This Duke is Mine

by Eloisa James

  Olivia put a hand on Grooper’s sleeve. “You did just the right thing. His father may not have been able to say this before he collapsed, but he is tremendously grateful to you, as am I.”

  The sergeant looked at his hands and said, “Iffen we’d known Lucy was a dog, I don’t know that we would have done it.”

  “In that case I’m glad you had no idea.”

  “We must be nearing the shore,” Quin said, breaking in. “Olivia, you will wait here with Sergeant Grooper.” He seemed to think that he had the ultimate say in that matter. “The captain will drop anchor and I will take the rowboat to the hut and fetch the marquess.”

  “No,” Olivia said, keeping her tone even. “I intend to be in that rowboat.”

  “I beg to differ.”

  “I did not come all this way to sit safely offshore. If Rupert is alive, he may not be well enough to venture a ride in a rowboat as, indeed, Grooper and his fellow soldiers surmised.”

  “When we first discussed this possibility, we did not realize that there is a garrison of French soldiers a handsbreadth from the hut. I am extremely doubtful that Rupert and the two men who remained at his side are still at liberty.”

  Olivia pressed her lips together before they could tremble. “It is true that Rupert is not a very lucky person.”

  “I am certain that we can retrieve his body from the French if we pay enough,” Quin said bluntly. “We will bring it back to England and he will be buried with honors, as befits his rank and his deeds. But you need not risk yourself in that particular endeavor, Olivia. I will bring Rupert home.” There was a fierceness in his voice that turned the words into a vow.

  Now tears were pressing against her eyes. Other than his father, Rupert had never had a champion. And now he had this magnificent, uncompromising duke. She felt sure that Quin would never allow the slightest insult against his erstwhile rival.

  “Rupert would have been honored to know you,” she said, her voice unsteady despite her best efforts. “And I shall be in that rowboat with you.”

  “No.”

  “If you do not permit me to accompany you, I will join you a few moments after I strike poor Grooper on the head and swim to shore.”

  “No need for that,” Grooper said. He seemed to be enjoying the skirmish. “Never let it be said that I came between a married couple.”

  “We are not married,” Quin said, eyes fixed on Olivia.

  Grooper shook his head. “And here I thought nobility didn’t have the loose ways o’ the rest of us. You surely fight as if you’d taken the vows.”

  “I am an excellent swimmer,” Olivia insisted, ignoring the sergeant’s less-than-helpful comments. She was trying to make a point, but the moment the words left her mouth, and she saw the pain that flashed through Quin’s eyes, she realized she had made a terrible misstep.

  She was at his side in an instant, her arms tight around his waist. “I won’t go in the water. I promise I won’t go into the water.” She brushed her lips across his. “If Rupert is still alive, I must be with him. He will recognize me; he has never met you.”

  “I’ll bring Lucy with me.”

  Olivia knew in her heart of hearts that she had to have her way on this. “You cannot make this decision for me.”

  “You won’t be safe.” His voice was ragged . . . raw.

  Though they scarcely noticed him, Grooper went up the steps to the deck, gently shutting the door behind him.

  “You cannot keep me safe.” She pulled him closer until she could feel his hard chest against her. “I cannot keep you safe either.”

  “Damn it, Olivia, these idiots stowed Rupert in a hut under the very noses of a whole garrison of French soldiers. If the Frenchmen were to capture you . . . no.”

  “They will not capture me,” she said. She felt the knifelike agony in his eyes sink into her own heart. “I didn’t come all the way to France simply to wait in the Day Dream.” Then she had an inspiration. “They won’t capture me because I will be with you.”

  “With me,” Quin muttered. His jaw clenched.

  “I want to remain with you. Not only will I be safer, but I couldn’t bear the tension of not knowing how you were faring.” She felt a pang of guilt. She was manipulating him. “What if those soldiers catch glimpse of the Day Dream?”

  “They will not,” he said flatly. “We will anchor offshore and shutter the lantern.” But his eyes searched her face. He was listening to her.

  “I cannot leave him to die alone.” She put every bit of willpower she had in her voice.

  “Dear heart.” He rubbed his thumb gently along the line of her lower lip. “Rupert is dead. I’m trying to work out how to carry his body down the inlet without alerting soldiers. And if by some remote chance he is alive, I will have Lucy with me. Surely she will be introduction enough.”

  “No.” She’d never thought, never imagined, that someone like Quin could love her. Still, she understood instinctively that he had to—he absolutely had to—respect her. He had to trust her even when his instinct was to deny her. “His father is gone. I am the only person in the world who cares for him, Quin. The only one. I must go to him.” She held his eyes. “My personal safety is immaterial. This is a question of ethics.”

  There was a moment of tense silence.

  “You have a point,” Quin finally said, his voice reluctant.

  She held her breath.

  His arms tightened about her. “You are Olivia, after all.”

  “What do you mean?” she whispered.

  “You love your sister enough to give me up. You love Rupert, the poor scrambled egg. You love Lucy with her bitten eyelid. You even love your misguided parents.”

  She cleared her throat. “You omitted one person in that list.”

  “You are the most loyal person I know. You will never give up Rupert’s secrets; you will never steal a man whom your sister wants. Therefore, obviously you could not live with yourself if you did not make every effort to be with Rupert.”

  Olivia opened her mouth to say something about love, something about how much she loved the complicated, harsh, and altogether fascinating man who stood before her, but there was a splash, followed by the sound of an anchor being lowered as quietly as possible.

  “Very well,” Quin said tightly. “I don’t like it. But I understand.”

  Olivia reached up on tiptoes and brushed a kiss across his lips again. “I love you.”

  His hands tightened on her arms and he kissed her. He said nothing. But it didn’t matter. Olivia understood love as well as any other woman, and when a man looked at a woman with desire and possession and caring all mixed up . . . he loves her, whether he articulates it or no.

  She smiled. “The rowboat is waiting for us. It’s time to go.”

  Twenty-seven

  “And Miles to Go Before I Sleep”

  Up on the deck, the first thing Quin realized was that the rowboat was far too small, hardly bigger than his bathtub. It would barely take his weight, let alone his and Olivia’s. And it certainly couldn’t take a third person, dead or alive.

  The captain of the Day Dream leaned close, his voice low. “It’s the only one I have with muffled oars. It slips through the water with no more sound than a man pissing in a pond. For those with a need to reach the shore quiet-like, this is the one.”

  The man showed every sign of being a smuggler. Quin paused, then nodded, consciously releasing the tension in his jaw. If they survived the next few hours, he didn’t want to keel over like Rupert’s father; he had noted that tension had an extremely deleterious effect on the human body.

  Two dead dukes, both betrothed to Olivia and neither with a surviving heir, would be absurd.

  He cautiously lowered himself from the schooner into the little boat and reached up for Olivia, whom the captain helped down. They had to sit with their legs sharply bent, knees pressed against knees, Lucy clutched in Olivia’s arms. The pang of desire he always felt at her touch, ordinarily so thrilling, wa
s now an irritant, a spur to his underlying sense of panic.

  But he slipped the muffled oars into the water, and indeed, the boat made no more sound than a reed in the wind. Rocks reared on the port side, and in the near distance a blur of sand shone in the moonlight.

  He mentally calculated the exact place where the inlet let into the sea, and was gratified to catch a patch of darkness just where he’d predicted it would be. Somewhere a curlew called a night anthem, notes tumbling with the gentle sound of the waves. Olivia’s eyes were shining. “I love the smell of the sea,” she whispered, her voice just a thread of sound in the night.

  In truth, the water didn’t smell like the terrible, engulfing entity that had stolen his son. It smelled like brine and seaweed, and reminded him of his childhood, when every physical quality of the world was a mystery waiting to be solved.

  Ahead of them was a bright spark in the darkness, slightly to the right of the inlet. He tapped Olivia on the knee, pointed.

  “Rupert?”

  “The garrison.” He pulled to the port side, heading straight for the dark shadow that signaled the mouth of the inlet.

  Perhaps they truly would be lucky . . . in and out like a fox.

  Then the little boat was slipping up the inlet, which was overhung with branches, just as Grooper had described. All the while, Quin was calculating how to bring the three of them back down the inlet, given the size of the rowboat. It was not possible.

  He would have to take Olivia back to the Day Dream, get her safely aboard, then return for Rupert’s body.

  The boat slid like a ghost through the water, and the stream bent slightly to the right again. A second later, they nosed onto the beach. Quin clambered to shore, made the boat fast, and turned to help Olivia and Lucy.

  He held her for a moment. “I don’t want you here,” he whispered.

  “Let’s go,” she said, her voice brushing his ear.

  He took her hand. It was hell to care about someone. How could he have forgotten that? He used to worry about Alfie every time he was ill. Anxiety was tiresome.

  They climbed up the bank and veered to the left. In his mind’s eye, he followed Grooper’s finger on the map, translating map distances into steps. If there were ever a situation in which his mathematical skill was useful, this was it.

  They moved silently forward, feeling their way as much as seeing it; after a time the dark exterior wall of a hut loomed precisely where it should be. Quin put a hand on Olivia’s shoulder and tightened it in a silent message. She nodded, her eyes huge in the moonlight.

  He followed the wall of the hut, turned the corner, and pushed gently on the door. Inside there was a faint brush of movement; instantly he whispered, “God save the King.”

  The door swung inwards. Quin walked into total darkness, and waited until the door shut behind him. Then a dark lantern slid open. Its wavering flame illuminated the faces of two drawn and exhausted English soldiers.

  “Thank God you’ve come,” one of them breathed.

  “He lives?”

  A jerky nod of the head. “Barely.”

  “Your names?”

  “Togs.” Another jerk of his head. “That’s Paisley.”

  Quin nodded at the lantern. They shut it again and he slipped out, returning with Olivia, her hand warm in his.

  When the lantern was opened once more, its light shone on the clear planes of her face, the glowing strands of hair escaping from under her hood, the generous line of her lower lip.

  “Lucy!” Togs gasped. There was a wealth of meaning in his voice. They thought she was worth risking their lives for. Quin could see it in both men’s eyes. A silent growl rose in his throat, startling him.

  Olivia shook her head, unloosed her cape, and put Rupert’s little dog on the floor. She smiled at the bewildered faces and pointed. “This is Lucy.”

  “The marquess?” Quin asked. He had stopped thinking about corpses and was now desperately calculating how to get both Olivia and a grievously injured Rupert back in that tiny rowboat. His remaining behind was out of the question; Olivia couldn’t row far enough to reach the Day Dream. He would have to take one, then return for the other—which meant that he would have to leave one temporarily behind.

  Togs shook his head and drew back a rough curtain in the corner, revealing a slight figure lying on a thin mattress on the floor.

  Olivia rushed over and fell to her knees. Lucy was already there, nosing her master’s cheek, her thin tail wagging madly.

  She picked up Rupert’s hand. It was odd to realize only now that his fingers were long and delicate. They weren’t like Quin’s powerful grip, but they were beautiful in their own way.

  She leaned close and said, “Rupert!” He didn’t stir.

  Lucy pressed close to Olivia, trembling, and then she suddenly took a little hop and landed on Rupert’s chest. Olivia reached out to remove her, but the dog was licking his cheek, his nose, his eyelids. Instead Olivia said, low and urgent, “Rupert, I’ve brought Lucy to you. It’s Lucy.”

  His eyelids trembled.

  She rubbed his hand faster and glanced over her shoulder at Quin. “He’s waking!” she mouthed.

  Lucy was still licking Rupert, her warm tongue bathing his cheek, his ear. He opened his mouth and rasped one word. “Lucy.”

  Olivia bent even closer. “Rupert, it’s Olivia. Lucy and I have come to take you back home.”

  For a second he said nothing. Then his eyes slowly focused on Lucy’s brown pointed nose and shining eyes. A smile trembled on his bloodless lips.

  His eyes moved to Olivia. “Knew you’d come.”

  The words were slurred. Olivia saw with a lurch of her stomach a trickle of dried blood leading from his ear.

  She felt a sob rising in her throat. He didn’t . . . he didn’t look as if he had long to live.

  Quin’s hand came on her shoulder and squeezed. He squatted down beside the pallet. “Lord Monts—”

  She shook her head.

  Quin started over, his voice calm and deep. “Rupert, we’ve come to take you home.”

  Rupert’s eyes wandered from Lucy. “Who?”

  “My name is Quin.”

  “Ah.” His eyes were closing. “Miles to go.”

  “Yes,” Quin agreed.

  He saw the truth of it in Rupert’s face, before the man even spoke. “Too many miles . . .”

  Olivia’s hand closed around Quin’s wrist. “We must take him now to the boat. Now. Otherwise . . . he will die here, in this hovel.”

  Rupert didn’t look like someone with the indomitable will that had driven a company of one hundred men over the walls of a fortress. There was a kind of acceptance about his face that spoke for itself. Quin thought he would almost certainly die very soon.

  “We cannot remain here for more than a few hours at the most,” he said.

  “The Frenchies almost caught us this morning,” Togs put in. “We heard them coming . . . they was set to enter the hut, but one of the dogs startled a duck and they went after their supper instead. We didn’t have a boat because we sent Grooper over in it.”

  Quin frowned, looking at the silent Paisley.

  “He don’t speak,” Togs said. “Not even a word. He’s the best sailor of us. He got the boat all the way here, but he couldn’t come across to fetch you because he don’t speak. The major said as how it didn’t matter to him as long as Paisley could hold a gun the right way up.”

  The silent man nodded.

  “You both stayed with him,” Olivia said, her smile, warm despite her fear, lingering on each of their exhausted faces.

  “He’s our commander,” Togs said. And Paisley nodded tersely.

  They were good men. Quin had to get them out as well, before the French stumbled by the hut again in the morning and decided to explore.

  Tension mounted in Quin’s chest. Rupert was near death, and the two soldiers were exhausted to the point of collapse. He would bet that they’d had little—if anything—to eat in the last
few days.

  He crouched down, close enough to catch the warm, flowery scent that was Olivia, and said quietly, “I must leave you here for a short time, dear heart.”

  She turned her face and her lips brushed his, sweet and heady. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  “I’ll be back for you. An hour at the most.”

  Quin realized that Rupert’s eyes had drifted open again, and that he was watching them.

  “Happy . . . you.” The words floated on the air.

  Quin had to clear his throat. “I’m going to carry you to the boat.” He slipped one hand under Rupert’s torso and discovered that he weighed almost nothing.

  “Take Lucy,” he whispered to Olivia.

  Olivia retrieved the little dog from Rupert’s chest, but stopped Quin before he could pick up the injured man. Rupert looked very ill and impossibly young. He didn’t seem sixteen, let alone eighteen.

  “You did it, Rupert,” Olivia whispered, leaning close. “Your father is so happy, and so proud of you. You have crowned the Canterwick name with glory.”

  Even in the low light, she could see a faint smile in his eyes, a tired smile.

  “And you’re also a wonderful poet,” she said, cupping his cheek with her hand. “You must heal, so that you can write more poetry.”

  He shook his head, just slightly.

  The truth of it was in his face. Olivia’s eyes filled with tears. “Then fly, Rupert. Be free. Leave all this darkness to us.”

  The smile was there again. He turned his head, just slightly, lips against her hand, and closed his eyes.

  Olivia stayed still for a moment, a tear splashing onto the rough blanket. Then Quin ran a hand over her hair, and she rose.

  She waited until Quin was standing with Rupert in his arms. “If he fails,” she told him, “you cannot leave him. He must not die on that boat with no one but Grooper by his bed. Do you hear me?”

  Her voice was barely above the sound of a nesting bird, and yet he heard every word. “Olivia, no!” It was a plea and a protest at once.