Instead, he shifted uncomfortably on the cushion. “And we came straight from Sandfell to here. Sienna didn’t want to go back to her house. So we’ve been traveling by horse on muddy roads for five days.”
He tore his attention away from his wife and looked at Violet. He wasn’t about to venture a glance at Cassandra just yet—she was still glaring at Sienna with far too much suspicion in her brown eyes. “So this is where we need your help.”
“Of course—anything, Logan,” Violet said.
“Sienna needs clothes, and I don’t have a clue as to how to procure women’s clothing.”
~~~
“This is far too generous.”
Sienna stood next to the bed in Logan’s chamber in his townhouse—now hers as well—and stared at the mounds of clothing piled high on the bed. Dresses and chemises and stockings and stays and slippers and riding habits and boots and gloves and hats.
All of it of the finest quality.
Stoking to life a fire across the room, Logan looked back to her over his shoulder. “I should have limited them—started with Violet, as she is most similar to your size, or at least was before her belly swelled.” His eyes swept across the piles upon his bed. “This is ridiculous—we won’t have to visit a seamstress for years with this horde.” He turned back to the fire.
It was nightfall by the time they’d left the Revelry’s Tempest. They had eaten the most sumptuous roast sirloin with potatoes and Chateaubriand sauce, spinach herb quiche, and flummery with raspberries at the gaming house, and she’d been fortunate to spend time alone with Violet and Cassandra when Logan had disappeared to speak with his guards.
Sienna liked both women immensely, even if Cassandra’s skeptical gaze did little to waver—Sienna knew Cassandra was only suspicious of her because she cared deeply about Logan. That was obvious. And for that, Sienna admired the woman all the more.
She’d also had the good fortune to meet a number of Logan’s men. Sienna instantly recognized why they were so sought after as guards—each was almost as handsome as her husband and each looked like they could easily crush anyone that crossed something they were to be protecting.
When guests had started to arrive at the Revelry’s Tempest for the evening’s gaming, Logan had excused them and they’d travelled on to his townhouse several streets away.
His home sat on a nondescript cobblestone lane, large, but simple, just as she’d hoped for when Logan said he owned a house in London. It stood four stories high, built of the smoothest white Portland stone with nondescript black door and trim. Quietly elegant. A calm street with nothing but a stray rooster confused about the time of day upsetting the peace. Logan hadn’t been expected back in London for another two weeks, so the house hadn’t been readied for them and they’d had to fumble about in the darkness until he lit some sconces on the main level and then several lanterns, sparking the house alive.
Candles had been lit for only fifteen minutes before footmen were knocking at the door, delivering bundle after bundle of clothing.
Violet and Cassandra had given them the names of their dressmakers and promised to take Sienna shopping at their favorite linen-draper in a few days, but both had still found it necessary to rush home and have extras of their ready-made clothing delivered so Sienna could change out of her muddy riding habit.
Sienna’s hands went onto her upper arms, rubbing her bare skin as she stood in her chemise. She didn’t know where to start with the piles of clothing on the bed. She stepped forward, fingering the soft blue fabric of a muslin dress that Cassandra had sent. Cassandra’s piles stretched even higher than Violet’s.
She glanced at the back of Logan’s head. “That one—Cassandra—it surprises me that she sent over as much as she did, as I don’t believe she cares for me.” Sienna couldn’t help the note of insecurity ringing in her voice. Both Violet and Cassandra were beautiful—and kind—even if Cassandra looked at her with a wary eye. Not to mention that both were ladies. And both clearly adored her husband—too much for her liking, if she let her jealousy get the best of her.
Logan leaned the fire iron against the black marble that lined the fireplace and turned to her, a reassuring smile on his face. He had stripped down to his trousers, the scars along his torso reflecting the light from the fire. She still didn’t like seeing the scars—didn’t like that he’d suffered them without her near to help him heal. Her look dipped to the scab where she had sunk a blade into him. At least she’d been able to tend to that wound, though it couldn’t heal fast enough for her.
He moved across the room to her, standing next to her to assess the piles on the bed. “Cass doesn’t know you, that is all.” He reached out, his fingers dragging along the wool skirt of a deep plum riding habit. “Think on it from her perspective—she has known me for ten years, and then one day I randomly show up with a long dead wife? I would shine much suspicion upon it as well.”
She looked up at him. “You never talked about me? Never once told them that you’d been married?”
Logan paused and turned fully to her, his voice near to cracking. “My fractured heart was mine alone, Sienna. I wasn’t about to share it with anyone.”
A lump swelled in her throat. The reality of how he must have suffered—not only from his wounds, but also from thinking her dead—striking her brutally hard. She couldn’t imagine—didn’t dare to imagine—his dying on her. How that would destroy her.
A bright smile suddenly took over his face.
Bright.
Too bright.
Fine if he didn’t want to dwell on the past, but this was too suspicious.
Her eyebrow lifted at him.
“Now that we’re in London, there is something else I need to tell you.” He reached out, grabbing her bare upper arms, his fingers rubbing them, sending warmth along her skin. “I had hoped to leave this unspoken until you remembered more—at a time when all of this wasn’t so overwhelming—but I fear I cannot do so any longer. But what you need to know is that it is something I never wanted any part of.”
She braced herself, her mind racing with horrors. Was he married? Going to prison? Dying? “What?” Her voice came out in a squeak.
“I inherited my father’s duchy.”
She froze in place. “Duchy? What? What duchy? You never said your father—he was a duke? A real duke?” Her head started to swing wildly back and forth. “You’re a…a duke?”
Logan shrugged, unfazed by her skepticism. “It never, never should have happened. My three older half-brothers should have been plenty. But not one of them had sons, and they have all died.”
Her head flailing back and forth slowed but didn’t stop as she tried to comprehend what he was telling her. “But—but you didn’t have the title when we married—I haven’t forgotten that vital fact? Even though I clearly have no memory of who your father was.”
“No, all of my brothers were alive at the point in time when we wed. You met them in Northumberland just before we married.” A hard glint flashed in his silver eyes and his voice turned brutal. His hands dropped from her arms. “I never wanted the title, and they certainly never wanted me to have it.”
Her head snapped backward with a heavy blink at how vicious his words formed. “Logan, you’re furious—why?”
“They were despicable humans, horrid to the core, Sienna.”
She lifted her fingers, setting them gently along his upper arm. “What did they do to you?”
“Aside from casting my mother, Robby and me out of the ducal estate after my father died?”
“You told me that, but I didn’t realize they were titled—you are right in your anger, as that is beyond all behavior becoming of a duke. How did they even think to get away with casting you and your mother and brother out?”
The vicious glint hadn’t left his eyes. “Their hatred ran deep, Sienna, and it knew no bounds of propriety.”
“Then it appears as though they received their due comeuppance.” Her hand dropped from his arm. �
��It also seems as though the best vengeance was you inheriting the title.”
“Except I never wanted it. I vowed when I was five to never have anything to do with the estate after watching the castle—our home—disappear as our carriage rolled away. So when the youngest of my three half-brothers died, I planned to never take possession of the title. I planned to let the estate wither away without care. But then I was persuaded otherwise.”
“How?”
“My hand was…encouraged to do so. One of my men needed a favor cast his way, and that was the price. I needed to take possession of the title for a mutual agreement to be reached.”
Her head cocked to the side. “That is odd. Why would anyone care if you took on the title?”
“They care because there are some lucrative travel routes through the ducal lands that needed to be protected.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t ask and I don’t involve myself. I took on the title, and that was what I agreed to do. Beyond that, I rarely participate with the estate. I tell no one of the title. I have one of my guards—a trusted friend—handle the lands in Northumberland, and I do everything necessary of me through proxies.”
Her hands went to her temples as her head dropped forward for a long moment. She still could not place all this in her mind just yet. Her shadowed eyes lifted to him. “So you’re a duke, and no one knows? Not Violet, not Cassandra, not the duchess—Adalia?”
He shook his head. “No. I haven’t told anyone. Especially those three. There are a few that need to know me in parliament. Adalia’s husband, the Duke of Dellon knows, even though Adalia does not. Anything I need a proxy for, he delivers. And the estate is small compared to some and is so far north in Northumberland that to anyone that even cares enough to think on it, I am a recluse duke, at most.”
Her head snapped up, her wide eyes pinning him. “If you’re a duke, that means…”
“You’re a duchess. Yes.” He chuckled and stepped forward, wrapping his hands around her lower back.
“What?”
“Your face right now is priceless, Sienna—perfectly priceless.”
Her hand swatted his chest, landing to press into the muscle. “Not fair to laugh—it isn’t every day one learns she is a duchess.” Her other hand lifted, swatting onto his chest as well. “And you kept this from me? Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“As I said, I didn’t want to overwhelm. It truly has no bearing upon my life, and shouldn’t upon yours either, Sienna.” His brow furrowed. “Unless you want it to? If you want it, if you want to live the life of a peer with London society and the balls and dinners and opera and foxhunts and horse racing and gaming—I can make that happen. I will give it to you without question. But I will warn you, from everything I’ve seen at the Revelry’s Tempest, it is much the life of frivolity.”
“Why would I want that? I want you, Logan, not the pressure of being a duchess.” Her hands lifted from his chest to cup his chin. “I can be the recluse duchess—just like you. That will suit me fine.”
A smile, wide and heated, spread across his face and he lifted her up to him. “That will suit me very well.” He kissed her nose, then tossed her onto the mounds of clothing on the bed with a wicked grin. “But I might start calling you duchess in bed for fun.”
She laughed, sinking between the piles of silk and muslin and lace. “Does that mean I get to order you about?”
“Please do.”
She swatted the jumble of clothing next to her. “Then you better get in here and start doing my bidding, husband.”
His fingers went to the fall front of his trousers, unbuttoning.
A knock, loud and echoing up the stairs and down the hallway, stopped his motion.
His face instantly shifted to irritated annoyance, a groan breaching his lips.
Sienna chuckled. “Now that is a look that’s priceless.”
“Damn those women—how much clothing do they think you could possible need?”
Another knock echoed up to them.
“Blast it all.”
She shooed him with her hand. “Go and take the bundles so the footman can go away—I swear I won’t move from this spot.”
“Move enough to get your shift off and we have a deal.”
“Done.” She sat up, already wiggling her chemise up her thighs.
Another primal groan at the sight of her bare legs and Logan turned from her, tugging on his boots and grabbing his white linen shirt from the chair by the fire. He exited out into the hallway, his boots clunking along the wooden floor.
She heard the door open just as she tugged her shift over her head.
Crash.
Her arms froze above her head.
Thunk. Crash. Shatter.
She tugged her shift down and scrambled from the bed, running out the door. She was down the steps in seconds, flying around the newel post at the base of the stairs as she searched for her husband. “Logan?”
Thunk.
Something hit the wall in the drawing room next to her so hard it made the floor vibrate under her feet.
She rushed into the room.
All air left her lungs.
Three huge brutes held Logan against a wall in the dark shadows of the drawing room.
His arms straining, his body convulsing against their power, Logan struggled against them. One on each arm pinned him to the wainscoting. One in the middle of him, shoving hard against Logan’s neck with his forearm. A fourth brute with a club pointed at Logan’s forehead, pushing his skull back onto the wall while he stuffed a rag against the raging scream in Logan’s mouth.
A flash of purple caught her eye, and Sienna spun toward the door and the light from the sconces in the hallway.
Purple coat. An orange swath trimming the lapel.
Purple coat.
The bottom dropped out of her gut.
Purple coat.
The man in the purple coat stepped toward her, his rotund belly leading the way, gold-tipped cane tapping the floor. Beady eyes. Pockmarked nose. Strands of greasy hair strung across his balding head.
His tiny dark eyes sparked when he saw her, glowing with what appeared to be genuine happiness, but below them, his mouth had pulled back into a smile that reminded her of a snake’s.
Her look darted to Logan straining, his legs swinging against the four men that held him back. Fear skewered her heart.
Haltingly—her breath not her own, not giving her any support—her gaze travelled back to the man in purple. Four more brutes moved into the drawing room, flanking him. Blocking the entrance.
Instinctively, she threw her shoulders back, straining the straps of her chemise as she pulled herself as tall as she could in her bare feet. “Father.”
{ Chapter 11 }
“Aye. Ye remember,” Bournestein said, thumping the cane he clutched in his meaty paw on the floor. “I suspected as much once I heard ye disappeared.”
She could hear Logan struggling behind her, but she kept her gaze riveted on her father. Her mind recognized him as such. Her father. But she could pull no memories as to what he was like—other than she intuitively knew she couldn’t turn her back to him.
She did, and he was likely to strike.
“You knew I left Yorkshire?”
“Aye. I know every step ye’ve taken these past ten years, child.”
“It was you—you were the one that kept me there? Kept me at Roselawn?” She shook her head, trying to shake free her memories of this man. Without memories, without knowing what he was capable of, she was severely disadvantaged. “Who was that woman—grandmother? Who was she?”
Bournestein blinked, surprised. “You don’t recall?”
Her eyes narrowed at him. “Recall what? Does this have to do with the whorehouse?”
He grunted as his head tilted to the side. “What do you remember, Sienna? It isn’t much if you don’t recall Miss Johnson. But you seem to know about the Joker’s Roost.”
B
last it. She’d already revealed too much. She bit her tongue, her chin jutting out in stubborn refusal to answer.
Bournestein let out a wicked chuckle. “Not much, then. But just as bull-headed as always.” He lifted his cane slightly to point at her. “Miss Johnson worked for me for a number of years. Then she was too old to service the customers. I thought she’d make ye a good grandmother.”
A growl roared through the rag in Logan’s mouth and Sienna spun back to see him twisting, freeing his arm. The club slammed into his gut, his arm recaptured before he could do damage with his swinging fist.
Bournestein lifted the cane to point past her shoulder to Logan struggling against the wall. “Do ye even remember this one, child?”
“Enough.” She turned back to her father, her lip curling. “I know Logan’s my husband. I know that he’s my lifeblood. I know that he hasn’t been lying to me for the past ten years.”
“Lying?” Instant red splotches mottled Bournestein’s balding head. “I been keeping you safe, girl. Keeping you in peace like yer mother wanted. Out of the city. That’s where she wanted to go with ye, so that’s where I stuck ye.”
“I had a life.” Without taking her eyes off of her father, her arm flew back, her fingers motioning to Logan. “A life with this man and you ripped that away from me. And now this? What is this? You come into our house with these…these…brutes and you attack him? What kind of a monster are you?”
Bournestein jabbed his cane at Logan. “Knock him.”
Before Sienna could fully swivel around and stop it, the club was blasting down on Logan’s head.
Her heart stopped.
Logan’s head fell forward, limp.
“Logan—”
“Don’t wail, child. They just knocked his eyes out.”
She couldn’t take her look off of the top of Logan’s dark hair. Willing him to move. Willing his eyes to open and his head to pop up.
One of the brutes shifted and Logan’s head rolled to the side, unresponsive. A thin trail of blood snaked down his temple.
The Devil in the Duke Page 10