A Duke in the Night

by Kelly Bowen

  “Have you lost something, dearie?”

  August nearly knocked a loose stone off the top of the fence with his elbow, so fast did he shoot to his feet, biting back a muffled curse as a bolt of pain shot through his arm. He wrenched himself around and was presented with a tall, angular woman flanked by a shorter, rounder version of herself. Both had silver hair pulled back neatly from their lined faces, and both had the same pale-gray eyes set above a healthy flush in their cheeks. The taller of the two was wrapped in a faded rose-colored shawl, while the shorter wore a similar garment in a deep green.

  “No.” August’s heart slowed as he straightened his shoulders, and he leaned back against the stone fence. Bloody hell, he hadn’t even heard them, so wrapped up had he been in the scene out on the field. “I haven’t lost anything.” Except, perhaps, his dignity.

  “Have you taken ill?” It was the taller who asked, shifting the basket she held over her arm. “Should we fetch someone for you? Perhaps we should alert Miss Hayward—”

  “No.” It came out a little louder than he would have liked. “There is no need to fetch anyone. I’m perfectly fine.”

  “Are you sure? You were crouched on your hands and knees for some time.” It was said kindly enough, but the shorter woman’s sharp eyes were dancing with poorly concealed humor that let August know she knew exactly what he had been doing.

  “I am quite sure. Thank you for your concern,” he replied curtly. Not that he needed to explain his actions to anyone. Especially these two. He subtly examined the two women further. Their clothes were plain but of fine quality. Sturdy, somewhat battered leather shoes peeked out from just beneath their hems, but there was nothing battered or plain about the emerald brooch pinned at the shoulder of the deep green shawl or the large sapphire on the finger of the taller woman where it rested on the top of a walking stick. “Lady Tabitha and Lady Theodosia, I presume?” The Earl of Rivers’s sisters. The ones who lived out here in Dover.

  “A pleasure, Your Grace,” the taller replied. “But most just call me Tabby. And you can call her Theo.” She gestured at her sister.

  August started at the address. “You know who I am.” He didn’t know if he should be relieved or mortified.

  “Of course, Your Grace. Your clothes are far too fine for you to be a tinker,” Lady Tabitha quipped, doing an admirable job of suppressing her amusement. Her sister wasn’t as successful. “Simple deduction, really.”

  “Well, it might not have been so simple. He might have been an apothecary,” Lady Theo suggested to her sister. “Collecting plants and herbs and whatnot.”

  “True. Or a biologist,” Tabby mused. “Looking for crickets.”

  “Or fossils.”

  “Or perhaps examining animal leavings.”

  Animal leavings? August closed his eyes briefly, wondering if they had forgotten he was still standing there. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Lady Tabitha, Lady Theodosia,” he replied deliberately. No matter the saucy cheek of these two old ducks, he would not be reduced to calling a woman old enough to be his grandmother Tabby. Or Theo. Not even in a middle of a field at the very edge of England.

  Lady Tabitha pulled her shawl a little tighter around her shoulders against the breeze. “Welcome, Your Grace. My brother sent word that you would be staying up at the dower house, evaluating the…livestock.” Her eyes slid past August to the group of students out on the plain, and August had the uncomfortable feeling that she might be laughing at him again.

  “The livestock and the land,” August repeated firmly. “I had just started out when I came across Miss Hayward and her students. I did not wish to be a distraction.” Why was he explaining himself? “I do hope I haven’t put you out of your residence,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the dower house and deliberately changing the subject. “I didn’t think to—”

  Lady Theodosia waved a plump hand to cut him off. “Tabby and I haven’t put ourselves out to pasture quite yet,” she said with a wry chuckle. “My sister and I live in the main house. Where the action is.”

  “The action?”

  “The young ladies of Miss Hayward’s school. We’re so pleased to have her company, and that of her students, every summer.”

  “Special woman, Miss Hayward is,” Lady Tabitha interjected.

  “She is. Makes an old soul feel young again.” Theodosia beamed. “And here they come now.” She was once again looking over August’s shoulder.

  August turned to see that Miss Hayward and her students were indeed returning to Avondale. She was talking animatedly to one of the girls, her hands as expressive as her features. Her face was pink from her walk or the breeze or both, and her hair had again lost its battle with its curl and the wind. The urge to yank the last few pins from the back of it and watch it unfurl down her back was almost overwhelming.

  August had a sudden vision of her sitting on the edge of those cliffs, only this time it was he who was with her. This time it was he who lay back in the grass, drawing her down with him. Baring her until she wore nothing but sunlight and that glorious curtain of fire that tumbled over her shoulders—

  “Miss Hayward, good afternoon,” Lady Tabitha chirped.

  August jerked, trying to haul his thoughts out of the dissolute depths where they had slid.

  “Good afternoon, Tabby, Theo,” Miss Hayward replied, and some of the laughter in her expression disappeared as her gaze settled on him. “Your Grace.”

  “Good afternoon,” he managed.

  Miss Hayward turned back to her students. “Head on up to the house, girls,” she instructed. “I’ll meet you in the library very shortly.”

  August had already braced himself for the irritation he would no doubt find in his sister’s expression. But instead she was deep in conversation with a pretty brunette with an American accent and merely gave him a distracted nod as she passed.

  Huh.

  “How was your walk, ladies?” Miss Hayward asked.

  “Oooh, it was lovely, dearie.” Lady Tabitha beamed. “We found three fossilized urchins and a lovely bivalve specimen on the lower beach. Oh, and we found His Grace. Though he was a little higher up.” She poked the end of her walking stick in his direction, which made August suspect that he measured up rather poorly to a fine urchin specimen.

  Miss Hayward once again turned her attention to August, and he found himself the object of another one of her indecipherable stares. Her eyes skipped down his body, lingering on the bits of grass still stubbornly clinging to the knees of his breeches. He saw her lips thin slightly and a faint crease mar her forehead. But as always, good manners won out, and her expression flattened into one of pleasant neutrality. “You’re up and about early, Your Grace.”

  Early? August scoffed. “It’s midafternoon, Miss Hayward. I’ve never much been one for lying abed when there is work to be done.”

  He saw her brows rise slightly, and she might have flushed, though it was difficult to tell beneath her wind-reddened cheeks. “How commendable,” she said in a way that suggested his particular work this afternoon was anything but.

  August was aware of the sisters’ gaze upon them. “Can you join us for a cup of tea, Your Grace?” Lady Theo asked. “Miss Hayward will be busy with her students, of course, but we’d love the company.”

  “Er, thank you, but no. I have a great deal to get done today. Perhaps another time.” He’d been the object of their entertainment for too long already, and he had no intention of prolonging it. Though he had no one but himself to blame.

  “Of course.” Lady Tabitha shrugged slightly and linked her arm through her sister’s. “Come along, then, Theo. Let us not stand in the way of…important work.”

  August inwardly grimaced.

  “I’ll be right in,” Miss Hayward said. “I just need a quick word with His Grace.”

  The sisters nodded and cheerfully headed off in the direction of the house, moving at a surprisingly swift clip.

  “They walk the beach every day,” Miss Ha
yward said.

  He frowned at her words. The beach? “But that has to be two hundred feet down.”

  “And two hundred feet back up.”

  “Why?” August was aghast.

  “They like to collect fossils. And they tell me the exercise is good for their constitutions.” She stared at him with that unreadable expression he despised. “Is that what you were doing this afternoon, Your Grace? Exercising?”

  “I was checking the calving sheds, if you must know.”

  Miss Hayward made a great show of looking around her. “The calving sheds.”

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes dropped to the knees of his breeches. “Must be a time-consuming task if you have to crawl around on your hands and knees to do so,” she commented with a calm, infuriating logic.

  “I was not crawling around on my hands and knees,” he bit out. That was true. He had been walking until he got to the fence. And then he had been more…crouching.

  She smiled, but it didn’t come anywhere close to her eyes. “If you are going to insist on spying on me, your sister, and the rest of my students, I am going to have to insist you leave.”

  “I was not spying on you.” But it was hard to argue with grass stains.

  “Of course you weren’t.” Her lips turned up in the cynical quirk he remembered so well.

  He went on the offensive, abhorring the accusation. Probably because it was true. “I was out walking when I stumbled upon…whatever the hell you were doing out there in that field. Having the girls lie on their backs in the grass like a bunch of dairymaids about to be tumbled.”

  He hated the words the second they were out of his mouth. Because before they’d disappeared in the long grass, they hadn’t looked like a bunch of maids about to be tumbled; they had looked like a bunch of beautiful young girls laughing in the sun.

  Miss Hayward’s immaculate composure slipped, and fury crossed her face, her eyes flashing and her hands fisting at her sides. “Have a care, Your Grace. That is your sister you are speaking of. And eight other women who don’t deserve such inconsiderate, ill-mannered remarks. Those sort of comments may find you popularity in the back rooms at Boodle’s, but they will not be tolerated here.”

  August ran a hand over his face. Not eight others. Nine. She hadn’t included herself in her defense of her students. What was wrong with him? His job with Miss Hayward was to be charming and personable and get her to open up to him. To get her to trust him. To bloody well like him. And right now he didn’t even like himself.

  “You’re right. That was thoughtless.”

  She blinked.

  “It was just…It wasn’t what I was expecting.”

  “Not what you were expecting?” She still sounded furious, but it looked as if she was fighting for patience. “You may be Lady Anne’s brother and guardian, but that does not give you the right to pass judgment on something you don’t understand.”

  “I saw my sister laughing.” That was not what he had intended to say. But this woman seemed to provoke him into fits of honesty that were as terrifying as they were liberating. Given his reason for being here in the first place, the irony was not lost on him.

  Miss Hayward stilled and then blew out a long breath. She looked away from him and gazed out over the expanse of the sea. “Do you know why I bring them out here?”

  August remained silent.

  “To take them out of their element and put them in mine.” She ran her fingers lightly along the top of the stone fence.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  She laughed softly, still looking out over the glittering expanse of water. “You, Your Grace, should understand more than anyone, I should think. Your worth in society is measured by your title. Yet I would argue that your true merit as an individual should come not from where and to whom you were born, but from what you did with the time between then and now.”

  Miss Hayward fell silent, and August simply watched the play of emotion that creased her forehead and brought a pensive aura to her being. Something strange was pulsing through him, a reckless feeling of acknowledgment that this woman saw him. Saw the very thing that drove him and haunted him at the same time.

  She finally looked back at him, her eyes searching his. “In this class I have girls who call dukes and earls family. I have girls who are daughters of bankers and miners and factory owners, one of whom isn’t even English.” Her beautiful lips twisted. “You tell me how this group of women would be encouraged to interact in a society ballroom.”

  He knew the answer because he had lived it. He had recovered his father’s fortune and then desperately tried to repair his family’s good name within the ranks of society. The debacle that had led him to dare Miss Hayward to dance had been part of that desperation. But it had been damn near impossible until the title of Holloway had unexpectedly fallen onto his shoulders.

  “They wouldn’t.” She was right. He did know that better than anyone.

  Miss Hayward inclined her head and seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “For the duration of my program, I wish my students to have the chance to be recognized for their own merit. Not an accident of birth or the ledger totals at the bottom of their family’s quarterly earnings statement. Not the type of lace used to trim their ball gown or the appearance of their hair. Not the label that society gives them because they come with a preconceived, baseless checklist of traits that has been ruled either acceptable or unacceptable.”

  August stared at her. It sounded ridiculous. Preposterous, even, because that simply wasn’t how the world worked. Yet he had never, in all his years, seen Anne as carefree and as joyous as she had been sitting in a field of wildflowers.

  Nor had he ever seen Miss Hayward as unguarded as she had been. As she was now.

  And he realized that it was because she had lived it too. She had been allowed to exist along the fringes of society just like him, tolerated but not welcomed. But unlike him, she had not inherited a duchy.

  “Is that what you wanted? To be measured by your merit?”

  She gave him a long look. “Don’t you?”

  “I know who I am. And I care very little for the opinions of others.”

  She made a noise in her throat. “Spoken like a man and a duke.”

  August scowled. “That’s not fair.”

  Miss Hayward didn’t look away from him. “It isn’t, is it?” she asked, and now there was an edge to her words.

  August tapped his fingers on the top of the stone. “Are you trying to be obtuse on purpose?”

  “Not at all. I’m trying to make you consider, just for a moment, what it might be like to not be a duke, or even a man, in a world that gives precedence and value to both of those things over all else. Consider what it’s like to navigate—” Miss Hayward stopped suddenly and clamped her lips together.

  The reckless passion and heat that had been in her voice were making it impossible for him to look away. This was the Clara Hayward he had never forgotten.

  “My apologies, Your Grace,” she said, looking down. “This is not at all a suitable conversation for—”

  “Stop apologizing.” He reached out and tipped her chin up, forcing her eyes back to his. It was hard to read what was in those liquid brown depths, but he wasn’t going to let her retreat behind the composure she wore like a cloak.

  He felt her breath on his wrist as she exhaled. Very slowly she reached up and drew his hand away from her face, though he didn’t let her withdraw her fingers from his. Her hand stayed trapped in his, hidden by her skirts. He had let her go once before, and he wasn’t ready to let her go again.

  She was shaking her head. “Your Grace—”

  “Pretend I am not a duke,” he said impulsively. “Pretend, just for a moment, that I am a young idiot again, who needs at least part of the world explained to him.”

  “You were never an idiot,” she said, with a weak smile.

  “Debatable.” His fingers tightened on hers, and she made no move to withdr
aw her hand.

  “Well, you were the only man who ever asked me to dance who wasn’t doing it as a favor to my father.” She said it wryly.

  “Then I would suggest that proves I’m a bloody genius, and the rest of the lot are all bottleheads.” He kept his words light even as an intense, possessive anger rose on her behalf.

  She sniffed, though it sounded a little like a chuckle.

  “Please finish your thoughts, Miss Hayward.”

  She drew in another deep breath and let it out slowly. “Very well. I was going to ask you to consider what it’s like to navigate your world in my shoes. Or, more importantly, in those of your sister.”

  August remained silent, waiting for her to continue.

  “As the sister to a duke, she must be gracious and beautiful, though not so much that she might inspire envy or jealousy. She should be firm, decisive, and capable, but only in those areas that you or her future husband allow her to be. She should not show an unattractive interest in subjects that have been deemed unladylike or beyond her comprehension. Which isn’t to say she shouldn’t be intelligent. Just so long as she doesn’t accidentally prove her intellect superior to that of the gentleman seated on her right at the dinner table.”

  August could feel his nostrils flare.

  “Ah. You’re angry.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re crushing my fingers.”

  He relaxed his grip. “Sorry.”

  “None of what I said was meant as a criticism of you, Your Grace.”

  “It sounded like it.”

  Miss Hayward sighed, sounding defeated. “That was not my intention.” She turned away from him slightly in the direction of the house. “I should get back to my students.”

  “Not yet.” August didn’t relinquish his grip on her hand. “What was?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your intention. What was it, if not to censure?”

  “What is your greatest passion, Your Grace?” she asked suddenly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What is it that gives you the most joy out of life? The thing that gets you out of bed every morning?”