The Duke's Downfall (12 page)

“Bloody damned hell!” Charles howled with rage, as he realized—too late—his predicament and threw up his arms to ward off the worst of the impact.

To Betsy, his upflung hands signaled an intent to throttle Boru. “Unhand my darling, you beast!” she cried, dropping the dagger and leaping at Boru as he and Charles went crashing to the ground in a splash of vivid leaves.

By a scant inch at best, Teddy managed to scramble free of the melee and scoop up the dagger. Springing to his feet, he hopped left and right and back and forth, nipping into the fracas to cut strings whenever a safe opening presented itself. But Charles thrashed one way, Betsy kicked another, and Boru lunged a third, which only further twisted and tangled the strings.

“Damn your eyes, Chas! Hold still!” Teddy bellowed, but to no avail, for the thrashing and kicking continued.

Intending to fetch his whip and crack it over their heads to get their attention, Teddy buried the dagger safely to its hilt in the leafy ground. He wheeled around, already running, in time to see a yellow phaeton bearing Lady Clymore, and Charles’s coach with Fletcher at the ribbons, converging from opposite directions on the spot where his curricle stood and George was scraping himself to his feet.

“Huzzah! Reinforcements!” Teddy whooped, and sprinted toward them.

Charles only half heard his brother’s shout, yet didn’t dare turn away from the golden-haired hoyden roundly pummeling him to see what was afoot now. The ringing in his ears, the blood pounding madly through his veins, and the brief glimpse he’d had of the dagger convinced him in his addled state that Betsy meant to kill him for thwarting her schemes with Teddy.

The little Delilah! To think he’d envied her flock of beaux the night before, that he’d ached to be one of them, that he had, God help him, felt his chest swell with pride when he’d led her onto the dance floor. To think, just now, at first regaining his senses, he’d thought her more lovely than Aphrodite.

Spurred by rage and the splitting pain in his head, Charles trapped her wrists in his hands. “What is your plan now, my lady? Since you failed to cut my throat, do you intend to beat me to death with your tiny little fists?”

“If you so much as lay a finger on my darling,” Betsy threatened breathlessly, in her fury totally oblivious to the fact that she was perched most shockingly upon him, “I will, so help me!”

“So he’s your darling now, is he?”

“He has been since he was but a pup!”

“Silly chit! He is a pup!”

“No more than my fists are tiny!” Betsy wrenched her right wrist free and landed a solid punch on Charles’s chin that snapped his head back.

The follow through left her sprawled across his chest, knuckles throbbing, eyes wide with horror as she realized she’d just struck a peer of the realm. Never mind that he deserved the facer for his highhanded treatment of her, he was still a duke, and she was supposed to be a lady.

“Your Grace, forgive me!” Betsy pushed her hands against his shoulders and shot up into a sitting position. “I can’t think what came over me!”

Charles could, remembering now the streak of menace he’d first observed in her nature in Oxford Street, but he was unable to say so. The best he could manage was a dazed and groaning, “Ungh,” as he raised a hand and gingerly worked his stinging jaw.

The lift of his arm and a well-timed lunge by Boru applied sufficient stress on the kite strings to break them at last with an audible pling. Released from his confinement, the hound shot like a rocket past Teddy, tail tucked between his legs and howling, the close brush of his flank nearly spinning young Lord Earnshaw off his feet.

Flinging a look over her shoulder, Betsy saw Boru streak toward the carriages just drawing to a halt on the verge, the bits of frayed string snagged in his coat streaming behind him like flags. She saw Teddy pinwheeling his arms to keep his balance, George stumbling away from the curricle to intercept Boru, and scrambled hastily to her feet. Sticking the ungloved fingers of her right hand in her mouth, she sucked a deep breath and whistled.

“Ungh,” Charles groaned again, clapping both hands over his ears to muffle the piercing shrill that cut like a knife through his madly ringing head.

The whistle had no effect on Boru, now veering away from the carriages with George on his heels and Teddy not far behind. The duke’s coachman leapt down from his box to assist them, and Silas was helping Lady Clymore from the phaeton. Fear clutched at Betsy’s heart as it had in Berkeley Square as she watched the terrified hound lengthen the distance between his pursuers. If they didn’t catch him within the next few yards, they never would.

“Don’t let him get away!” she shouted, gathering up her shredded skirts to join the chase.

She’d taken no more than half a running step when a firm grip closed on her left elbow and yanked her around. Nearly pulled off her feet by the abrupt change in direction, she gave a squeak of surprise that ended in a gasp of astonishment when she found herself grasped by the elbows in the Duke of Braxton’s hands. His eyes looked glazed, as if he were very sleepy or very foxed; the fiery imprint of her knuckles on his chin was already beginning to bruise.

“Not so fast, my lady,” he growled. “I’ve yet to grant you forgiveness for loosening every tooth in my head.”

Panic welled in Betsy’s breast as his grip tightened and pulled her closer. She was not afraid of the fury glittering in his narrowed, blue-green eyes, but of the sudden rush of warmth his touch sent flooding through her body.

“Please, Your Grace,” she pleaded shakily. “I must see to Boru. He is frightened and unused to the city."

So was Charles. He felt disjointed, as if he were watching himself from a distance—somewhere beyond the damnable ringing in his ears and the dull, sick pounding in his head. God help him, but she was more lovely than Aphrodite. Even with leaves in her hair, dirt on her nose—and her hooks into Teddy.

“It occurs to me, my lady, that I could solve the problem you seem intent on becoming by having you taken into charge for trying to kill me.”

“Then you would look the veriest fool,” Betsy retorted, lifting her chin defiantly, “for I was only trying to cut you loose.”

“It’s far too late for that,” Charles told her, for he knew quite suddenly that it was.

Just as surely as her monstrous pet had tangled and all but strangled him in kite strings, just as easily as she’d captured Teddy, she’d trapped him, too, in her web of gossamer hair and summer-sky-blue eyes. The realization brought with it a wave of light-headedness that rocked Charles on his feet. He mistook it for dizziness caused by his fall, but when his unsteady swaying drew Betsy closer, he recognized it for what it was.

“Let me show you why,” he said, pulling her into his arms—and for the first time in his life giving in completely to temptation.

The kiss caught Betsy off-balance as well as off-guard. One moment her feet were firmly planted on the leafy turf, the next they were not. As Hyde Park spun away in a dazzling spiral of sensation, she closed her eyes and clung to the only grounding point she had, the Duke of Braxton’s mouth pressed hungrily against hers. She was falling, metaphorically she thought, into the depths and aching sweetness of the kiss, until her shoulder collided roughly with something solid and warm and the smoky fragrance of dying leaves burst in her nostrils.

The impact dragged her mouth free of Charles’s and opened her eyes. They had fallen—at least the duke had—in a lush windsweep of jewel-toned leaves beneath the oak tree holding his kite captive. His shoulder had cushioned her fall, and she lay, Betsy realized with a shocked gasp, almost completely on top of him, still locked in his embrace.

“I’ve been a fool,” Charles said, his voice deep and wondrous. “A bloody damned fool.”

“No, Your Grace. You merely suffered a blow to your head,” Betsy replied quaveringly. “A rather nasty one, I fear, when Boru knocked you senseless.”

“Would that he had done so years ago!”

Laughing, Charles easily reversed their positions, in the process crushing her poke bonnet beneath her shoulder blades. Betsy scarcely felt it, or the tug of the ribands at her throat, so stunned was she by the awareness of the warmth and length of Charles’s body pressed against hers.

Looming over her on one elbow, he raised his free hand and smudged the dirt from her nose. The graze of his fingertips and the tender smile on his face chased shivers of alarm up Betsy’s spine.

“‘What life is there, what delight,’” he murmured to her dreamily, “‘without golden Aphrodite?’”

“There won’t be any for either of us,” Betsy told him, her heart banging at the fevered gleam in his eyes as she pushed her flattened palms against his chest, “if you do not, Your Grace, let me up this second.”

“Call me Braxton.” Catching her right hand in his left, Charles pressed it into the leaves behind her head, gently traced the delicacy of her wrist and the softness of her skin with his thumb. “No, call me Charles.”

Betsy wanted to call for help, but there was none, she saw, as she twisted her head desperately away from him. The carriages stood empty at the foot of the slope, Teddy and his reinforcements vanished in pursuit of Boru. There was not so much as a passerby to come to her aid.

Not one that Betsy could see, at any rate, and Julian Dameron had no interest in aiding anyone but himself.

Chapter Twelve

The trick, of course, was how best to turn the tender scene unfolding before him to his advantage. Dashing to Betsy’s rescue from the stand of smooth, gray-barked young beeches screening him from view on the edge of the green occurred to Julian, but since he doubted her gratitude would be great enough to agree on the spot to marry him, he rejected the notion.

Their voices had carried sufficiently, despite the wind, to identify Betsy’s seducer as the Duke of Braxton. Julian briefly considered using the pistol tucked in his waistband on Charles, though his original intent when he’d borrowed it from the hackney driver, leaving him with orders to wait out of sight around the curve in the road, was to use it on Boru. He’d even thought momentarily of shooting Lady Clymore to remove that obstacle from his path, but she’d nipped away too quickly on the arm of her coachman.

The upstart Earl of Clymore had no real desire to harm any of God’s creatures other than Boru, he only wanted Betsy and her blunt. That the thought of murder had even entered his head disturbed him, for it was an indication of his desperation and the hot pursuit of the cent-per-centers. If he did not come about soon, the treacherous and unforgiving River Tick would cast him upon the rocky shores of poverty.

In the Blue Saloon in Berkeley Square he’d felt certain the Duke of Braxton’s interest in Betsy was nothing but a hum. But now, as Julian watched Charles catch her chin and turn her face toward his, he was not so certain of the duke’s intent. Or of Betsy’s response.

But neither was she, pinned and panicked beneath Charles. The trace of his fingertips along the curve of her jaw sent shivers racing everywhere. Steeling herself against them, she jerked her chin free of his hand and glared at him.

“I prefer to call you Your Grace,” she said coldly, “for I am certain you have no idea what you are doing.”

“I have never been more certain of anything,” Charles murmured, brushing the tip of his thumb across her lower lip. “But you are right that you should not call me Charles. You should call me Chas.”

Loosing his hold on her flung-back wrist, he cupped her face and bent his head to kiss her. With all her strength, Betsy tried to push him off, tried to twist away from him, but he was far too strong. Tears sprang in the corners of her squeezed-shut eyes as his mouth closed over hers, tears of anger, humiliation, and wrenching despair.

The poor addled man hadn’t a clue what he was doing. He’d suffered a blow to the head and mistaken her for Aphrodite, just as her father had mistaken her for her long-dead mother after his fatal fall from his hunter. It had given the dying earl comfort in his last hours to cling to her hand and call her Sylvia, but there was no solace in the Duke of Braxton’s impassioned confusion. For Betsy, too, had suffered a blow, one most cruel—to her heart.

Flinging her arms wide, she groped for something solid, a clump of grass, a tree root, anything she could use to pull herself free. But there were only leaves, handfuls and handfuls that crumbled to dust at her touch, until her fingers closed on the hard, sharp corner of her last resort. What irony, Betsy thought, as she fumbled to grasp the book in both hands, that Ovid should be my savior.

The solid thwack of the expensively bound and therefore heavy volume on the duke’s crown, the bleat of pain and surprise he gave as he reeled back on an elbow and clapped a hand to his head, drew a grin and a chortle of relish from Julian. Watching Betsy surge to her feet and round on the duke in a swirl of muddied-pink muslin, cheeks flaming, eyes flashing, her hair snarled with burnished leaves, he made a note to forbid books in the house once they were wed.

“Bloody bell!” Clenching his teeth and clutching his temples, Charles raised his knees and thrust his elbows upon them. “That’s twice today you’ve hit me!”

“Come near me again and I’ll make it three!” Betsy warned, a curl loosened from the cluster pinned to the top of her head drooping over her eye as she cocked the book threateningly above her left shoulder.

“You try my patience, lady.” Lifting his head from his hands, Charles meant to glare at her, but could only squint painfully in the blinding dazzle of the sunbeams streaming through the oak branches. ‘Once I can forgive, but twice—”

Fairly growling the last word, he made a fist of his right hand against the ground and levered himself to his feet. Backing hastily away, Betsy swung the book as hard as she could, but it whooshed through nothing but air and spun her around. In midpirouette, her squashed bonnet came sailing over her shoulder and into her eyes. She flung it away and saw Charles fall forward onto his buckled knees.

“Since I am unable at the moment to stand,” he said, swaying woozily from side to side, “it appears that wringing your lovely neck will have to wait.”