A Duke Never Yields (18 page)

Morini shifted forward and took Abigail’s hand between hers. “I think you are not seeing the duke with your true eyes.”

Abigail gathered herself. “So you see, you mustn’t get your hopes up. Even if Wallingford loves me, loves me enough to wish to marry me, it’s not enough. He’s not a suitable husband, and I’m certainly not a suitable duchess, and we should make each other quite miserable. Either way, the curse wouldn’t be broken.”

A flurry of noise overlaid her last words. Footsteps rattled down the hallway, and the door to the dining room sprang open before Morini could reply.

“Signorina!” burst out Maria in eager Italian syllables, sparkle-eyed, gripping her apron with both hands. “Don Pietro is here. And his acolyte, oh, signorina! The most beautiful young man in the world!”

“Of course he is.” Abigail rose from the chair with a deep sigh. “Exactly what the castle needs.
Another
handsome chap sworn to chastity.”

*   *   *

T
he two cups sat side by side on the worktable, both plain and white, handles turned away from the other, as if they were enjoying a confidential chat. A pot of honey squatted a foot or two away, like a round-bellied chaperone.

Burke’s voice rose from behind Wallingford’s back, in response to the question the duke had just posed. “
Two
teacups? How extraordinary. I suppose . . . well, I wanted another cup.”

Wallingford stepped forward and peered into the cups. Triumph flooded his veins: the heady sensation of having one’s worst suspicions confirmed by the facts on the ground. He turned to face Burke and brandished an accusing finger. “Half full, both of them. You didn’t think simply to refill the first?”

Burke rolled his eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, old chap. You’re like a detective from one of those dashed sensational novels. I suppose I forgot about the first cup. One tends to get a bit distracted, fiddling with machines all morning.”

Already, Burke’s composure had returned. His arms were crossed against his chest, and his face had relaxed into annoyed boredom. His right foot twitched, in preparation for an impatient tap against the worn wooden floorboards of the workshop.

Wallingford wasn’t fooled, not for an instant. He cast his eyes about the room, speculating, considering, until his gaze fell upon the large wooden cabinet next to the counter fixed to the opposite wall.

Just the right size for a contraband female.

Wallingford strode across the floor, past the automobile, and reached for the knob of the cabinet door with tingling fingers. By God, Lady Morley must be shaking in her boots by now.

“Look here!” Burke exclaimed.

Wallingford flung open the door and shouted: “
Aha!
”

The hinges squeaked in astonishment, unnaturally loud against the empty stillness of the cabinet. A pot of paint, upset by the intrusion, toppled from the shelf at the top and landed with a ringing crash on the floor.

“You see?” Burke said triumphantly. “Nothing there.”

Wallingford whipped around. “Oh, she’s here, all right. I know it. I can feel her, sneering at us.” His every sense had prickled to life, sweeping the sunlit dimensions of Burke’s workshop with a surveyor’s eye for detail. He stalked the perimeter, examining each chest, each stack of parts and machinery. The leaning tower of pneumatic tires, inside and out. He cocked his head toward the rafters, in case her ladyship should be swinging by her marsupial tail.

Burke stood next to the automobile, not quite resting himself on the smooth metal frame of one door, his arms still crossed. “Wallingford, you’re boring me. Can you not learn to control this . . . this clinical paranoia of yours? Find some other baseless obsession. Resume your goose feather flirtation with young what’s-her-name. Oh,
really
. I assure you, she’s not in the damned
sink
!”

Wallingford turned and sniffed the air. Was he mistaken, or did the faint hint of lilies hover about the air?

Lilies. Lady Morley’s scent.

He scowled at Burke, who stood with legs planted and arms crossed next to the machine in the center of the room, green eyes narrowed against the sunlight now shafting through the window.

The
machine
. In the center of the room.

Burke’s automobile sat guilelessly on its blocks, without wheels or seats, its smooth metal returning the gleam of the sun. It was long and sleek and narrow and quite unlike any other automobile Wallingford had encountered in his limited experience, dashing almost, even denuded of any obvious signs that it was an automobile at all. Burke was immensely proud of it. Not three days ago he had said, over breakfast, and without a trace of immodesty, that it would change the entire course of automobile design, provided he could get the damned electric battery to do its duty.

Burke adored that machine.

Wallingford whispered, “Yes. Of course.”

“You’re mad,” snapped Burke. He took a step.

Wallingford swallowed the distance to the automobile in two eager strides. He curled his hands around the metal edge, where he presumed the door should be, and tilted his body with a deliberate flourish to peer inside.

The floorboards stared back up at him, polished to liquid honey smoothness, containing not a trace of a cowering dowager marchioness.

He looked forward and back, into the shadows, just to be certain she had not shrunk herself to rodent size and scurried beneath the steering column.

From some nearby tree outside the silent workshop, the squirrels had set to chattering. Wallingford felt a growl of frustration rise up in his throat. “Empty,” he said, turning back to Burke. He was seething, razor sharp with suspicion, like a hound whose quarry had darted into the thickets at the last instant. “Where is she, then?”

Burke spread his hands innocently, palms upward. “Haven’t the slightest. Back in the castle, perhaps?”

The solution was here somewhere. Lady Morley could not have dissolved into the air. Her tea still sat right there in its cup, with a trace of warmth. How had she escaped? Not by the front door, clearly.

But the carriage doors at the back?

Wallingford stared at the old wooden portal, hands on hips. His mind reviewed the chain of events, went over the details of his own arrival a short while ago. Penhallow had been chatting amiably with Burke. He had been on the point of leaving, in fact, with no marchioness in sight. “She slipped out, didn’t she? When Penhallow arrived.”

Burke threw his hands up in the air and groaned.

Wallingford stomped toward the carriage doors. Wood warped, bars coated with dust, they looked as if they hadn’t been opened in decades, but who was he to judge such things? He grasped the bolt, yanked it from its socket, and flung open the right-hand door. The immediate burst of noontime sun stung his eyeballs.

He looked about the little clearing behind the workshop. “The question is whether she’s gone back to the castle or lingered about, waiting for us to leave.”

“Search away,” said Burke, behind him.

Wallingford stepped forward into the dappled sunshine. The scent of apple blossom surrounded him, warm and delicate, from the orchard on the terrace above. His boots sank into the soft new grass. “My guess is that she’s still about. She’s a persistent woman, after all. Tenacious.” He glanced back at Burke. “Come along. I’d like to keep an eye on you.”

“You bloody dukes. You don’t understand the first thing about actual work. How, for example, it requires hours of uninterrupted concentration . . .”

“Humor me.”

Up went Burke’s arms again. “Bloody hell, Wallingford.” But he followed anyway, in grudging steps, coming to rest at last against a gnarled and ancient olive tree, his ginger head nearly losing itself in the new-laden branches. “I’ll wait here,” he said grimly.

Wallingford did not give a damn for Burke’s grimness. Dukes were not in the business of pleasing others, after all. He meant only to find Lady Morley, to roust her out of whatever hollow she had hidden herself in until his departure from the workshop, and from there to roust her and her companions out of the castle itself.

For Burke’s sanity, and his own.

He raised his head and sniffed the air, searching for the telltale hint of Lady Morley’s lilies, but smelled only the sweetness of the apple blossoms, the gentle hints of sunshine and grass, as he paced about the clearing in measured steps. What had Lady Morley been wearing today? Blue? Yellow? He couldn’t remember, couldn’t even recall seeing her. Surely those endless skirts would be difficult to hide outdoors.

But he saw only the brown of the trunks and limbs, the green of the leaves, the endless springtime blue of the sky above the trees.

Burke called out from his olive branches. “There, you see? She’s not here. Now would you mind taking yourself off?”

Wallingford circled slowly back to the door. His mind, accustomed since childhood to the split-second adventure of hunting, turned keenly over the possibilities. She was not in the clearing, likely hadn’t been in the clearing. She was not in the workshop itself. What had he missed?

He glanced at his uncle, who stood firm next to the olive tree, his face set in stern lines. “Well done, Burke,” he said. “Admirably played. But next time, I assure you, I’ll be ready.”

“Whose blasted side are you on?”

“Yours, though you may not believe it.” He put his hand on the latch.

Burke started forward. “Look here, man. You’ve already searched the damned cottage!”

“Only retrieving my hat, for God’s sake.” Wallingford pushed open the door and stepped through, blinking, his eyes adjusting to the dimness after the unchecked sunshine outside.

“I’ll retrieve your hat!” said Burke, dashing in behind him.

Wallingford turned around. “For God’s sake . . .”

Burke stood with the sunlight at his back, hands flexing at his sides. Wallingford could not see his face properly, but there was no mistaking the wideness of alarm in his eyes, the taut set of his shoulders and arms.

The
devil
.

Wallingford smiled, a slow and satisfied smile. For a moment there, a brief and rather horrifying moment, he’d wondered whether his instincts had truly been scrambled by the befuddling effects of Tuscan sunshine and Abigail Harewood, and not necessarily in that order.

“Aha,” he said softly. “She’s still here, isn’t she?”

Burke’s feet shifted. “She was never here. You and your damned imagination.”

Wallingford turned in a slow and calculating circle. The details of the workshop slid past his eyes, the same as before, the cabinet and chests and machine parts, the automobile in the center of the room. What had he missed? He rubbed his fingers against his thumb, as if to draw out the answer from his own skin. “Now, if I were a lady, caught in flagrante . . .”

“In flagrante
,
my arse.”

“. . . where would I scurry to hide my shame? A slender lady, mind you. And one with plenty of nerve. None of your missish airs about Lady Morley, I’ll say that.”

Burke said nothing, merely stood there by the carriage doors, crackling with expectancy. His hair, poor chap, seemed actually to stand out from his head, like a ginger thistle.

Wallingford came to a stop. No use looking where he’d looked before. He’d searched up, he’d searched north and south, west and east, inside and outside. But he had not looked . . .

His gaze, roaming about the vacant machine, slipped downward.

“By God,” he said. “You damned clever thing.”

“Wallingford, you’re mad.”

Just like the end of a long day’s hunt, when the fox had led them a merry chase across half the county, and they were wet and tired and muddy, and the drizzle had moved in and spoilt his coat, and the infernal hounds had lost the scent time and again, and at last, at
last
, as if by the hand of some magnanimous Creator, the old devil fox made some critical error. Had grown overconfident and shown himself.

Wallingford took his time, walking across the floor to the automobile on its blocks. There was no point in rushing the moment. Such intense pleasure must be savored.

“Do you know, Burke,” he said, “I almost admire this Lady Morley of yours. It takes a certain amount of fortitude, not to say cheek, to lie beneath an automobile for such a considerable period of time. I do wonder whether she’s sincerely in love with you after all.”

He stopped, mere feet away from the sleek metal box that contained all Phineas Burke’s dearest hopes. Something stirred in his chest, some unfamiliar sensation, something that another man might perhaps have called . . . what was the word?

Sympathy
.

“Are you, Lady Morley?” he asked softly. “Are you in love with my friend Burke?”

No reply came. Naturally, a Harewood woman would never be so accommodating as to essay a direct answer to a direct question.

Wallingford eased himself down into a catlike crouch and put one hand on the floor. His riding boots creaked with indignation. “Although,” he said, leaning his face beneath the bottom edge of the machine to peer into the shadows, “I daresay she wouldn’t recognize the emotion if it slapped her on her pert little . . .”

Daylight
. Nothing but daylight and . . . was that a spider?

He struck the floor with his fist. “Bloody hell. She’s gone!”

TEN

W
allingford was halfway back to the first terrace when the answer struck him.

The cabinet.

He staggered to a halt and slapped his hand against his thigh.

Good God. Of course. She’d slipped out from under the automobile when they’d gone outside, and then darted into the empty cabinet when the carriage doors had rattled open again, the clever devil.

He slapped his thigh again, this time with his closed fist. A child could have figured it out. How they must be laughing at him now, absolutely doubled over at his witlessness. If they weren’t already locked in a passionate embrace, of course.

A pair of squirrels raced across the faint beaten-down grass on the path before him, squabbling angrily over some purloined delicacy, or else madly in love. Together they scampered up a towering cypress, one chasing the other, until Wallingford lost them in the branches.