Leslie Lafoy (10 page)

“And now that you know all about me,” she said, taking a sip of wine, “it’s only fair that you tell me something about yourself.”

“There isn’t much to tell.” Well, there was a great deal to tell, actually, but he really wasn’t all that interested in
talking. If he’d had his druthers, he’d much rather close and lock the dining room doors, sweep the table clean and lay her down on it.

“Your family name is Mackenzie,” she pressed. “Scotch, obviously, but I don’t hear the brogue in your voice.”

Then again, some women considered conversation foreplay. “My father’s ancestors came to England with the first King James. In the course of the almost three hundred years since, the Stuart blood that was once in us has been considerably diluted. A good nosebleed these days would be the last of it.”

She smiled and then tipped her chin up to laugh outright. His loins tightened instantly.

“My paternal grandfather was your father’s cousin,” he said, in part to distract himself, in part to keep the game going. “The title had to do quite a bit of backtracking and side-sliding on the family tree to be dumped on my doorstep.”

“You make it sound as though you weren’t expecting it and don’t much want it.”

“I wasn’t and I was rather enjoying the life I had.”
But things are definitely looking up at the moment.

She laughed again and set her plate aside. And then, to his deep and abiding appreciation, she leaned forward, picked up the wine glass in one hand, propped the elbow of her other arm on the table, and cradled her cheek in her palm. Her eyes sparkling, she smiled across the table at him and said, “I’m afraid that you’re going to have to explain all that. It’s simply too intriguing to leave as a mystery. How could you not have known you’d someday be a duke?”

He’d explain anything the provocative little siren wanted
to know. “You weren’t aware that you had a brother? And that he was killed some six months ago?”

“No!” she gasped, her eyes wide.

Drayton nodded. “His name was Daniel. I suppose it says a great deal, though, that he was always known as Dinky.”

“How horrible. How could they do that to him?”

“The name fit him. Like a glove.” He cocked a brow and added pointedly, “A very small glove. With sequins.”

“Oh,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

“Yes, oh. Dinky lived most of his life in Paris.”

“Where he’d be far less likely to cause the family embarrassment.”

He lifted his glass to her and, as she sipped her wine, he went on, saying, “When Geoffrey died, Dinky was informed of his social elevation and went out with friends to celebrate. According to the French authorities, he was accidentally strangled to death in a drunken . . . encounter.”

“Well,” she offered with a little chuckle, “it can’t be said that the family is boring.”

“There being no other direct descendants,” he continued, watching her take another sip and wondering what sort of tolerance she had for alcohol, “the queen’s men went to the archives and starting tracing the lineage backward, looking for someone to fill Dinky’s spangled shoes. In a stroke of pure, rotten luck, my name was the first one that came up.”

“No one can make you wear anything you don’t want to wear.”

“
Au contraire, ma petite
. Two men arrived at my barracks, informed me of my misfortune, stripped me out of my uniform, stuffed me into an ill-fitting suit, and hauled
me off to the office of a barrister. All within the span of three hours.”

“You were in the military?”

“Like my father and uncles before me,” he supplied, “I was an officer in Her Majesty’s Royal Regiment of Artillery. Which, as it turns out, was of very little practical preparation for fulfilling the duties of a duke.”

Her heart racing at a ridiculous pace, Caroline grinned.
This
was what Simone had been talking about when she’d said that Drayton was a “regular” man. No airs, no prigginess. Oh, but Simone had so much to learn about men. Drayton Mackenzie wasn’t regular in any way at all.

“Ah, you only think you’re speechless now,” he said. “Wait until you hear the rest of it.”

“This would be the part of the story relating to the conditions set in the will?”

“Oh, you can’t possibly appreciate the conditions of the will until you understand the conditions of the estate in general.”

“Which are?”

“Abysmal.”

She laughed and drank a bit more wine. “I suspect that our respective definitions of ‘abysmal’ are wildly different.”

“Well, let’s just see, shall we?”

“All right,” she laughingly challenged. “Tell away.”

“There are three physical properties in the estate,” he began, absently swirling his wine in the glass. “The first is the London town house. It’s in Hyde Park. Very fashionable, you know. It has a staff of sixteen and a payroll that hasn’t been fully met in the last eight months. I can only assume that the staff hasn’t moved on to other positions because the grocers have continued to deliver food
on a regular basis, putting the bills on what is now
my
tab.”

He was positively adorable in his frustration. “Sixteen people could consume a great deal of food.”

“And they do,” he assured her, grinning. “Additionally, because God forbid that anything in this be a pleasant surprise, dear ol’ Geoffrey spared no expense in building this monument to his importance, but chose a builder who spent no tuppence he didn’t have to in hiring the workers who actually constructed the damn thing.”

“Uh-oh,” she said, drinking to keep herself from laughing out loud.

“Yes. I’ve been informed by a structural engineer that if there should be a strong breeze on the same day that there’s three inches of snow, it will collapse into the neighboring property.”

How he could make it all so delightfully entertaining . . . “Can it be fixed? Made sound?”

He held up his hand and shook his head. “The second property left to me is a strand of shoreline on the coast of Cornwall, complete with a twenty-room mansion that overlooks the sea and which, at some point in the past, I assume, must have been quite lovely. I can only imagine its former glory, of course, because the entire west wall of the house has fallen off and allowed persons unknown to cart away all the furnishings.”

Oh, God. She was going to explode in the most unladylike laughter. “And Geoffrey didn’t have it repaired?”

“Geoffrey was up to his eyeballs in debt. The cost of building the house in Hyde Park, the expense of keeping Dinky in Paris, and the bills for preventing sixteen people from starving to death in London were the least of his obligations. There was also the duchess. Or more accurately,
her expectations, revenge, and the effective use of her dowry to achieve both.”

“This just gets worse and worse.”

“Yes, it does. More wine?” he asked, snagging the bottle. “It gets easier to contemplate when you’ve had great quantities of alcohol.”

“You said revenge,” she reminded him, holding out her glass and letting him fill it. “I gather that the duchess knew about his dalliances.”

“According to the barrister—who, by the by, wasn’t kind enough to get me drunk before telling me all of this—Brunhilda—”

“Brunhilda?”

“Yes, Brunhilda.”

“You’re joking!” she accused through her laughter.

“I am not. Apparently she was from Alsace-Lorraine and from a family known for sturdy physiques and their minor claims to Austrian royalty. In any event, her major appeal to Geoffrey was that she came with a huge dowry.”

“Ah,” she said, lifting her glass in salute. “One of those loveless marriages we were talking about earlier.”

“Without, after Dinky’s birth, apparently even the practical service exchanges to make it tolerable.”

“So sad,” she said, drinking. It was wonderful wine. So sweet and smooth and enjoyable. Rather like Drayton Mackenzie in certain respects.

He snorted. “Lady Ryland was apparently the kind of woman you didn’t cross without paying for it several times over. When Geoffrey’s indiscretions became a public embarrassment, she went to her papa with the tales and, through what was apparently a hideously complicated legal maneuver, he managed to get his little princess
control of her dowry. After that, if Geoffrey wanted so much as a new pair of underdrawers, he had to ask her for them.”

“Didn’t he inherit money of his own?” she asked, fascinated. With the story. Even more so with the man telling it.

“Aside from being a first-class bounder, Geoffrey was also a drunk, a gambler, and the world’s worst money manager.”

“Of course.” She shook her head, polished off the wine in her glass, and held out the empty stemware, smiling and saying, “More wine, please.”

He grinned and poured. “Which brings me to the third property I inherited from him. The country estate. Ryland Castle. I have no idea what sort of physical condition the dwelling itself is in. I’ll be seeing it for the first time when we arrive there tomorrow. I can tell you, however, all about the estate’s financial condition because the barrister felt obliged to bludgeon me with its account ledgers.”

She drank and he continued to entertain her with travesty, saying, “It has a staff of twenty-five people who, apparently, are also in no danger whatsoever of starvation. The castle sits in the midst of a thousand acres in the famously prosperous and fertile agricultural region of Norfolk. A thousand acres that have managed, somehow, to operate at a significant annual loss for the last eighteen consecutive years.”

Well, that wasn’t amusing. Not in the least. She lifted her head out of her hand and straightened to consider him. “How is that possible?”

“Judging by the accounts that have been kept, my one thousand acres have long had the lowest yields of any estate in the region.”

“Really,” she drawled. “It should be interesting to actually see the harvest come in this fall.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

Caroline nodded. “Honest accounting should improve your financial situation a great deal.”

He snorted again. “The hole Geoffrey dug is so deep it would take twenty years of crop income to even bring the accounts current.”

She arched a brow, asked, “Are we at the conditions of the will now?”and took a bracing drink of her wine.

“We are, indeed,” he said blithely. “Lady Ryland died a year before Geoffrey did and with her fingers still wrapped tightly around the purse strings. Geoffrey could have her money only if he publicly recognized his bastards and used the dowry funds to see them married off as befitted their new social status.”

“The humiliation of it all for him.”

“That, the expense and time of legal hoop-jumping, and the satisfaction of controlling from the grave how her husband used her money. It’s a complicated procedure for a peer to recognize his illegitimate offspring. It requires mountains of paperwork, a regiment of solicitors, special dispensations to be secured from the government, then gaining the queen’s approval—”

“Victoria?”

He grinned. “She’s the only queen we have at the moment.”

Well, yes, she knew that. It was just that the idea of the queen’s knowing all about the sordid details of her life . . . She washed the mortification away with a healthy drink before she pressed on, asking, “She’ll have final say?”

“She’s already had it. Two months before Geoffrey
croaked off, she waved her scepter over the paper, stuck her signet ring in the wax, and sent it on for the signatures of the elevated—that would be you and your sisters.”

Oh, she’d thrown that last mouthful of wine down too quickly. Her head was starting to wobble on her shoulders, making straight thinking a bit of a trick. “Two months?”

He nodded and his smile looked weak. “Geoffrey didn’t hire an investigator to actually find his daughters until he was sure he could get something for them. The agent’s report was being finalized when the old man died. The agent handed it—and his bill, of course—to me the day after that first meeting with the barrister.”

“And the conditions Lady Ryland set in her will passed on to you as the new Duke of Ryland,” she guessed.

He lifted his glass and then brought it to his lips and drained it.

“And you said there wasn’t much to tell,” she accused, shaking her head in wonder. The entire room tilted on an angle as she did. Caroline blinked, smiled, and propped her chin in her hand to put it all back to rights.

“I was still intending at that point to keep the realities to myself,” he admitted, his eyes twinkling, his smile wide and easy.

There really should be laws, she thought, forbidding men to look so damn handsome. “Why did you change your mind?”

He laughed softly. “I had a vision of rolling up the drive of Ryland Castle to find a burned-out hulk and twenty-five persons roasting my last fatted calf on the roof of the lone remaining turret. It occurred to me that explaining it all at that point might be a bit more awkward than it would be now.”

For Lord Ryland, most definitely. But Drayton Mackenzie had never had an awkward moment in his life. “The castle could be in fine condition,” she reminded him. He lowered his chin and cocked a brow. “All right,” she admitted, chuckling, “it’s not likely. How soon will you receive control of Brunhilda’s money?”

He sighed. “I get half of the set-asides for each of you, upon your signatures. The solicitor will arrive at Ryland Castle with the documents the day after tomorrow. The funds will be available in the form of letters of credit he’s also bringing along. The remaining halves will be released from trust on your marriages.”

She thought about that in the foggy, not-terribly-concerned-about-anything sort of way her mind was working. “It could be years,” she eventually concluded. “Especially considering how young and socially withdrawn Fiona is.”

“I’m beginning to understand why ol’ Geoffrey drank so heavily.”

Well, yes, she could, too. It was rather nice to float along not being all that affected by concerns that would otherwise be quite troublesome. Concerns like money and marrying strangers to get it. “Of course, being a duke,” she said as the thought drifted through her awareness, “you have incredible potential for marrying well yourself. Just don’t pick a Brunhilda and get the money for her up front.”