply. “I for one must return to my duties.”
Alice’s gaze drifted back toward the darkened window. “Indeed,” she murmured. “You have your hands quite full, by the look of him.”
Adrian was not sure himself how he had ended up posing for one of Lady Dalrymple’s sketches. He had merely been waiting outside with Heath, discussing his plans. He did know, however, that he felt quite absurd, especially with Heath watching in amusement from the garden bench. How many times had his friend Dominic made jokes about the outrageous sketch of Heath Boscastle’s manhood that had ended up on the streets and in the salons of London?
Well, Adrian wasn’t removing his pantaloons for any of the females sketching him in the garden. He’d had a deuced hard time refusing Lady Dalrymple at all. No matter what abhorrent violence had defined his professional years, he harbored a strange weakness for sweet old ladies and uncouth little children. His grandmother had spoiled him and his siblings until two weeks before her death. He wondered now whether Lady Dalrymple had reminded him of his beloved nana. Had his grandmama’s eyes twinkled at him with such irresistible wickedness? He suspected they had.
“Do you mind turning at the trunk a little and arching your back?” Lady Dalrymple asked in her quavery, angelic voice, then struck a classical pose to demonstrate.
He frowned down into her pleasant face. “Excuse me?”
“As if you were engaged in some labor that required every ounce of your strength,” she explained with an evasive flutter of her wrist. “Oh, dear. Pretend you’re lifting a heavy load.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Coal. Bricks. Whatever makes those marvelous muscles work.”
He glanced past her to his host, Heath, who, by this point, had covered his offensive grin with his hand. For Adrian, that insult coupled with the startled look on Emma’s face as she stood at the window before hurriedly closing the drapes, warned him he had walked into a very wicked trap indeed.
And here he’d thought Lady Dalrymple to be a sweet, harmless scatterbrain. “Exactly what manner of sketch is it that you have in mind?” he asked, his hand planted on his left hip.
She smiled up at him over her easel. “Hercules,” she murmured. “We have yet to add him to our Deity Collection. You don’t object, do you?”
“Object?” he echoed as Heath slithered farther down the bench in a paroxysm of suppressed laughter. “Well, I’m not entirely sure—what exactly is the Deity Collection, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“All the proceeds go to charity,” Hermia assured him.
“Hercules? He wasn’t a deity, was he?”
“Don’t move,” she muttered. “The light won’t last long as it is, and my knees feel a storm moving in. Hercules became a deity after he died. Could you do me a favor?”
She had that naughty twinkle in her eye again. “That all depends, Lady Dalrymple. What is it?”
“Do you mind pretending you’re wrestling a lion?”
His forehead creased. “Wrestling a lion?”
Miss Butterfield raised her pencil above her head. “I say, Lady Dalrymple, I think he’s supposed to be naked in this labor. At least that’s how he looked in the museum.”
Adrian glanced up in alarm. Heath was practically rolling on the ground. “I hope you’re talking about the lion, and not me.”
“Not you,” Lady Dalrymple said with a reprimanding smile. “Hercules—Lydia, do fetch my cloak for his lordship to use as a prop.”
Lydia ran back into the house and breathlessly returned a minute later with Hermia’s heavy gold velvet cloak. She held it up to Adrian, who took it in his hands with a snort of resignation.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked Lady Dalrymple.
“Wrestle with it,” she said.
He twisted it around his wrist, tossed it into the air, and caught it. “Like that?”
Her mouth thinned. “One doesn’t wrestle a Nemean Lion as if it were an orange at a country fair, does one?”
Adrian stared her in the eye. “I don’t know, but I am developing a Herculean headache. May I please get down?”
“In one moment,” she replied, unruffled. “Do be patient, Hercules.”
It was at this point, with all the girls of the academy avidly sketching, and Emma hiding behind the drapes, that Adrian decided enough was enough. Of course extricating himself from the situation was another matter. Every time he attempted to move, Hermia gave him a look that reminded him of his grandmother. And he stayed.
Obviously, Heath had no intention of intervening, and as there was no telling how long Hermia would hold him, Adrian was debating making an unheroic if desperate escape when Charlotte Boscastle appeared in the garden.
“It’s time for deportment, everyone!”
The girls abandoned their sketches with sighs of regret and awkward curtsies in Adrian’s direction. For a moment
he could not figure out who the deuce the lot of them were curtsying at. He chuckled when he realized it was him. Relieved, he stepped down onto the grass, glancing past Charlotte to the house. Emma waited at the door to gather her flock.
Adrian gazed at her delicate profile.
She seemed so sure of herself, too self-assured to appeal to most men, but her strong presence rather appealed to Adrian. She wasn’t one to mince words. He could trust whatever she said, even if he might not like it. And yet she still managed to carry herself like a lady should with a natural grace and regard for others.
He glanced around, suddenly realizing that both Charlotte and Heath were watching him with un-abashed interest. “Well, that was an unplanned diversion,” he said, turning his head so that he would not be tempted to stare again. “I hope I do not discover my likeness printed all over town tomorrow.”
Charlotte’s blue eyes danced with laughter. “Take heart. All monies collected are distributed to London charities.”
“Do you mean someone would actually pay to have a sketch of me?” Adrian asked, grinning.
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” Heath strolled past him toward the house. “Your driver is here, by the way. If you’d care to stay for supper, I’ll have him wait.”
Well, that was pointed, but polite, and Adrian knew he’d more than worn out his welcome. “I’m going. Thank you, anyway. In fact, thank you for all that you’ve done.”
“You’re more than welcome, but—You are coming back again, aren’t you? I’ll wager Hermia will pester you to finish wrestling that lion.”
He hesitated. He could hear Emma informing one of the girls she’d dropped her pencils. “Of course, I’ll come back,” he said vaguely. “Soon.”
Heath studied him with a thoughtful smile. “A good friend is always welcome in my house.”
A good friend. Adrian nodded, wondering whether it was his own guilt or Heath’s intuition that gave the invitation a deeper implication.
Chapter Eleven
A chilling rain challenged the integrity of the ancestral pink granite manor house that bordered the Berkshire valley. The voices within were muffled by infrequent claps of thunder. Two sleek deerhounds dozed before a roaring applewood fire. A bottle of hearty port and three crystal glasses sat on the Jacobean table that had occupied the same corner two centuries ago.
The Devilish Pleasures of a Duke Page 12