The Trouble With Dukes

by Grace Burrowes

  Hamish’s bank balance had certainly changed. “My pismire of a solicitor said something about this, though he claimed it would cost considerably and take some time. I haven’t mentioned anything to my sisters about acquiring the title lady.”

  Miss Megan slipped her glasses down her nose to peer at Hamish. “Your brother also becomes a courtesy lord. All it takes is a warrant of precedence signed by King George. I think you must ask for my supper waltz, Your Grace.”

  As if the king was about to extend favors to the Duke of Murder? “Miss Meggie, there’s no point to my asking for your supper waltz.”

  If Hamish were to waltz with any woman, though, it would be Megan Windham. She didn’t put on airs, she was quiet, and in an understated, easily overlooked way, she was lovely.

  “Ask me anyway.” She sounded much like her auntie, the Duchess of Doom.

  “Miss Meggie, though it pains me to admit it, I’m nearly famous for not knowing how to waltz. I’d embarrass us both and likely end up on my kilted arse before all of polite society.”

  This time, she patted his hand. “Nonsense. If I can learn to waltz, so can you. Tomorrow afternoon should suffice. Bring your sisters, I’ll round up a few of my cousins, and we’ll have an impromptu tea dance at my cousin Westhaven’s townhouse.”

  Moreland was teasing Rhona, who was a shy soul when she wasn’t threatening mayhem for want of a few dresses. Lady Rhona, according to Megan Windham. Hamish needed to know more about that warrant of whatever, and for his sisters’ sakes, he needed to learn to waltz.

  “Name a time, and promise me this gathering will be private,” he said. “I’ll not be falling on my backside for the entertainment of half of Mayfair.”

  Sir Fletcher was sauntering up the path, Edana beside him. Damned if she didn’t look half-smitten, more’s the pity.

  “You’ll not be falling on your backside at all,” Miss Megan said, “but you are to remain by my side so long as Sir Fletcher is about, do you understand, Your Grace?”

  Hamish did not in the least understand, though he hoped Miss Megan’s order—for it was an order—meant she had a few reservations where Sir Fletcher was concerned. What Hamish knew for certain was that he had somehow been talked into letting this little, bespectacled blueblood teach him to waltz, and worse, he was looking forward to that ordeal.

  “A word with you, Your Grace.”

  Hamish looked about, wondering when somebody had let a bloody damned duke into the conversation. Across the music room, Megan Windham was sorting through music at the piano, Edana and Rhona by her side.

  The three fellows surrounding Hamish were Miss Megan’s cousins, and by some sleight of hand known only to English dukes, all three cousins were titled.

  “Beg pardon,” Hamish said. “The ‘Your Grace’ bit will take some getting used to. You might as well know I can’t waltz for shite.”

  “Language, Murdoch,” the biggest of the three muttered.

  The one with all the lace at his throat and wrists took to studying the parquet floor in the manner of a gunnery sergeant trying not to murder his own recruits on the first day of target practice.

  “I honestly cannot waltz,” Hamish said, hoping Miss Meggie could at least play the piano. Rhona and Edana had a few passable tunes memorized, but they were no substitute for an orchestra.

  “If Megan has decreed that you’re to learn to waltz,” the auburn-haired fellow said, “then you shall learn to waltz. She is softhearted, and we will not allow you to disappoint her.”

  Lord Shall and Allow must be the ducal heir.

  “That’s good,” Hamish replied, making sure his sporran hung front and center. “You ought to be protective of her, because she’ll have no toes left if she dances with me.” Very pretty toes they likely were too.

  “She will have all of her toes,” the nancy brother said. “Can your sisters waltz?”

  “I expect so. They’ve had a dancing master coming around for the past three years. Expensive little shi—blighter.”

  “Then let’s be about it,” Lord Nancy Pants said. He wore as much lace as a French colonel intent on impressing the ladies, but had a good set of shoulders too. “Ladies, if you’d choose your partners, the entertainment portion of the afternoon is about to begin.”

  Edana took the heir, Rhona made her curtsy to the big fellow cousin, and Hamish was left …

  “You’re not wearing your specs,” he said as Miss Megan rose from a graceful curtsy.

  “The year I made my come out, they went sailing off my nose in an energetic turn and landed in the men’s punch bowl. I haven’t worn them on the dance floor since. Shouldn’t you bow, Your Grace?”

  She offered her bare hand—this was a practice dance, after all—and Hamish executed the requisite gentlemanly maneuver.

  “Now what?”

  “Now Lord Valentine will play the introduction….”

  God above, the nancy bastard knew his way around a keyboard. This was not the tortured thumping Hamish associated with country dances and overheated ballrooms, this was music.

  “Slower!” Miss Megan called, and the speed of the music calmed, though the melody acquired more twiddles and faradiddles along the way. “We’ll need a lengthy introduction as well.”

  “More introductions?” Hamish muttered.

  Her eyes were truly lovely without the spectacles, large, guileless, the blue of the Scottish sky over high pastures in spring.

  “The waltz is in triple meter, like the minuet,” Miss Megan said. “One-two-three, one-two-three, and all you need to do is feel the downbeat.”

  Scotsmen were born to dance. They had no particular defenses against being handled by determined women, though. Miss Megan put one hand on Hamish’s shoulder and grasped his hand with the other.

  “Your free hand goes above my waist, toward the middle of my back, but not quite. You want it where you can guide me. Your Grace, it’s customary to assume waltz position when contemplating the waltz.”

  Hamish longed to touch her—to assume this genteel, slightly risqué, elegant dance pose with her—and he didn’t dare.

  “I might knock ye over,” he said, hoping the twiddles and faradiddles kept his words from her cousins’ notice.

  “You cannot possibly. I’ll simply turn loose of you and step back should your balance become questionable. The simplest way to learn the waltz is to pattern your steps like a square….”

  Hamish’s balance had become questionable back in Hatchards bookshop, when he’d heard Pilkington sneering and strutting through a conversation with a lady. He’d lost his balance all over again at the dress shop, and pitched it into Moreland’s prize rose bushes in the ducal garden too.

  Miss Megan nattered on, all the while the other couples twirled and smiled around them, the music lifted and lilted, and Hamish wanted to kill Sir Fletcher Pilkington. The ability to flirt in triple meter had seen the younger son of an English lord elevated to the point where he got good men killed, and men only half-bad flogged nearly to death.

  “You look so fierce,” Miss Megan said when they were on their second lurch about the room. The lady, fortunately, was more substantial than she appeared, and determined on Hamish’s education.

  “I’m concentrating. Anything more complicated than a march and a fellow gets confused.” Her perfume was partly responsible, half spice, half flowers. Not roses, but fresh meadows, scythed grass, lavender and …

  He brought the lady a trifle closer on a turn, the better to investigate her fragrance, and between one twirl and the next, Hamish’s instructress became his every unfulfilled dream on a dance floor. She had the knack of going where a fellow suggested, as if she read a man’s intentions by the way he held her.

  Megan Windham made Hamish feel as if spinning about in his arms sat at the apex of her list of delights, the memory she’d recount in old age to dazzle her great-nieces and granddaughters. She danced with the incandescent joy of the northern lights and all the feminine warmth of summer sun on a Sc
ottish shore.

  To her, he was apparently not the Duke of Murder or the Berserker of Badajoz. He was simply a lucky fellow who needed assistance learning to dance. The relief of that, the pleasure of shedding an entire war’s worth of violence, was exquisite.

  For another turn down the room, Hamish wallowed in a fine, miserable case of heartache, for this pleasure was illusory—he had killed often and well—and the lady could never be his. Worse yet, she apparently belonged to that walking hog wallow of dishonor and guile, Sir Fletcher Pilkington.

  The sooner Hamish waltzed his own titled, homesick arse back to Scotland, the better for all.

  The Duke of Murdoch was all grace and power, and his protestations about not knowing how to waltz must have been for his sisters’ sakes. Soldiers could be shrewd like that. St. Just, Westhaven, and Valentine would surely beg a set from the ladies as a result of this informal rehearsal, and Murdoch had probably known as much.

  “A couple usually converses during a waltz,” Megan said as they started on another circuit of the music parlor. “How do you find London, that sort of thing?”

  Murdoch’s sense of rhythm was faultless, but he’d apparently misplaced the ability to smile—at all.

  “Find London? You go down the Great North Road until you can’t go any farther, then you follow the noise and stink. Can’t miss it. I prefer the drovers’ routes myself. The inns are humble, but honest.”

  Megan’s mother was Welsh, so a thick leavening of Celtic intonation was easily decipherable to her. She switched to Gaelic, as she occasionally did with family.

  “I meant, does London appeal to you?”

  Nothing had broken His Grace’s concentration thus far. For dozens of turns about the room, despite Westhaven’s and St. Just’s adventuresome maneuvers with Murdoch’s sisters, and Valentine’s increasingly daring tempo, the duke had become only more confident of his waltzing.

  One simple question had him stumbling.

  And when a large fellow stumbled and tried to right himself by grabbing on to a surprised and not very large woman, and that woman stumbled …

  Down they went, though Megan landed on His Grace, an agreeably solid and warm place to find herself. His sporran had twisted itself to his hip, and his arms remained about her.

  “Miss Megan,” Lady Edana cried. “Are you all right? Hamish, turn loose of her, for pity’s sake, you’ll wrinkle her skirts, and break her bones, and tramp on her hems, and get up, you can’t simply lie there, a great lummoxing lump of a brother.”

  “Get up now,” Lady Rhona chorused. “Oh, please do get up, and promise you’ll never attempt to waltz in public again. Wellington might be at Her Grace’s ball, or the king. Oh, Ham, get up.”

  His Grace could not get up as long as Megan luxuriated in the novel pleasure of lying atop him.

  “I’m fine,” she said, kneeling back after enjoying two more instants of His Grace’s abundant warmth and muscle. Westhaven hauled her to her feet by virtue of a hand under each elbow, glowering at her as if she’d purposely yanked fifteen stone of Scottish duke to the floor.

  St. Just extended a hand to Murdoch and pulled him upright, but not fast enough to hide a flash of muscular thigh from Megan’s view, not fast enough by half.

  The duke righted his sporran, bowed, and came up … smiling. “Miss Meggie, my apologies for hauling you top over teakettle. You speak the Gaelic.”

  All the rainbows in Wales, all the Christmas punch brewed at the Windham family seat, couldn’t approach His Grace’s smile for sheer, charming glee. That smile dazzled, intrigued, promised … oh, that smile was quite the weapon against a woman’s dignity.

  Megan fired off a shy, answering volley of the same artillery. “My mother is Welsh, and I enjoy languages. Welsh and Gaelic aren’t that different to the ear.”

  In fact, each Scottish island and region had its own dialect, some sounding nearly Irish, others approaching a Scandinavian flavor, and Megan didn’t pretend to grasp the proper spellings, dialect by dialect. But she could manage well enough in casual conversation to take a Highland duke very much by surprise.

  “Nobody speaks the Gaelic in an English ballroom,” Murdoch said. “Not since the Forty-Five, probably not ever.” He made a few words of Gaelic sound like a great feat of courage, not a simple courtesy to a newcomer.

  St. Just and Westhaven watched this exchange like a pair of oversized pantry mousers placing bets on the fate of a fugitive canary.

  Bother the glowering pair of them.

  Nobody smiled at Megan Windham the way Murdoch was smiling. Even without her glasses, she could see the warmth and approval in his eyes, see all the acceptance and admiration a woman could endure from one man.

  “Nobody ends the waltz by falling on his partner,” Westhaven snapped. “Lord Valentine, if you would oblige. The duke is in want of practice, assuming Cousin Megan is none the worse for her tumble.”

  Megan had tumbled hopelessly, right into a pair of bottomless blue eyes, a pair of strong arms, and … those thighs. Ye manly waltzing gods.

  “I’m fine,” Megan said, putting her hand on Murdoch’s shoulder. She was apparently becoming a proficient liar, because having seen his great, beaming benevolence of a smile, she might never be fine again.

  Cousin Valentine struck up another introduction at the piano, the pace moderate, the ornamentation minimal, and Megan wished someday, ages and ages hence, she might tell her granddaughters about the time the dashing Scottish duke had waltzed her right off of her feet.

  Hamish would fight across Spain, scale the mountains, and march through the whole of France all over again for a waltz like the one he was sharing with Megan Windham.

  He danced with the same passionate abandon formerly reserved for when the swords were crossed after the fourth dram of whisky, and the camp followers had acquired the airs and graces of every soldier’s dreams.

  Miss Megan beamed up at him, her hand clasped in his, her rhythm faultless, her form starlight in his arms.

  When the music came to a final, sighing cadence, Hamish’s heart sighed along with it.

  “My thanks for a delightful waltz,” he said as Miss Megan sank into a deep curtsy. She kept hold of Hamish’s hand as he drew her to her feet and bowed.

  “The pleasure was entirely mine, Your Grace.”

  While the sorrow was Hamish’s. To her, this was just another waltz, a charity bestowed on a reluctant recruit to the ranks of the aristocracy.

  To Hamish it had been—

  “Now you lead her from the dance floor,” the big cousin barked. “Parade march will do, her hand resting on yours.”

  On general principles, Hamish stood his ground. This fellow had begun to look and sound familiar, and one thing was certain: Hamish had the highest-ranking title in the room.

  “You served on the Peninsula?” Hamish asked.

  Megan’s cousin spoke with an air of command, and he had the watchful eyes of the career soldier. Hamish put his age at about mid-thirties, and his weight about fourteen stone barefoot and stripped for a fight. His waltzing had been worthy of a direct report to Old Hooky himself, his scowl was worthy of a captain, possibly a major.

  “You behold Colonel Lord Rosecroft,” Miss Megan said, patting the fellow’s cheek. “Cousin Devlin is quite fierce, but he has to be. He’s the father of two daughters and counting, and the oldest of ten siblings. Her Grace contends that he joined up in search of a more peaceful existence.”

  Rosecroft shot Hamish a glance known to veterans the world over. Let her make light of me, that look said. Let her make a joke of the endless horrors. We fought so that our womenfolk could pat our cheeks and jest at our nightmares. They remained at home, praying for us year after year, so that some of us could survive to make light of their nightmares too.

  Miss Megan tugged at Hamish’s hand. “Now you return me to my chaperone or help me find my next partner, the same as any other dance. We make small talk, greet the other guests, and look quite convivial.”

/>   “That’s three impossibilities you’ve set before me, Miss Meggie.”

  Hamish had amused her, simply by speaking the truth. “I saw you smile, Your Grace,” she said, leading Hamish over to the piano. “Your charm might be latent, but it’s genuine.”

  He leaned closer. “I won’t know your next partner from the crossing sweeper, I have no patience with small talk, and looking convivial is an impossibility when you’re known as the Duke of Mur—”

  “A gentleman never argues with a lady,” the colonel observed, hands behind his back, two paces to Miss Megan’s right. He bore a resemblance to Moreland in his posture and about the jaw, and yet he was apparently not the ducal heir.

  “Does a gentleman lie to a lady, Rosebud? My sisters will tell you I can’t keep social niceties straight, I lack familiarity with those of your ilk, and I’ve no gift for idle chit-chat.”

  “None at all,” Edana said.

  “He’s awful,” Rhona added, russet curls bobbing, she nodded so earnestly. “We despair of him, but one can’t instruct a brother when he won’t even try to accept one’s guidance. We tell Hamish to inquire about the weather, and his response is that any woman who can’t notice the weather for herself won’t notice a lack of chatter in a man.”

  They meant well, and they were being honest, but a part of Hamish felt as if he’d been knocked on his arse again, kilt flapping for all the world to see.

  “I’ve made the very same point to my countess,” the auburn-haired Earl of Enunciation said. Hamish forgot his name. “Why must we discuss the weather at tedious length when there’s nothing to be done about it and its characteristics are abundantly obvious? Better to discuss …”

  Edana, Rhona, and Miss Megan regarded him curiously.

  “The music,” said Lord Nancy Pants rising from the piano. He was a good-sized fellow, for all his lace, and he had that ducal jaw too. “Ask her if she prefers the violin or the flute, the piano or the harpsichord. Ask her what her favorite dance is, and then ask her why.”