Rules to Catch a Devilish Duke (17 page)

He lifted a hand and brushed the tear away with his fingers. “I probably could have told Udgell not to bother hanging the mistletoe,” he mused, kissing her cheek where the tear had been. “It doesn’t seem to be necessary.”

She spied the plant with its deep green leaves, hanging off one of the ribbons that looped before the fireplace. “That shows what you know,” she whispered, deeper excitement running like molten silver through her, and took his hand to lead him to the hearth and the thick rug before it.

*   *   *

Midnight had long passed when Adam opened his eyes. For a moment he wasn’t certain where he was, until he caught sight of the bouquet of mistletoe twisting lazily some twelve feet above his head. The drawing room.

Memory returned languidly, and he turned his head. Sophia lay against him, her head on his shoulder and his arm draped loosely about her hip. The fire behind them was nearly out, the glowing coals sending her glorious hair into a glinting, deep scarlet blaze across his chest.

And he, the man who always had something to do, somewhere to be, didn’t want to move. Naked, beginning to feel a bit chilled in the still room except for where her warm skin touched his, he felt … content. Him.

Then Sophia stirred. Adam quickly closed his eyes again, feigning sleep even as he decided that was a silly, childish thing to do. He felt her head lift, and then cold down his left side as she sat up. Evidently she didn’t feel the same contentment that he did, though his was rapidly beginning to fade.

She returned, sitting beside him, and the cool sensation of a blanket draped over him up to his chest. A moment later she lay down against him again beneath the blanket, and her lips brushed feather-light against his cheek. Her head settled on his shoulder once more, and he pretended to stir so he could circle her waist with his hand.

Once her breathing softened and deepened into sleep, he opened his eyes again. What kind of life had he lived, that he couldn’t recall moments like this? That he’d never experienced this … peace before now? Or that he’d never met anyone with whom he could simply relax before a dying fire? She’d covered him with a damned blanket, when he wouldn’t know whether she’d spared him a thought or not.

She’d said he’d made Christmas for her. If he could continue feeling like he did at this moment, he would gladly make Christmas for her every day. He would give her much more than that, if she would only allow him, if he could have some assurance that whatever drudgery awaited him in life, so would this … perfection.

Sometime after that he fell asleep again, and only awoke when a wet, snuffling nose stuck itself in his ear. “Damnation,” he muttered, shoving Brutus away from him. Sophia was gone from his side, but a second later he heard her quiet chuckle. “That’s a fine good morning,” he said as he sat up.

Sophia was perched on the end of the couch closest to him, her bare legs tucked beneath her and only her man’s shirt concealing the rest of her lovely form from him. “They were pawing at the door,” she explained. “If I hadn’t let them in, someone would have come to investigate.”

“No, they wouldn’t, if they valued their continued employment. Toss me my trousers, will you?” Once she did so, he pulled them on and stood. “You prefer tea in the morning, yes?”

“Yes, but—”

Before she could finish her protest he opened the door. “Udgell. A pot of tea.” He closed the door again.

“But I’m mostly naked,” she said, her voice squeaking, and shot to her feet.

“He won’t come in.” Adam crossed to her, putting his hands on her shoulders and kissing her.

She kissed him back, her mouth soft and surprising despite the occasional biting wit of her words. “So Udgell knows to leave the tea outside? You must do this often, then.”

“Hm.” Firming his grip on her shoulders, he pushed her back down onto the couch. “I’m occasionally moody, as you might have noticed,” he said slowly. “When the door is latched, he leaves the tea outside.”

“Oh.” She frowned as he dropped down beside her. “I wasn’t trying to say I was jealous. Because I’m not. Evidently I’m simply not witty before breakfast.”

“Witty enough to have a dog sneeze in my ear.”

That made her laugh. “That was a happy coincidence.”

Jealous.
Generally he detested that word. It had signaled the end of more than one arrangement with a mistress. At this moment, however, part of him wished she
was
jealous. This friendship, however, evidently didn’t work that way. Aside from that, in a few short weeks she would be married, and to a vicar, of all things. Lucifer’s balls, she would be miserable. And damn Hennessy for selecting a torture for her when he might just as easily have been kind. The fact that he would be in a nearly identical circumstance might have been ironic, but he didn’t find it all that amusing.

“This moodiness of yours,” she said abruptly, her jaw tightening a little, as though she wasn’t certain of his reaction. “Is that why you have houseguests over Christmas? Not this Christmas, of course, but generally.”

And just like that she figured him out. He had friends whom he’d known for years with less insight into his character. They saw precisely what he allowed them to see. He could dissemble, laugh away her suggestion, or attack in a different direction, but that would be doing both of them a disservice. “Yes. I don’t like it here, but having a large number of people about makes it more tolerable. It gives me less time to myself, I suppose.”

“If you don’t like Greaves Park, why do you come?”

“It’s the family seat.” He shrugged. “If I avoided it, people would notice. I’m not about to advertise a weakness.”

For a moment she studied his face, though he had no idea what she thought she saw. “I know you don’t need my advice, but perhaps having Lady Wallace here makes the circumstance more … difficult than it needs to be. Especially this year.”

This time he drew a breath, pushing back against the tendrils of annoyance that began climbing through him. He rarely required advice, and certainly not from a gaming room chit. On the other hand, she wasn’t that easy to classify. “Not all of my guests are unconcerned with their reputations. As I’m unmarried, I require a female hostess. A family member. Especially this year.”

The door handle rattled, and both Caesar and Brutus began barking. “Hush, boys,” Sophia chastised, reaching out with both hands to scratch the mastiffs. Unlikely as it seemed that this petite woman could manage those massive dogs, they both melted into tail-wagging, leg-thumping heaps.

Clearly the lads adored her, Adam noted as he climbed to his feet and went to retrieve the pot of tea. And so did he. He paused midstep, then continued, glad he was facing away from her so she couldn’t see his expression. He adored her.

It wasn’t all that surprising, he supposed, considering that they’d been together almost constantly for ten days, and that she was pretty, exceedingly good-natured, and just as compassionate. More unexpected was the fact that the realization startled him. He did have friends in whom he confided, after all, and women with whom he had sex. He’d just never had both in one package before.

Shaking himself, and deciding that his sudden self-awareness was somewhat pitiful rather than earth-shaking, he pulled open the drawing room door and retrieved the tea tray set on the floor. If not for his looming thirtieth birthday and Eustace circling like a vulture and waiting for him to fail so she could dig her claws into his inheritance, he would have sent for the Jones brothers. It would have been a small matter to tell them he didn’t like the bridge construction, and for them to begin the project over again. Then he could spend Christmas alone with Sophia. That would be a present he definitely appreciated, if the cost to him wouldn’t have been more than he could tolerate.

EIGHT

The Greaves Park music room lay directly off the portrait gallery. Sophia paused at the top of the stairs, her gaze already drifting to the former Duke of Greaves’s portrait despite her resolve never to spare that man another glance.

“It’s just a painting,” she muttered to herself, squaring her shoulders and stepping forward.

As she drew even with the portrait, though, she slowed. Not only had this man tormented his family in life, but he’d made arrangements to control his son’s life even in death. In a sense, he’d tried to ensure that Adam would marry without love—or at the least merely to keep his properties—that the new Duke of Greaves would have as little reason to respect and honor his wife as he’d had himself.

With a deep breath she faced the painting. Those compelling gray eyes gazed back at her, unblinking. Because she knew a little bit more about him now, she could study his expression, his stance, for hints of that self-concerned cruelty, that sense of arrogant superiority he must have had.

Michael Arthur Baswich. The ninth Duke of Greaves. Evidently she would have been just his type. A shudder ran down her spine. If that man had invited her to a Christmas house party, she would have declined the invitation. She couldn’t imagine wanting to spend time in his company, much less being intimate with him.

His son, though, was something else entirely. Yes, he could be arrogant and too sure of himself, but he actually listened when she spoke. He remained concerned over her comfort, and he didn’t mind losing a hand or two of cards—even to a female.

Most telling, whether or not he would ever acknowledge it, he cared about the sort of man he was. And the sort of man he wasn’t. How many dukes invited to their homes an illegitimate, employed female who wore trousers and oversized gowns? Not the one in that painting, she was certain.

“I don’t like you,” she said, and turned her back on him.

Adam stood at the end of the hallway, watching her.
Damnation.
She couldn’t even have a one-sided conversation with a painting without someone seeing.

A moment passed before he walked forward. “I know now how you feel about him,” he drawled, indicating the portrait behind her. “How do you feel about me?”

A smile curved her mouth, her insides heating at the mere notion that he’d bothered to ask her such a question. She reached up ostensibly to straighten his cravat, but mostly so she could touch him. “It’s too early to tell.”

“Oh it is, is it?” He leaned down and kissed her softly. “What are you doing in here? You didn’t come by just to reprimand my father, I assume.”

It took a moment for her to find her voice again after that kiss. “I used to play the pianoforte. I wanted to know if I still remembered.”

He nodded, then released her to open a neighboring door where a maid cleaned windows. “Two mugs of hot cider in the music room,” he said, and returned to her side. “Shall we?”

“I thought you were meeting with your bridge builders this afternoon.”

“They aren’t here yet.” He took her hands and turned her in a circle, his deep gray eyes sparkling. “I’m almost disappointed you’re not wearing trousers today.”

She glanced down at her blue muslin. “Milly’s washing them for me. This is actually
my
dress.”

“I remember. It’s the one you wore into the river. I’m glad it wasn’t ruined.”

“One sleeve was torn and the hem was ripped out, but Milly mended it for me.” She sent him a sideways glance as they strolled into the music room. “Why did you order your head housekeeper to be my maid?”

“Because you had one gown and a godawful hat to your name, and every lady should have a maid at least once in her life.”

“And you decided that even before you knew about my father’s ultimatum,” she returned with a soft sigh. And he doubted his own humanity, the lummox.

“I’m evidently very intuitive.”

Sophia snorted. “It is nice having someone help me put up my hair. Lucille and I sometimes do each other’s hair, but she digs the clips into my skull.”

Adam chuckled. “I’m glad to spare you a little cranial scarring, then.”

With a laugh she sat at the lovely pianoforte with its panel of inlaid mahogany and polished ivory keys. “It’s almost too pretty to play.”

“Nonsense. Show me what you can do.”

Suddenly a little nervous, she paged through the music resting atop the instrument. The Nocturne no. 4 in A Major by John Field seemed vaguely familiar, and she experimentally played a few stanzas. Slowly her fingers began to remember the notes, and her confidence grew.

When a pair of long-fingered, masculine hands reached past her shoulder to turn the page she started, stumbling over a handful of notes until her mind caught up to her fingers again. “Sorry about that,” he murmured.

“Don’t be. My fault.”

She finished the piece with an impromptu flourish of the keys, and Adam applauded. “You play well.”

“It was barely passable, but thank you. I don’t play nearly enough.”

“Do you have a pianoforte at the club?”

“No. It would have been nice, but none of us could ever afford one, and Diane and Oliver already provide more generously than we ever expected.”

“I’ll purchase one for you.”

Sophia looked up at him. A lock of his black hair had fallen across his forehead, and she brushed it away, lowering her fingers to touch his cheek. He was so handsome, and she wanted to ask how many women had fallen in love with him. “I won’t be there to play it.”

“I’ll send it to Cornwall, then.”

If he put his mind to it, he could make a great deal of trouble for her. “You cannot purchase a pianoforte for me. That’s much worse than a horse. It’s more … personal.”

His eyes narrowed for just a breath. “Then I’ll gift it anonymously to The Tantalus Club’s employees in your name. I imagine quite a few of the ladies know how to play.”

That sounded more reasonable, thank goodness. “Yes, they do. And since you’re ridiculously wealthy and the girls will be thrilled, I won’t argue with you.”

His lips curved in a slow smile. “I’m all astonishment.” His gaze holding hers, Adam kissed her again.

She pulled him onto the wooden seat beside her, sliding her arms around his neck and kissing him back. Mm, she liked this man. He kept saying she was unique, but she’d never met anyone like him—dark and dangerous at one moment, witty and good-humored the next. It would take years and years to decipher him, and she would have been exceedingly willing to take the time to do so.