by Carrie Lomax
The Duke's Stolen Heart
Carrie Lomax
Contents
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Books by Carrie Lomax
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Excerpts from London Scandals Series
The Wild Lord: London Scandals 1
Becoming Lady Dalton: London Scandals 2
The Lost Lord: London Scandals Book 3
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Books by Carrie Lomax
Regency Historical Romance
Twelve Nights of Scandal: A Regency Holiday Novella - December 2019
The Wild Lord (London Scandals Book 1)
Becoming Lady Dalton (London Scandals Book 2)
The Lost Lord (London Scandals Book 3)
The Duke’s Stolen Heart (London Scandals Book 4) - January 2020
Contemporary series:
Say You Need Me (Janelle & Trent)
Say ‘I Do’ (Bonus Novella: Fiji Wedding)
Say You’re Mine (Olivia & Ronan)
Also by Carrie Lomax
Trick or Treat Me: Six Hot and Humorous Halloween Novellas
Find Buy Links at www.CarrieLomax.com
Chapter 1
“It appears, my lord,” the Duke of Havencrest’s footman spoke nervously after clearing his throat, “That the lady has declined your invitation to dine.”
“Indeed.”
Havencrest did not turn away from the window. He brooded down at the light snowfall turning gray in the street below. How dare she refuse him? A common thief did not decline a duke, no matter how much she disliked him.
Two days prior he had sent the American woman a letter.
Dear Miss Lowry,
I believe you have something that belongs to me.
You are invited to supper tomorrow at eight to discuss arrangements for its return.
Cordially,
The Duke of Havencrest
Although the object in question was not, technically speaking, his, Havencrest intended to have it. No mere thief could hope to hold out against him. Not with Bow Street in pursuit for her pilfering London’s ladies’ jewels all throughout the fall season. A word from him, and Miss Antonia Lowry would find herself on the business end of a hangman’s noose. The gall of her refusal cracked his reflection’s stony mask into a ghost of a smile. He moved back toward the lamp and examined her letter as if trying to discern any hint of encouragement in the looping feminine scrawl.
Dear Lord Havencrest,
I find my diary is full.
Yours,
Miss A. Lowry
The brevity of her dismissal wounded Havencrest’s pride. The more he reflected upon it, the more the venom of her rejection stung. It is just like a woman… He quelled the thought, unfinished.
Havencrest tore his first reply, and a half-dozen after it, into pieces which he fed to the fire. What might be sufficient inducement to a woman of great intelligence, uncertain breeding and a dearth of morality to help a man who occupied the highest echelons of society?
Fear. He knew her secret—or strongly suspected it—and Malcolm Hepworth Dunn, fifth Duke of Havencrest, was not above using all the immense power of his station to frighten the little thief into compliance with his wishes.
Miss Lowry,
Light fingers cannot assuage a heart heavy with guilt.
My residences, this evening, or you shall soon receive an interesting visit from Bow Street.
In all sincerity,
The Duke of Havencrest
Her response came within the hour. Her brazenness punched like a boxer’s blow to his temple. His heart thudded heavily as he read.
Your Lordship,
What makes you think I feel guilt? Bow Street is welcome to visit me at my residence with Lord Evendaw and his family in Clermont Street. I encourage you to broach the topic of a visit with Lady Evendaw, whom would undoubtedly welcome a visit from such an esteemed personage as yourself. In fact, I cannot imagine what a man of your stature might want with a simple American visiting from abroad. Nothing proper, I expect.
Regretfully,
Miss A. Lowry
If his quarry was acquainted with the concept of fear, she did not reveal it easily.
“Sir,” prompted the footman after a long silence. “Do you wish to dine alone?”
“No. However seeing as Miss Lowry has elected to leave me to my own devices, it appears I shall have to.” He moved away from the window in decisive strides. Few good decisions had ever been made with an empty stomach. “Ready my horses for after supper.”
The footman bowed and backed away to do his bidding with a hint of fear behind his expressionless features. Malcolm found the great dining room, like the rest of his home, empty and cold. He attacked the soup as though it were a mortal enemy and devoured the fish course like a famished shark. The exquisitely prepared lamb, he dismembered with unnecessary savagery. A carrot nearly escaped beneath a scrap of gravy. Malcolm stabbed it with his fork and lifted it to his mouth, victorious in his hunt, lost in thought.
As if he hadn’t had sufficient time to formulate a plan to cow Miss Lowry into submission. Like most of the aristocracy, Havencrest had retreated to his country seat to brood through the lonely Christmas holidays. Alone but for servants and memories in his grand old family mansion, his obsession with the American woman had festered for a full month. Even Boxing Day, ordinarily his greatest pleasure of the season, came and went without lightening his heart. Families receiving packages of secondhand clothing, housewares and gifts of fabric ordinarily brought a rare smile to his face, but this year, Havencrest had been too preoccupied to enjoy the ritual much. Now that he was back in London ahead of the parliamentary session forming on January twenty-ninth, Malcolm had more than enough time to consider his next move with regard to the infuriating Miss Lowry.
He needed…leverage.
Miss Lowry pretended to be unafraid of the Bow Street Runners. After a string of thefts last fall, half the ton had hired an investigator to discover whom had relieved London’s highest ladies of their pearl strings, ear bobs, bracelets and hairpins at every ball and the occasional opera since last September. After the magistrate had made a shocking arrest of Mrs. Viola Cartwright, rumored paramour to Lord Darby, the young fool who had taken a shine to the widowed sister of Lady Briarcliff.
Why should Miss Lowry feel any sense of danger from that quarter, when the idiots had already made one wrong arrest and nearly hanged an innocent woman?
After Mrs. Cartwright had been proved innocent in court thanks to the efforts of her rumored lover, the larceny had ceased as quickly as they had started. Therefore, it had to be someone within Darby and Mrs. Cartwright’s orbit. Someone with no particular goodwill toward either the man or his paramour, who yet had access to the best of London’s social events. There was no shortage of well-heeled foreigners thronging London society. The Kilpatrick family, for example, with three sisters
as bold as their brassy red hair. Yet they possessed no talent for subtlety. No, the culprit must be an innocuous young lady, newly arrived, demure and too clever by half. Miss Lowry had caught his attention
If he hadn’t glimpsed her committing a crime, he might not have believed it himself. Yet her letters proved it.
What makes you think I feel guilt? Miss Lowry had asked. It was hardly a denial, more of an oblique confirmation. Malcolm smiled grimly as he settled into his box and lumbered off through the gloom of a January evening in London. By the time he was done with her, Miss Lowry would feel far more than guilt. She would feel the lash of a whip at her back in punishment if he had anything to say about it.
* * *
The incredible arrogance of the Duke of Havencrest did not negate the danger he represented to Antonia Lowry’s peace of mind. She hovered at the door of the bedroom where she lived as guest of Lady Margaret Evendaw—widely regarded as the most insipid young lady in all England—listening.
“Is she here?” a man’s voice demanded of the butler in an arrogant growl.
“Lady Margaret is indisposed this evening, your lordship,” a cowed and obsequious butler informed the unwelcome duke with a deep bow. “Her brother, the Earl, and Lady Evendaw are at Covent Garden theatre to see Kemble’s latest Shakespeare production.”
Of course, the servant assumed the duke was here about Margaret. He would never guess for one moment that the Evendaw family’s American houseguest of indefinite duration was the true object of a duke’s impromptu visit. Petite and biddable, Antonia’s unwitting friend made a desirable prospective wife for many a London bachelor—at least, the ones who failed to understand that Margaret might be young and unsophisticated, but she was far from stupid. Naïve, however…there had been times during what these fancy people called the “Little Season,” — as opposed to the formal season just now gearing up—when it was all Antonia could do to keep her guileless companion from wandering out onto a balcony with a man more interested in her substantial dowry than in Margaret’s chatter. Antonia had not been born to this world of chess-move alliances and cutthroat matchmaking, but she grasped its rules easily enough. To be compromised forced a lady’s hand to marry. Antonia found the notion of suffering through an unwished-for marriage poisonous to her soul.
Even for a lamb of questionable good sense like her friend. Especially for someone like Margaret.
“I meant, Miss Lowry,” Havencrest said from below. Hearing her name in the duke’s low rumble sent a delicious, unexpected thrill through Antonia’s body.
“You aren’t the first man to mistake me for a mouse,” she whispered into the darkness. Antonia had edged out onto the stair landing to better eavesdrop on the men in the elegant foyer of the Earl of Evendaw’s townhome. As if he had heard her, Havencrest jerked his gaze upward. Antonia froze.
“Miss Lowry is attending to Lady Margaret. Shall I inquire whether she is able to receive visitors?” offered the butler with a note of skepticism. There could be no legitimate reason for a duke to demand an audience with an unmarried woman well after visiting hours—especially when the earl and his countess were were out attending a theater performance.
Even she, a crass American, knew that much. He must be desperate to come here. Five months’ residence amongst England’s finest families had been plenty of time for her to pick up on the basics of social expectation and comportment if not every subtlety of rank. Dukes were such rarities that even the most asocial, toothless and ancient example was considered a prize for a husband.
As Antonia recollected, Havencrest still possessed all of his teeth. Not that she had ever witnessed the dour man display them with any hint of humor or levity. He might have been handsome if it weren’t for the haunted bleakness in his gaze.
“No,” he said after a tense moment. “I’ll call upon her tomorrow afternoon. See that she is at home.”
The butler bowed, subservient. As though he had the slightest influence over her comings and goings. Ever since her arrival here last December, Antonia had made a point of going about her business in town without a chaperone. Occasionally she took a maid or a footman, but as often as not she simply left. Now, she made a mental note not to be at home tomorrow afternoon. Havencrest dragged his gaze away from the landing. Antonia inhaled sharply. Her pulse pumped, ready to run. She was good at that. Running.
After tonight, Antonia Lowry was a dead woman. The sooner the better. Pity. She had done so well insinuating herself into this world to which she did not belong. First through the company of three red-headed women from Virginia, then, as they had made inroads socially, by befriending Margaret and her family.
If Havencrest suspected that she had been the source of so much grief for the past few months, others must, too. It was amazing that she had gotten away with her false identity and petty thefts for so long. If the Kilpatrick sisters, whom she had stayed with for months prior to accepting Margaret’s invitation to reside with her brother and sister-in-law during the Christmas season, ever put their quarrelsome red heads together and figured out she had stolen from their highbrow new friends, Antonia had no doubt they would turn her over to the authorities.
“Who was that?”
Antonia started, but in the way she had learned to do many years before. She stilled instead of jerking around. Her mother had taught her how to feign placid stupidity like her life depended upon it, because once upon a time, it had. “The Duke of Havencrest stopped by. What are you doing out of bed, Maggie dear?”
“I heard voices and woke up,” Margaret sniffled. The top of her tousled blond head came to Antonia’s ear. Her small snub nose was as red as a cherry with the waxiness of frequent blowing. “What did he want?”
“To court you, I suppose,” Antonia joked, her expression teasing. To her surprise, Margaret shuddered.
“I hope not. My brother would be keen to marry me to a duke. What a success to have his youngest sister married off before she has even had a full season,” she complained bitterly.
“No unhappy marriage can be considered a success.” Antonia thought back to her mother’s acrimonious union with her father. As a child, Antonia had answered to a different name. For a while, she had been angry with her mother for taking her away from the beautiful house and relative comfort of serving a well-to-do white woman. Even at nine years old she had recognized loneliness. It wasn’t until she had been older that she understood that she had been kept as a pet because her large brown eyes and dark curls had made her doll-like in the eyes of her mother’s employer. But by the time Antonia grasped that her life as a rich woman’s accessory had been exploitative and temporary, her legal father was dead and her relationship with her mother in tatters. Those early lessons at Mrs. Beckwith’s side had proven handy as Antonia sought to improve her station, from servant-turned-thief, to fine lady. But she had plans for her future, and they did not involve husbands or skirts. All she needed was a little more money…
Margaret made a pfft sound through pursed lips. “Welcome to England, where all that matters in a marriage is how great the bride’s dowry and how respected the groom’s title.”
Antonia chuckled. “You’re funny when you’re sarcastic.” She brushed a tangle of pale hair away from Margaret’s forehead. “You’re also as hot as a chimney. Back to bed with you.”
Her friend followed Antonia’s suggestion, as obedient as a spaniel. Part of her pitied Margaret. Just eighteen, and in her first season, her brother had made no bones about wanting her well married and out of his home as quickly as possible. Antonia needed to keep Evendaw happy to keep her free lodgings as Margaret’s companion. In retrospect, she should have styled herself Mrs. Lowry, not Miss. But that decision had been made during a shipboard passage to secure the sympathies of her prior hosts, the Kilpatrick women. By the time they landed, it had been too late to change her story.
But in a few more months, with some luck, Antonia would have enough money to stop running. Some mornings, Antonia awoke with an iron b
and of panic around her ribs, heart pounding at the thought of being caught before she could disappear. Renting a small room on the fringes of Cheapside, a neighborhood with access to the tradesmen she relied upon to fence her stolen bits of wire and gemstones, had brought Antonia a small measure of peace. She could bolt at any time. Reinvent herself. Choose another name, another past, become anyone she wished—and the person Antonia wished to become next was wealthy. Being poor was, at best, an inconvenient way to live.
Havencrest had made clear that she didn’t have months, however.
“Will you read to me?” asked Margaret plaintively when they had settled her into bed. She rubbed her red nose with a square of linen. Antonia deployed the bell pull to summon a maid for a fresh pot of tea. Reading a few pages to a sick woman was a cheap way to earn her keep.
Yet Antonia dreaded the way her off-kilter pronunciations spoke the truth about her lack of formal education. At least here in England she could pretend they were odd Americanisms. It was one reason she had elected to move here, instead of out West, when the time had come to get out of New York. At the time, she had believed England offered greater proximity to wealth and the physical comforts that came with it.
London wasn’t the first city where she had pilfered the contents of its finest citizens’ pockets, but Antonia had vowed it would be the last.
Then again, Antonia’s decisions were rarely well-considered. If she were an animal she’d be a cat, forever landing on her feet after making a wild leap. Her promises were so much hot air.