The Duke (35 page)

“Go,” Robert ordered her.

Bel found a small oil lamp atop the desk and felt around in the dark for a tinderbox, finally lighting it. As the small flame rose, she opened the slanted lid of the writing desk, peered inside, and riffled through its contents.

“Shall I check for letters or something like that? Oh, there’s a sketch book, drawings.”

“Bring it here.”

She obeyed, picking up the workbook of charcoal sketches. She brought it over to him and opened to the first page.

“Swans. Very gracefully done,” she said dryly, then turned another page. “Daffodils. A picture of a girl.”

Robert glanced over, his eyes tormented, his lips white. “That’s Coldfell’s daughter.”

Bel started to turn to the next page, but when she glimpsed it, she stopped in shock.
Oh, dear.

“Robert,” she said gingerly,
“do
you believe this to be Lady Coldfell’s work?”

“I’d know her hand anywhere. But that doesn’t mean she used this place for trysts.”

“Well, you’d better look at this, then.” With a wince of distaste Bel turned the page to reveal a nude sketch of Dolph Breckinridge lying in bed in a sated sleep.

Robert looked over, stared in shock, then cursed. “Take this,” he growled, thrusting the gun into her hands. “If he moves a muscle, pull the trigger.”

Bel took the gun in dismay as Robert walked away with the sketchbook and went to lean against the arm of the sofa, nearer the lantern.

Dolph started to get up.

“Don’t tempt me, you barbarian,” she warned, drawing a bead with the pistol right between his eyes.

He sneered at her. “You wouldn’t shoot me, Bel. I’m the only one who really cares, remember?”

“Shut up!”

“Breckinridge,” Robert snarled in warning.

Dolph sank back down to the floor like an angry cur at its master’s rebuke. Then Robert turned the page.

Bel glanced at his stricken face as he turned leaf after leaf, showing gracefully executed black-and-white sketches of not merely Dolph, but a carefully selected collection of the other young bucks of the ton, all in various states of undress.

“Oh, my God,” he said in a hollow voice.

She looked over and saw his dark, stormy eyes fill with stunned sorrow as he came to a three-quarter foreshortened sketch of his own face.

Bel felt his bewildered pain as her own in that moment.

He turned page after page, staring at drawings of himself in a dozen different attitudes. Whatever games Lucy had played with his heart, clearly the woman had wanted him. Longing was clear in every fine, feathery stroke of her pencil. The countess must have studied him at great length, however furtively, to have drawn him so beautifully from her memory. She had captured the restlessness in him and the passion locked within his rigidity, and his integrity and high noble pride.

He lifted his fractured gaze to hers, at a loss.

“I think she was making a conquest of you and you didn’t even know it,” she said softly.

“Of course she was,” Dolph muttered. “That’s what I just said.”

“If it was Hawkscliffe she wanted, then why did she seduce you?” Bel asked Dolph.

“Why do you think?” he retorted. “My uncle wasn’t any use to her. She needed a man between her legs, unlike you, you frigid—”

“Recall that I’m holding a pistol before you insult me,” she advised him even as she read the flicker of guilt behind his eyes. She studied him. Perhaps he had not killed Lady Coldfell, thank God, but she began to sense that he was definitely hiding
something.

Robert pushed up from the arm of the sofa. “Breckinridge, you’re free to go. I apologize for this debacle. Obviously, I was in error.”

Bel looked from one man to the other in uncertain protest.

“Well, I daresay,” Dolph snorted. He climbed cautiously to his feet and dusted off his flamboyant clothing. “I am tempted to call you out for this, Hawkscliffe, but lucky for you, I, too, can play the paragon.
I forgive
you,” he said with a sarcastic snort.

“Robert, I think he’s hiding something. I know this man—”

“He didn’t kill Lucy,” he interrupted sharply, disgust flaring in his dark eyes. “Beyond that, I don’t give a damn.”

“A wise answer, Your Grace. Now, you got what you wanted, so if we are quite through with this travesty, Belinda and I will be on our way.”

“No!” she cried, holding Dolph at bay with the gun.

“A deal is a deal, my heart,” he said with a leering smile.

“Robert!”

Hawkscliffe returned to her side and gingerly took back his pistol. “Go outside and mount up,” he murmured to her.

“I’m not going with him!” she cried, appalled.

“Yes, you are,” said Dolph.

“No, she’s not.”

Dolph’s eyes narrowed to slashes. He stepped toward Robert in spite of the gun. “She’s coming with me. That was the point of all this. You gave me your word—information for the girl.”

“I lied,” he said.

Dolph stared blankly at him. “You lied?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe this. I give you the truth and this is how you repay me? With trickery?”

Robert didn’t move, holding his stare.

Bel backed away but could not bring herself to leave the room—she could feel it in her bones that something terrible was about to happen.

Dolph glared at him in outrage. “You—Hawkscliffe, the high stickler? Why, you’re nothing but a damned liar! You fraud!”

Bel reached for her protector’s hand, certain now of what was about to happen. There was only one possible outcome when a man called another man a liar. Honor had its price. “Come with me, please, he’s not worth it,” she whispered.

“You’re a dead man,” Dolph said.

“Please, Robert, let’s go—” Dolph was a famous marksman and a crack shot.

“Yes, go, Hawkscliffe,” the baronet spat in contempt. “Go home to your mansion, you false bloody hypocrite, and take your whore with you. My second will call on you shortly. Then we’ll settle this like men.”

“No!” Bel cried, but Robert lifted his chin without protest.

Dolph stalked out between them and slammed the front door as he left.

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They rode back to Knight House in grim silence, Robert brooding and taciturn, while Bel fought panic, knowing that at dawn that insufferable lecherous boor was going to put a bullet in the man she loved. Clutching her horse’s reins, she stole frequent anxious glances at Robert, riding beside her. Moonlight limned his broad shoulders and sculpted his aquiline face, but his remote, dark stare remained fixed on the dusty road ahead. After an hour’s ride south through the moonlit countryside back into Town, they rode down Regent Street and turned right on Piccadilly.

The crowds thickened as they neared Green Park, when suddenly a series of great booms and explosions echoed through the streets, spooking their horses. Robert brought his stallion under control then reached over and grasped her gelding’s bridle, calming the animal. Once the horses were steadied, Bel and Robert, each in their own dismal worlds, looked up and saw fireworks exploding across the black sky over Green Park, opening the Regent’s Victory festival.

August the first had arrived. The terminal date of their contract.

The bursts of color rocketed then bloomed, practically atop the roof of Knight House.

Bel felt a slow tremor of loss move through her body.

She looked at Robert, saw the red glare illuminate his rugged face. Neither said a word. Bel fought a surge of emotion, remembering the last time they had watched fireworks together on that deliriously romantic night at Vauxhall. Avoiding her gaze, Robert clucked to his horse.

They proceeded through the gates of Knight House, where the grooms took their horses. Bel dismounted, removed her riding hat, and wiped the sweat from her brow, watching Robert walk wearily up to the front door. The gold light from the lanterns that flanked the doorway cast a ruddy halo over his wavy black hair.

Her heart ached for him as she watched him disappear inside. After all his honor and gallantry, his shining ideal lady had been proved an utter fraud.

Amid her compassion for him, however, was guilt, for she knew that, in her way, she was as much a fraud as Lady Coldfell. How could she let him go on thinking she had pushed him away as a ploy to get more gold out of him? Unlike Lady Coldfell, however, she still had a chance to come clean with him, if only she dared. This might be their last chance to make peace.

She stared up at the grand, ornate house, half expecting its flawless facade to come tumbling down like everyone else’s had this night.

Another tremble of cold fear ran the length of her body, but she squared her shoulders, knowing what she must do. As humiliating as this was going to be, he was her protector and she owed him the truth.

In the library Hawk dispatched two servants, one to locate his brother, Alec, to serve as his second, the other to ride to Coldfell’s villa to alert him that the long-awaited duel was set for dawn.

When they had gone he sat down at his desk and slowly pressed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He rested like that, feeling defeated and utterly alone.

He couldn’t believe how wrong he had been. Good God, but Lucy had fooled him. He had gone into this thinking himself the righteous avenger and had come out of it looking like a blundering fool.

He couldn’t blame Dolph Breckinridge for calling him out. Any man accused of so heinous a crime would have done the same. Hawk knew full well he was in the wrong and supposed his only honorable option, therefore, was to delope.

“Robert?”

He looked up at her soft call. Belinda stood in the doorway amid the shadows, her face tense and pale. Her beauty caught him like an unexpected blow to the chest. He picked up a quill pen and pretended to examine it.

“Is there something you require, Miss Hamilton? I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a rush. I have some business to get in order, as it appears there’s a jolly good chance I’ll be leaving this world with rather unforeseen haste.”

She flinched and lowered her head at his words. He stared at her.

“Silent, eh? Let me guess—you’ve come to say ‘I told you so.’ And well you should. You knew from the start that Dolph didn’t kill Lucy, but I refused to listen. Your point is well taken; I defer to your greater wisdom and shall remain to the bitter end Lucy’s fool—and yours.”

“God, but you know how to wound me,” she whispered, lifted her head, and met his stare with anguish in her eyes. “Don’t equate me with her. At least I don’t hide the fact that I’m a whore.”

He threw his pen on the desk and braced his mouth against his hand.

“I have something to say to you,” she said in a brave, hushed tone.

No doubt, he thought, braced for a tongue-lashing, the way things were going.

Belinda shut the door. His veiled gaze followed her as she moved cautiously into the room where they had shared so many intimacies. Had her show of love been a delusion, like everything else? He couldn’t tell anymore what was real, and was honestly tired of trying to figure it out.

She drifted toward his piano and rested her hand atop its glossy lid as she stood gazing toward the empty hearth. “I wanted to say that I-I’ve tried over the past two months to make your life happier in small ways. To make you more comfortable and to bring you—pleasure.”

He clamped back the impulse to confess how well she had succeeded.

He was done with her and that was that. He was about to die for her, after all, for his refusal to hand her over to Dolph. Wasn’t that enough? It was treacherous, this urge he felt to go to her and enfold her in his arms, to give comfort and to seek it.

He sat at his desk in stoic silence, waiting to hear her out and watching the complex play of emotions that chased across her fine-boned features.

“Robert, that night in the dining room, it wasn’t greed that made me push you away,” she said quietly. “The truth is—oh, Robert, please.”

“What?” he asked prosaically.

Her graceful posture turned rigid and her small, delicate hand tensed where it rested on the piano. She closed her eyes but kept her face angled slightly away from him. “I know you look down your nose at demireps. Please try to understand. You are my f-first protector. The reason I pushed you away is because . . .”

Her words broke off as she struggled.

He waited, motionless, but made his tone bland and superior. “Yes?”

“I don’t know how to make love,” she said in a small voice.

He stared at her. “Forgive my indelicacy, Belinda, but let’s be reasonable. Love is your trade. It’s not as though you were a virgin when I entered you.”

“No.” Her voice dropped to an agonized plea. “There’s something I need to tell you—something I’ve never told anyone. Something that happened to me.” Her chin came up and at last she met his gaze with stormy yet weary intensity. “Robert, I didn’t just get tired of being poor one day and decide to become a courtesan. I was a decent woman. When Dolph got me fired from the finishing school, I kept my head above water by selling oranges in the day and mending shirts at night, just as the children told you. The work was endless, but I had my honor. I saw these children—Tommy and Andy—and it was winter and their bare feet were bleeding, Robert.” Her words were tumbling out faster and faster and a terrible foreboding was taking shape in his chest. “So I used the money for my father’s chamber fees at the Fleet to buy them boots,” she continued, her ladylike calm dissolving by the second. “Then I went to the warden to explain that I didn’t have the money and would he give me credit for a fortnight and he said he would think about it and it was raining.”