The Runaway Duchess (6 page)

He
should have been thinking of money and ledgers and business, but the memory of
a startling pair of amber eyes kept intruding, as did the woman to whom they
belonged.

Lady
Charlotte Vanderley…

It
was not a name he would soon be forgetting.

CHAPTER SIX

“Mother,
if you make me go to his house for tea I shall
scream
.” Outwardly
seething, Charlotte clenched her hands into fists and planted them high on her
hips. She managed – just barely – not to kick something, but there was no
stopping the rebellious toss of her head.

One
week had passed since the Haversham Ball, and Charlotte was growing more and
more desperate by the day. There seemed to be no solution in sight to breaking
her engagement, especially since it had become public knowledge.

Now
the duke was recovered from his cold and insisting on seeing her. Had been
insisting for the past three days, in fact. Her excuses were running thin, and
her mother was no longer taking ‘no’ for an answer.

“There
is a slight chill in the air today. Put on this shawl and get in the carriage,”
Bettina demanded in a tightly controlled voice as she held out a yellow silk
gauze shawl embroidered with pink ribbon.

Charlotte
eyed the shawl distastefully. “No.”

The
corners of Bettina’s mouth turned white. Saying nothing, she took her daughter
by the arm and all but dragged her to the front foyer. Tabitha, her eyes
downcast and a fretful frown tugging at her lips, stepped to the side and held
the door open.

“Stop
it!” Charlotte cried, twisting to be free of her mother’s shoving hands. But
Bettina was strong, and determined, and did not relent until Charlotte was in
the carriage.

 Truly
desperate now, Charlotte clung to the open window and attempted to change
tactics in one last second attempt to save herself from being alone with Crane.

“Come
with me,” she coaxed, forcing a smile. “It is hardly proper for me to pay a
visit to a man without a chaperone. People will talk. There will be gossip. Bad
gossip.”

Bettina
merely sniffed and tossed the shawl through the window. “Do not lecture me on
propriety, Charlotte Amelia. The duke is your fiancée and you are calling on
him for afternoon tea with servants present. If there is anything more proper
than that I should like to know what it is. Now do try to calm yourself. This
is for your own good, dear. It will benefit you immensely to know more about
your husband before you marry.”

“I
am
not
marrying him,” Charlotte bit out through clenched teeth.

It
was, she thought wretchedly, rather like trying to climb over a stone wall that
kept getting higher and higher with every step you took. No matter how fast you
climbed, or how high you reached, the wall would always be faster and higher.

She
saw Bettina wave out of the corner of her eye as the carriage pulled away. Her
only response was to close the curtain window with a hard snap of her wrist,
enclosing herself in darkness.

The
Duke of Tarrow was a short, round man with the quivering jowls of a bulldog and
the dark, squinty eyes of a toad. His skin was sickly pale, as though he rarely
ventured out into the sun, and there was no mistaking the mop of white curls on
his head for anything other than a wig.

His
clothes were ill fitting; baggy in some places and grotesquely stretched in
others. The blue overcoat he wore over his frothy white shirt was mocking in
its brightness and did nothing to compliment his sallow complexion.
  

Charlotte was repulsed just by looking at him, and when she saw his pink tongue slide
across his dry, cracking lips she felt bile rise in the back of her throat. It
took all of the will power she possessed not to turn on her heel and flee out
the front door. Clinging to the end of the curved banister to steady her
trembling hands, she faced him head on, refusing to appear intimidated even
though she was exactly that.

“Good
afternoon, Lady Charlotte. It is a pleasure to see you again.” His voice was
soft and oddly high pitched. To Charlotte’s ears it was nails on a chalkboard,
and she struggled to disguise her grimace of disgust.

“Your
Grace,” she said, dipping into a curtsy that was deliberately mocking in its
brevity. She had no intention of meekly rolling over for this pitiful excuse of
a man, her mother’s wishes for complete compliance be damned. Unfortunately,
Crane did not seem to take note of her rudeness. If anything he seemed amused
by it, if the sudden glint in his beady little eyes was any indication, and too
late Charlotte recalled what Vera had told her in the tea shop so many days
ago.

He
liked breaking their spirits, he did. It was a game for ‘im. The more they
resisted, the longer he drew it out, like a cat toyin’ with a mouse.

“Would
you like to accompany me to the parlor?” Crane gestured towards a room past the
grand staircase. Like the rest of the house the parlor was dark and gloomy,
with heavy mahogany furniture and thick velvet curtains drawn tight across all
the windows.

Every
inch of Charlotte’s body protested against going further into the shadows and
she shook her head so vehemently from side to side that a curl sprang loose
from her tightly wound coiffure and bounced across her temple. “I wish to go
outside.”

The
duke’s thin eyebrows darted together. “Outside?” he said distastefully,
speaking as though she had requested they go for a walk in a swamp. “Whatever
for?”

“I…
I fear I have not been feeling well,” Charlotte improvised hastily. “The fresh
air would do wonders to clear my head. I would not want to end our visit
prematurely, Your Grace.”

“No,
no that would not do at all.” He rubbed one of his chins and frowned. “Your
mother did not mention you were ill.”

Sensing
his suspicion – he was not as stupid as he appeared – Charlotte plastered a
false smile on her face and waved one hand flippantly through the air. “Oh, I
did not want to bother her. You know how overprotective mothers can be.”

He
studied for her several moments, his dark eyes missing nothing, before he
finally nodded. “I will have the servants bring the refreshments outside.”

“You
are very kind. Thank you for being so considerate, Your Grace.”

“Please,”
he said, smiling to reveal a row of uneven teeth that were yellow and black
with age and disease, “call me Stanley.”

Call
this odious man by his given name? When hell froze over. “I could never be so
forward… Your Grace.”

Their
eyes met, and in that moment Charlotte knew she had made the grave error of
underestimating her opponent. The duke was not just old and lecherous, he was
highly intelligent as well, and cunning as a snake darting through the grass.

Unable
to stop herself, she looked away first, and Crane’s oily chuckle of triumph
grated against her skin like jagged glass.

Without
further comment they moved outside to the back lawn and sat across from each
other beneath the shade of an old mulberry tree. Plucking a fallen leaf from
the small, circular table, Charlotte twirled it absently between her fingers
while she discreetly studied her new surroundings.

Everything
in sight was manicured with ruthless precision. Not a single blade of grass
grew out of line. There were no flowers. Dark green hedges higher than her head
formed a barrier around the lawn, preventing anyone from looking out or, she
thought with a shudder, stopping anyone from looking in.

What
monstrosities had happened here in this stale, stagnant place? How long had the
duke’s wives suffered in silence before they died? A chill ran down Charlotte’s
spine as she imagined them trapped like pretty birds in a cage, unable to break
free. Allison, his first wife, had tried to escape. Tried and ended up with a
broken neck. Did the same fate await her?

She
jumped when she felt fingers close around her wrist, and with a visible shudder
she tried to pull free of the duke’s hand but he held on, his fat, fleshy
fingers clinging to her arm with surprising strength.

“You
have very soft skin,” he murmured as he skimmed his thumb across her knuckles
before his grip tightened, wringing a soft cry from Charlotte’s lips.

She
had petted an iguana once. The lizard’s skin had been cold and dry, and even
though its tongue had flicked in and out and its beady eyes had followed her
every movement she felt as though she were touching a dead thing. Crane’s flesh
reminded her of the same, and the bile she had managed to suppress earlier upon
entering his house rose yet again. “Your Grace, I do not believe this is very
proper—”

“We
are engaged to be married. Surely a simple touch here” – his fingers began to
inch their way up her arm – “or there would not hurt anyone.”

Charlotte
stood up so fast her chair was knocked sideways. The momentum pulled the duke
halfway across the table before he let her go, resulting in a row of angry red
marks on her skin from his bruising fingers. “Do not touch me!” she said
sharply, clutching her arm to her chest.

His
cheeks suffusing with color, Crane heaved himself to his feat. “Impertinent
wench,” he growled, his top lip curling. “You would do well to address me with
respect.”

Charlotte’s
tenuous hold on her temper snapped completely. “Why? You are an old, lecherous
man and if you were the last person on earth I would not marry you. I
will
not
marry you,” she declared, driving the heel of her boot into the soft ground for
emphasis.

The
sound of his quiet laughter set her teeth on edge, and she stared at him
incredulously. “What is so amusing about that? Did you not hear what I said? I
am not going to marry you. I refuse!” The moment the words were past her lips
she felt as though a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. There
would be no wedding. There would be no marriage. She should have put her foot down
– both literally and figuratively – weeks ago.

Still
chuckling under his breath, Crane said, “You stupid, foolish girl. Did you
think it would be as easy as that? Did you think once I had you I would let you
go? No.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “No, once gained I do not
let my possessions slip through my fingers so easily. You are mine. You belong
to me.”

Charlotte
stiffened. “I belong to no one, least of all you!”

“Oh,
but you do, and I have the betrothal contract that says exactly that, signed by
your mother. I also own the deed to your town house in London, that pitiful
excuse for an estate in Hampshire, and all the belongings they contain. Burn
one contract, my sweet, and you burn the other along with it. We will be
married at the end of the month and there is nothing you can do about it.”

“No,”
Charlotte said, even as her insides turned to ice and all the blood drained
from her face. “No, my mother would never do that to me.”

Crane
smiled. “Desperate women will do desperate things, Lady Charlotte. You will
learn that lesson soon enough. Here comes the tea. Do sit down, my dear. Unless
you would rather go back inside?”

The
last thing in the world Charlotte wanted to do was sit across from a man she
despised with ever fiber of her being, but her carriage would not return to
pick her up for another hour, and they both knew it. Faced with choosing the
lesser of two evils – she would not, under
any
circumstances, go back
inside that house – she sat in her chair and steadfastly ignored both the tea
and the duke for the remainder of her visit.

“Mother,
how COULD you?” Charlotte’s wail of despair echoed through the entire house.
Throwing herself onto a velvet settee, she hugged her legs to her chest and
glared accusingly at Bettina over the top of her knees. “Father provided well
for us when he—”

“Your
father provided us with
nothing
,” Bettina snapped. The uncharacteristic
vehemence in her voice shocked Charlotte into silence. Her mother never lost
her temper or raised her voice. Ever. “It was all I could do to keep a roof
over our heads after he died. I had to sign the contracts. I had no choice. Do
you think it has been easy, raising a daughter on my own?”

Deciding
it would not be the wisest time to point out that a governess had, in fact,
done most of the raising, Charlotte bit her lip and obediently shook her head
from side to side.

She
had not always been the easiest child; she knew that. She and her mother were
simply too different to ever see eye to eye, which resulted in bickering over
the silliest of things. Although, to be fair, being engaged against one’s
wishes could hardly be considered a trivial matter. They were not arguing over
what color dress she should wear. This was her life, her future, and Charlotte
was done having others make decisions for her.

“I
did the only thing I could do to ensure our survival,” Bettina raged on.
“Anyone else would be grateful for what I have done, but not you!”

“Grateful?”
Charlotte sputtered in disbelief, unable to hold her silence any longer. “I
should be grateful you want to trap me in a loveless marriage with a man old
enough to be my grandfather?”

“Love,”
Bettina sneered. Her face contorted, and suddenly she did not look so elegant
and graceful anymore. “I married your father for love, and look where it has
gotten us. Heavens knows Crane is not young, but he is wealthy and generous.
You will be taken care of for your entire life, Charlotte. You shall want for
nothing.”

“If
he is so wonderful, then
you
marry him!” Jumping up from the settee, she
stalked past her mother, intent on barricading herself in her bedroom. Bettina
reached out her hand to detain her, and in a fit of temper Charlotte slapped it
away. The sound of flesh striking flesh echoed in the sudden silence, and
Bettina’s mouth dropped open.

“You
struck me!” she cried.

“I
am sorry Mother, but I fear I have had enough of being manhandled for one day.”
Without another word she walked out of the room, up the stairs, and collapsed
on her bed after making sure to lock the door.