Seducing the Duchess (39 page)

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Authors: Ashley March

BOOK: Seducing the Duchess
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“I love you,” he murmured in her ear, at her temple, against her cheek. His lips traced over the path where her tears had fallen. “I’m sorry, my darling. Charlotte. I’m sorry for everything. You will never know—”
He covered her mouth with his own, then groaned as she responded with the same urgency. Her hands caught in his hair and she pressed herself against him.
He tried to tell her with the kiss everything he wasn’t able to say. The words he couldn’t write down in a poem, the romantic phrases she deserved to hear, the full extent of his love for her which he would never be able to adequately express. There was no rhyme or meter, but only softness and heat and the rich, addictive taste of her.
At last he broke away. “Thank you,” he murmured against her mouth.
“For what?”
“For loving me. For giving me one more chance.” He kissed her again; he couldn’t help it. “I promise it will be the last one I need.”
“It better be,” she said, staring into his eyes. After a minute, she withdrew from his embrace and pushed him aside to shut the door behind them.
“I will contact my solicitor tomorrow to cancel the petition.”
She paused, her hand still on the handle. “I never asked you to cancel the petition.”
Philip stopped breathing. “I thought—”
“
Tsk
,
tsk
, Your Grace.” She shoved away from the door. “I would have thought you’d have learned by now. There you are again, trying to control everything.”
She drew a finger down the center of her throat, past her collarbone to the valley between her breasts. Philip’s heart lurched in his chest, and suddenly he was breathing again—much, much faster than before.
She lifted her other hand and began to draw off her gloves. Slowly, the fabric lingering at the vulnerable flesh of her wrists.
Charlotte glanced up at him through her lashes. “You have much to make up for before I decide I don’t want a divorce, after all. I might need some convincing.” Dangling the pair of gloves in the air, her lips curved seductively. “Do you think you can convince me, Philip?”
The gloves dropped to the floor. He watched them land on the rug between them, then looked up to meet her gaze. Her eyes sparkled with laughter, desire—and love. Finally, love.
“I will certainly try my best,” he said, and strode toward her.
Read on for a preview of
 
MY LORD SCANDAL
 
first in the Notorious Bachelors series from the “deliciously wicked and tenderly romantic”*
Emma Wildes
 
 
 
*
New York Times
bestselling author Celeste Bradley
T
he alley below was filthy and smelled rank, and if he fell off the ledge, Lord Alexander St. James was fairly certain he would land on a good-sized rat. Since squashing scurrying rodents was not on his list of favorite pastimes, he tightened his grip and gauged the distance to the next roof. It looked to be roughly the distance between London and Edinburgh, but in reality was probably only a few feet.
“What the devil is the matter with you?” a voice hissed out of the darkness. “Hop on over here. This was your idea.”
“I do not
hop
,” he shot back, unwilling to confess that heights bothered him.They had since the night he’d breached the towering wall of the citadel at Badajoz with forlorn hope. He still remembered the pounding rain, the ladders swarming with men, and that great black drop below. . . .
“I know perfectly well this was my idea,” he muttered.
“Then I’m sure, unless you have an inclination for a personal tour of Newgate Prison, which, by the by, I do not, you’ll agree we need to proceed. It gets closer to dawn by the minute.”
Newgate Prison. Alex didn’t like confined spaces any more than he liked heights. The story his grandmother had told him just a few days ago made him wish his imagination was a little less vivid. Incarceration in a squalid cell was the last thing he wanted. But for the ones you love, he thought philosophically as he eyed the gap, and he had to admit that he adored his grandmother, risks have to be taken.
That thought proved inspiration enough for him to leap the distance, landing with a dull thud but, thankfully, keeping his balance on the sooty shingles. His companion beckoned with a wave of his hand and in a crouched position began to make a slow pilgrimage toward the next house.
The moon was a wafer obscured by clouds. Good for stealth, but not quite so wonderful for visibility. Two more alleys and harrowing jumps and they were there, easing down onto a balcony that overlooked a small walled garden.
Michael Hepburn, Marquess of Longhaven, dropped down first, light on his feet, balanced like a dancer. Alex wondered, not for the first time, just what his friend did for the War Office. He landed next to him, and said, “What did your operative tell you about the layout of the town house?”
Michael peered through the glass of the French doors into the darkened room. “I could be at our club at this very moment, enjoying a stiff brandy.”
“Stop grumbling,” Alex muttered. “You live for this kind of intrigue. Lucky for us, the lock is simple. I’ll have this open in no time.”
True to his word, a moment later one of the doors creaked open, the sound loud to Alex’s ears. He led the way, slipping into the darkened bedroom, taking in with a quick glance the shrouded forms of a large canopied bed and armoire. Something white was laid out on the bed, and on closer inspection he saw that it was a nightdress edged with delicate lace, and that the coverlet was already turned back. The virginal gown made him feel very much an interloper—which, bloody hell, he was. But all for a good cause, he told himself firmly.
Michael spoke succinctly. “This is Lord Hathaway’s daughter’s bedroom. We’ll need to search his study and his suite across the hall. Since his lordship’s rooms face the street and his study is downstairs, this is a much more discreet method of entry. It is likely enough they’ll be gone for several more hours, giving us time to search for your precious item. At this hour, the servants should all be abed.”
“I’ll take the study. It’s more likely to be there.”
“Alex, you do realize you are going to have to finally tell me just what we are looking for if I am going to ransack his lordship’s bedroom on your behalf.”
“I hope you plan on being more subtle than that.”
“He’ll never know I was there,” Michael said with convincing confidence. “But what the devil am I looking for?”
“A key. Ornate, made of silver, so it’ll be tarnished to black, I suspect. About so long.” Alex spread open his hand, indicating the distance between the tip of his smallest finger and his thumb. “It’ll be in a small case, also silver. There should be an engraved
S
on the cover.”
“A key to
what
, dare I ask, since I am risking my neck to find it?”
Alex paused, reluctant to reveal more. But Michael had a point, and moreover, could keep a secret better than anyone of Alex’s acquaintance. “I’m not sure,” he admitted, quietly.
Michael’s hazel eyes gleamed with interest even in the dim light. “Yet here we are, breaking into a man’s house.”
“It’s . . . complicated.”
“Things with you usually are.”
“I’m not at liberty to explain to anyone, even you, my reasons for being here. Therefore my request for your assistance. In the past you have proven not only to think fast on your feet and stay cool under fire, but you also have the unique ability to keep your mouth firmly shut, which is a very valuable trait in a friend. In short, I trust you.”
Michael gave a noncommittal grunt. “All right, fine.”
“If it makes you feel better, I’m not going to steal anything,” Alex informed him in a whisper, as he cracked open the bedroom door and peered down the hall. “What I want doesn’t belong to Lord Hathaway, if he has it. Where’s his study?”
“Second hallway past the bottom of the stairs. Third door on the right.”
The house smelled vaguely of beeswax and smoke from the fires that kept the place warm in the late-spring weather. Alex crept—there was no other word for it—down the hall, sending a silent prayer upward to enlist heavenly aid for their little adventure to be both successful and undetected. Though he wasn’t sure, with his somewhat dissolute past—or Michael’s, for that matter—if he was at all in a position to ask for benevolence.
The hallway was deserted but damned dark. Michael clearly knew the exact location of Hathaway’s personal set of rooms, for he went directly to the left door and cracked it open, and disappeared inside.
Alex stood at a vantage point where he could see the top of the staircase rising from the main floor, feeling an amused disbelief that he was a deliberate intruder in someone else’s house, and had enlisted Michael’s aid to help him with the infiltration. He’d known Michael since Eton, and when it came down to it, no one was more reliable or loyal. He’d go with him to hell and back, and quite frankly, they
had
accompanied each other to hell in Spain.
They’d survived the fires of Hades, but had not come back to England unscathed.
Time passed in silence, and Alex relaxed a little as he made his way down the stairs into the darkened hallway, barking his shin only once on a piece of furniture that seemed to materialize out of nowhere. He stifled a very colorful curse and moved on, making a mental note not to take up burglary as a profession.
The study was redolent of old tobacco and the ghosts of a thousand glasses of brandy. Alex moved slowly, pulling the borrowed set of picklocks again from his pocket, rummaging through the drawers he could open first, and then setting to work on the two locked ones.
Nothing. No silver case. No blasted key.
Damn
.
The first sound of trouble was a low, sharp, excited bark. Then he heard a woman speaking in modulated tones—audible in the silent house—and alarm flooded through him. The voice sounded close, but that might have been a trick of the acoustics of the town house. At least it didn’t sound like a big dog, he told himself, feeling in a drawer for a false back before replacing the contents and quietly sliding it shut.
A servant? Perhaps, but it was unlikely, for it was truly the dead of night, with dawn a few good hours away. As early as most of the staff rose, he doubted one of them would be up and about unless summoned by her employer.
The voice spoke again, a low murmur, and the lack of a reply probably meant she was talking to the dog. He eased into the hallway to peer out and saw that at the foot of the stairs a female figure was bent over, scratching the ears of what appeared to be a small bundle of active fur, just a puppy, hence the lack of alarm over their presence in the house.
She was blond, slender, and, more significantly, clad in a fashionable gown of a light color. . . .
Several more hours, my arse. One of Lord Hathaway’s family had returned early.
It was a stroke of luck when she set down her lamp and lifted the squirming bundle of fur in her arms, and instead of heading upstairs, carried her delighted burden through a door on the opposite side of the main hall, probably back toward the kitchen.
Alex stole across the room, and went quickly up the stairs to where Michael had disappeared, trying to be as light-footed as possible. He opened the door a crack and whispered, “Someone just came home. A young woman, though I couldn’t see her clearly.”
“Damnation.” Michael could move quietly as a cat, and he was there instantly. “I’m only half done. We might need to leave and come back a second time.”
Alex pictured launching himself again across more questionable, stinking, yawning crevasses of London’s rooftop landscape. “I’d rather we finished it now.”
“If Lady Amelia has returned alone, it should be fine,” Michael murmured. “She’s unlikely to come into her father’s bedroom, and I just need a few more minutes. I’d ask you to help me, but you don’t know where I’ve already searched, and the two of us whispering to each other and moving about is more of a risk. Go out the way we came in. Wait for her to go to bed, and keep an eye on her. If she looks to leave her room because she might have heard something, you’re going to have to come up with a distraction. Otherwise, I’ll take my chances going out this way and meet you on the roof.”
With that, he was gone again and the door closed softly.
Alex uttered a stifled curse. He’d fought battles, crawled through ditches, endured soaking rains and freezing nights, marched for miles on end with his battalion, but he wasn’t a damned spy. But a moment of indecision could be disastrous with Miss Patton no doubt heading for her bedroom. And what if she also woke her maid?
As a soldier, he’d learned to make swift judgments, and in this case, he trusted Michael knew what the hell he was doing and quickly slipped back into the lady’s bedroom and headed for the balcony. They’d chosen that entry into the house for the discreet venue of the quiet private garden, and the assurance that no one on the street would see them and possibly recognize them in this fashionable neighborhood.

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