Duke Du Jour

by Petie McCarty

  Bullen swallowed hard a second time. “You know…dissolute.”

  Jared stared in shock. Mostly because Bullen knew the word. Nineteenth-century servants were not all that well educated. He also felt insulted, though common sense told him no, since he wasn’t really the seventh Duke of Reston. He thought of the smirk on Seven’s face in Jared’s portrait gallery.

  “Terribly dissolute?”

  Bullen blinked. “Pretty much.”

  “Ye’re a rake and a drunk,” Heddy added helpfully.

  He glowered at her.

  “Well, ye are. Gossip is ye’ve slept wi’ half the married ladies in London and all the widows. Not yer fault though. Ye’ve a face like an angel,” she offered indulgently, “so the ladies flock to ye.”

  Bullen nodded. “You’re a looker, and you know it.” The man finally made eye contact and looked sad about his divulgence.

  Bloody hell. I am an arrogant, lecherous drunk, and I have only just arrived.

  “Do you always speak so openly to your duke?”

  Bullen looked as though Jared had just planted him a facer.

  Heddy answered for him. “Ye two grew up together, Master Jared. The old duke even let Bullen be tutored wi’ ye till ye went off to Eton. Ye always treated Bullen as more friend than servant. Ye even made him yer stable master. Things is different wi’ yer people out here in the country. Not like yer hoity-toity servants back in London.”

  “Hoity-toity, are they? I cannot remember.” He rubbed his head for effect.

  “Ye poor dear.” Heddy dunked the cloth and wrung it out. She came toward him. “Ye should lie back down, Master Jared.”

  He held up a hand. “I am fine. I just need your help remembering.” To Bullen, he said, “I thought you said my visitor would be Lady Wilder if I didn’t go to see her first.”

  Heddy gasped and glared at Bullen, who looked sheepish.

  “What?” Jared stared at his housekeeper.

  “She’s a fast one, that lady,” Heddy said, making lady sound like a curse word.

  He wanted to ask if Lady Wilder was a looker, too. Fast was not necessarily a bad thing. He settled for “Does she come here often?”

  “No!” Heddy gasped again. “And it’s not proper for her to come here atall. Ladies do not do that sort of thing.

  “Right.” If he was to be stuck here for any length of time, he would have to bone up on societal rules in the Georgian era.

  “Of course she does, bein’ a widow and all,” Heddy lumbered on.

  “A widow, you say.”

  “Aye. She was married to the Baron Wilder for only a year before he passed.” Heddy gave Bullen a pointed look as though he should explain.

  “Ahem.” The stable master cleared his throat. “Some say she wore him out, if you will.”

  Jared felt his brows rise to his hairline.

  “Wilder was thirty years her senior,” Bullen quickly added as though that explained everything.

  He could only stare. Things were getting curiouser and curiouser.

  “You always try to head her off at the pass,” Bullen offered, “which is why I brought your curricle round.”

  His curricle. He bloody well intended to try out that cart. Then he remembered he had no idea how to drive a curricle. It could not be too much different from the sulkies he raced at Bertleven’s stables. If he was right, he would remember to thank Bertleven for his love of trotters when Jared returned to the future.

  “I may need your help there, too, Bullen.” He tapped his forehead.

  Bullen nodded knowingly. Thank God, these people knew something of memory loss.

  A knock sounded at the bedchamber door.

  Jared pulled himself to his feet and fought off another bout of dizziness. “Enter.”

  His butler appeared in the doorway.

  “Chapson,” Heddy hissed from behind Jared, and he gave her a slight nod.

  “An uppity one,” she whispered low enough only Jared could hear her, and he stifled a grin. “We call him Chappy.”

  “You have a guest, Your Grace,” the barrel-chested Chapson proclaimed in a sonorous tone. “I have placed her in the morning room.”

  Jared raised his brows in question.

  “Lady Wilder.”

  “Bloody hell! She’s beaten Lady Ariana here,” Bullen said and headed for the door. “You’re on your own.”

  Jared followed in his wake, and Chapson eyed him up and down.

  “What?”

  “Your attire, Your Grace?”

  “Bullen, wait!” Jared called. “Where’s my valet?”

  “I don’t know,” Bullen called back, halfway to the stairs. “London maybe?”

  Jared glanced at Heddy.

  She looked horrified. “Don’t look at me! I haven’t dressed ye in over twenty years.”

  “I don’t want your assistance,” Jared groused. “Where are my clothes?”

  “Oh.” She pointed at a doorway to the far right of the bed. “Yer dressing room and wash room are through there. And all yer clothes.”

  He stalked past an incredulous Chapson, pulled the door wide, and stepped into a large square chamber that had been renovated into a master bath decades before the now-breathing Jared’s birth.

  A claw-footed white porcelain tub—too small for him to recline—and a washstand perched along one wall. The doors stood open on the twin walk-in closets he remembered. He stuck his head in the doorway of the first closet and found the necessary, more like a chamber pot with a seat. The second closet bore a row of large brass hooks down the left wall, each bearing a jacket of blue-gray or black, an enormous armoire against the back wall, and floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with folded clothes covered the right wall. A row of boots lined up like soldiers beneath the jackets. He pulled down a neatly folded pair of close-fitting wool pants shaped to the leg—pantaloons in this period—and shook them out.

  He grimaced. No way would he try to squeeze into these for the first time with a crowd waiting outside. To say nothing of finding a waistcoat, shirt, and jacket that actually fit. He needed to get downstairs, get rid of his company, get back to the fountain, and return home as speedily as possible.

  “Devil take it,” he muttered and tossed the breeches on the chair inside the closet and stalked back to the bedchamber, where Heddy thankfully held out his own shoes and socks. She eyed them curiously. No time for history lessons. Chapson had already left, hopefully to attend the infamous Lady Wilder.

  Jared donned his footwear and headed for the door. He noticed Bullen had waited at the landing.

  “Are you coming?” Jared asked him, as he started down the stairs.

  His stable master grinned wide. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  ****

  Lady Ariana Hart steered her high-perch phaeton through the gates at Haverly Manor and sped down the mile-long drive to the ducal mansion.

  Jared was safe. He had not perished at Waterloo.

  Perched on the seat next to her, the black Irish wolfhound turned his head. She quickly maneuvered up a hand. “No licks,” she commanded.

  One lick from those massive and now-slobbering-in-the-wind chops could dampen the whole side of her new bonnet and any exposed skin or hair. Nor did she want slobber spots on her new carriage dress, this one of rich green velvet, a nod to the still chilly spring temperatures in May.

  Though Jared would never notice, she wanted to look her best—wanted him to see what he had passed up. Her handsome neighbor had never once noticed her attire, and Ariana felt certain he had never looked at her as a woman, but rather as the neighbor girl, continually in scrapes and requiring his rescue.

  She doubted she would ever forget the day she had kidnapped one of Jared’s horses to go riding. If she closed her eyes, she could still feel the thrumming hooves of the great stallion, Hammer, as she clung to his back for dear life.

  The formidable stallion raced across the open fields south of Haverly Manor and on to the wide meadow bordering the lake between H
averly and Wakefield Manors. No matter how hard Ari pulled on the reins, she could not slow the great animal down. She stared with horror at the rapidly approaching woods that lined the far side of the lake and watched her life pass before her eyes.

  She had been stupid and foolish for wanting to show off her newfound riding ability for Jared. Sidesaddle on one of his enormous hunters? What had she been thinking? Seven years her senior, Jared was easily the best equestrian in the county, maybe all of England, and she had been riding for but a few months. Her escapade had only proved how little riding ability, and sense, she possessed.

  “I forbid you to learn to ride, Ariana,” her father had ordered after her mother Nora died in a riding accident when Ari was only seven years old. Nora had jumped a hedge and died instantly when she fell from her mount and broke her neck. At the age of fourteen and desperate to learn to ride, Ari had slunk off to Haverly and lied to Jared, claiming her father had neither the time nor the patience to teach her to ride. Jared had taken pity on his little neighbor and agreed to teach her, and Ari had reveled in the hours spent alone in his company.

  Hammer swiftly approached the wood line and the end of Ari’s short life. She had disobeyed her father, and now she would pay the price. She would surely be stripped from the stallion’s back as he tore through the trees ahead. She would fall and break her neck as her mother had done, and her father would blame Jared who had not even been present to witness her glory in mounting and riding his dangerous stallion. Jared would no doubt have forbidden her to do so.

  Thundering hooves echoed behind her, but she was afraid to turn around and lose her seat for that would bring immediate death beneath Hammer’s powerful hooves.

  “Ari, kick your boot free of the stirrup!” Jared yelled from alongside her.

  She had never been so glad to hear his shout, and she instantly obeyed. With her boot free, an arm snaked about her waist and jerked her from the stallion’s back. She clung to her rescuer, and when Jared’s mount slowed, she dared to glance up and saw white-hot fury consuming his expression. He soundly berated her for risking both her and Hammer’s lives with her shoddy riding, then loudly pointed out that Hammer could have stepped in a hole and broken his leg during her ill-conceived, breakneck ride across the meadow.

  She nodded her head at the well-deserved chastisement, but his words flew in one ear and out the other for her heart swelled at her romantic rescue. She only adored Jared more for having saved her life.

  What a fool she had been!

  Ari drew in a deep breath and tilted her cheeks into the wind. Now older and wiser, she could see there had been nothing romantic about the rescue, and Jared had probably been more worried about his stallion at the time, but she intended to make him notice her today. Only now, it would be Ari ignoring Jared. He no longer maintained a place on her pedestal. No longer an innocent adolescent girl, she knew him for what he was—a rake and a wastrel who cared more for his womanizing and gaming forays than for his tenants or the nearby villagers of Dolan. Gossip proclaimed Haverly to be in poor condition and Reston funds to be lacking. Everyone knew where the Reston funds had gone, too.

  After being given up for dead at Waterloo, Jared had made a miraculous return home and been granted a second chance. Everyone would wait to see whether he intended to waste it.

  “You never gave up. Did you, Harry?” She nudged the giant black wolfhound with her shoulder and dodged his reflexive tongue.

  When Jared had departed to fight alongside Wellington, Bullen had brought Harry to Wakefield Manor along with a note. Jared had not even bothered to come himself. He had sent the note with his stable master and asked Ari to look after his dog because he knew she would take better care of Harry than anybody else. That was the extent of the note, except for a formal regards scrawled at the bottom of the parchment along with his signature—Jared Langley. As though another Jared would have asked her to care for his hound.

  No apology for what he had done to her at Viscount Barwood’s ball weeks earlier, no explanation for his sudden compulsion to fight for king and country, and especially no good-bye.

  She had wanted to hate him after Barwood’s ball, but she no longer thought him worthy of the effort. That long ago night, he had taken a nosedive off the pedestal on which she had placed him during her adolescent years, and he belonged right where he had fallen. In the dust. At twenty-three, she was older and wiser and only visiting Jared today to return his dog.

  Ari had all but swooned when her father’s head groom Barker had brought the news of Jared’s return not a half hour earlier. Barker had gone to consult Haverly’s stable master about the colic one of Wakefield’s horses had suffered, and Bullen had divulged the news. The groom came straight away to tell her.

  She hated giving Harry back. She had grown attached to the big dog in the two years of Jared’s absence, but she had managed to calm herself, change to her best green-velvet carriage dress, and hop in her high-perch phaeton with Harry, who had served her well as the required chaperone for a single maid traveling alone about the county. No man could get within ten feet of her, with Harry in tow.

  The midday sun glistened on the manor house in the distance as her matching dun mares smartly trotted down the narrow entrance drive. She had not visited Haverly in almost two years and then only to see how Heddy fared. The closer she got, the more rundown the estate appeared. The stone mansion was still in good shape, but numerous shutters required straightening and a new coat of paint. The grass had not been scythed in a long while, and the shrubs looked leggy and in desperate need of a trim. No flowers had graced the entrance path or rear gardens since the sixth duke had passed on nearly six years earlier, leaving Jared all alone.

  Never having known his mother—who died of influenza shortly after his birth—and being orphaned after his father’s passing had set Jared on his path of dissolution. Ari preferred to think so and felt certain he could have been a model citizen had his father lived longer. Instead, the young lord took off for London and blew through a large portion of his inheritance on gambling, excessive drinking, and buying jewels and townhouses for his numerous mistresses. London gossip eventually sifted down to even small villages like Dolan. If only a portion of the gossip were true, Jared had bedded half the widows and matrons in London and dallied with a substantial number of the maids.

  Ari had fallen victim to harmful gossip herself, albeit the smaller Compton parish version of gossip, and all because her personal nemesis—Lucilla Tartley, the widowed Lady Wilder—had set her cap for Oxley Pearson, Baron Dalton, from the county seat of Compton. Unfortunately for Ari, the baron had discovered the Earl of Wakefield had substantially increased her dowry, and Dalton immediately terminated his ongoing dalliance with Lucilla to set his beaver hat for Ariana, thus starting a war of the eligible females.

  Ever-devious Lucilla had set up Ari to be caught in a compromised situation—in the hopes she would be ruined and Dalton would recant his suit—which had not succeeded, though Compton gossips had had a field day with Ari’s reputation. Worse still, her number of suitors had increased exponentially following the debacle.

  “But we do not listen to gossip, do we, Harry?” She nudged the wolfhound who was ready for her this time and snapped his foot-long tongue across her cheek and the right half of her bonnet before she could dodge.

  “Bloody hell,” she muttered, then wiped off her cheek and straightened her half-soggy bonnet, thankful no one had been around to hear her curse.

  She pulled the phaeton to a stop in the circle outside the porte cochere and fended off another of Harry’s wildly aimed, rapid-fire slurps.

  “He is not in London now, and we don’t care about all those London ladies, Harry. This is your second chance.” She hugged the dog around his shoulders. “Jared will love you this time. I know he will. I intend to make sure.”

  She tugged on the dog’s collar and climbed down from the phaeton. With a resigned sigh and a last smooth of her skirts, she strode for the front doo
r.

  Chapter Three

  A fashionable blonde stood before one of the full-length windows in the drawing room, her back to the door. Her gown, light blue with dark blue trim, hugged a curvaceous figure, and a matching pale blue bonnet rested on a nearby settee. How much trouble could such a proper, well-dressed noblewoman be?

  When Jared crossed the threshold, he cleared his throat and she turned. His eyes almost bugged out of his head. The woman was a beauty—peaches and cream complexion, full rose-colored lips, and large blue eyes she worked at making larger. A pair of voluptuous breasts were attempting their escape from her overtight bodice. Each breath caused the precarious rise and fall of the two creamy globes within their confinement.

  Dear Lord, she could be Eddy’s sister.

  “Good day, Lady Wilder,” he said, remembering his manners.

  Bullen had followed him into the drawing room and waited just inside the door. Lady Wilder smiled and eased forward. Jared wondered if the seductive sway of her hips was practiced or natural. She paused inches from him and laid a delicate hand on his arm.

  “Well! Lady Wilder, is it?” She gave his arm a gentle squeeze. In reprimand, perhaps? “That is not what you used to call me.”

  Jared heard Bullen’s not-so-subtle cough behind him, but he didn’t turn. Evidently, the lady was not too concerned about whom she shocked with her forward address or who had heard. Her voice had that sultry quality Yanks liked to call a Mae West voice. Was that practiced as well?

  Her fingers tightened on his arm, and Jared got the distinct impression he had just stepped out of his league.

  “And what are these odd clothes?” She gestured to his polo shirt. “Have you come down to receive me in your bed clothes? To see so much skin is—”

  She trailed a finger down his bare forearm, then paused to actually bat her eyelashes at him. “—breathtaking.”

  It took a second for the word to register as he had expected her to say shocking. Bullen’s second cough proclaimed he had immediately caught her intent.

  Lady Wilder heard him, too, and she shot Bullen a glare. “I see you brought your shadow with you,” she said drily, but the smile she turned to Jared was dazzling. “Maybe we should retire to your library to discuss our business privately.”