An Inconvenient Duke Page 18

  When they were being shot at, she meant. Guilt pierced him that she’d been hurt tonight because of him—for Christ’s sake, that she could have been killed. Ruefully, he placed a kiss to her knuckles, then eased open her fingers so he could examine the wound. “Why didn’t you say something about this before now?”

  “We were a bit busy.” She smiled conspiratorially. “And then a bit busy again.”

  This time, he didn’t find her attempt at humor at all amusing. The thought of anything happening to her chilled his blood. “You should have told me.”

  “It’s only a little cut. It barely bled at all.”

  But her assurances did little to ease his concern. Or his guilt.

  She pulled her hand away and deftly changed subjects. Right back to him. “So this warehouse that obviously isn’t a warehouse—you come here to do…what exactly?”

  He handed back the brandy. “To be alone.” He strode over to his training equipment and snatched up one of the clean lengths of cloth that he used to wrap his hands whenever he punched at the bags.

  “Then I’ve ruined it for you.” She stared into the glass. “You’ve allowed a woman into your gentlemen’s club.”

  “A very beautiful woman.” He raked a hot, searing look over her, seeing right through the coat to the delectable curves he knew were hidden beneath. “If being alone with you is ruining it, then I’ll gladly have it ruined.”

  In the firelight’s glow, he could see the bright flush of her cheeks and the slight upward curve of her lips. “Are you certain?”

  “You’re special.” More than she realized. “And you’re right. You’re the first woman I’ve allowed through those doors. Most likely the first woman ever allowed through those doors.”

  That surprised her, and her gaze darted up to his. “Ever?”

  “It’s an armory.” With a shrug, he splashed water from a pitcher into a bowl on an old side buffet that he used as a washstand after his training sessions, when he wanted to wash away the sweat and grime and memories of the past. “Military men usually don’t want women around and underfoot, especially where arms and weaponry are concerned.”

  “Worried we’ll use them against you?”

  “Terrified.” He ripped the length of cloth in two, then plunged half of it into the water to wet it. “No one else knows about this place, except for Merritt Rivers and Brandon Pearce.” He wrung out the excess water. “I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “Of course.” She paused, then asked, “Brandon Pearce…the Earl of Sandhurst?”

  “Don’t let him hear you call him that, or you’ll find yourself dragged out for a duel, skirt or no.” He brought the cloth over to the settee and sat on the edge of it beside her. “Those are fighting words as far as he’s concerned.”

  “What is it with you former soldiers,” she mused as she leaned back against the arm of the settee and extended her injured hand toward him, “that none of you are grateful for your titles? You should be honored to possess them and what they represent—England’s appreciation of your heroism.”

  “It’s not that we’re ungrateful.” He kept his face carefully inscrutable at discovering her wound to be much deeper and bloodier than she’d let on. “It’s that we know what we’re giving up by leaving the military.”

  She studied him over the glass as she rested it against her sensuous lips. “Bad food and people trying to kill you?”

  He threw back, “A night at Vauxhall, you mean?”

  Her lips curved in a smile against the rim of the glass.

  Careful not to cause her pain, he used the wet cloth to wipe away the dried blood and clean the cut. Her hand was small and dainty, and his gut tightened with self-recrimination to know that it might very well be scarred forever from this.

  “What was it like,” she asked, most likely reading his emotions and attempting to distract him, “being in the army? What was it truly like?”

  “Truly?” His brows drew together in a frown, but he never lifted his gaze from her palm. “Freezing cold when it wasn’t boiling hot or pouring rain. Loud when it wasn’t unbearably silent. Usually uncomfortable. Always filthy. Long stretches of boredom broken by moments of sheer terror.”

  “Well.” She sharply sucked in a mouthful of air when he touched a sore spot. “All that and poor pay, too? I can’t see why every man wouldn’t choose that for his livelihood.”

  His lips twisted at her sarcasm. “Fortunately, it runs deeper than that for a career soldier.”

  “How so?”

  “When you’re in the military, you have a sense of purpose, of a larger fight so much bigger than yourself and whatever regiment or battle you’ve been placed in.” He slid the wet cloth over her palm to wipe away the last traces of dirt and blood. “Every day, you wake up knowing that you are fighting for morality and liberty, for a cause so good and right that it seems that it can’t be anything other than divinely guided.” He dropped the wet cloth to the floor and reached for the dry length that he’d flung over his shoulder. “You work hard all day to move just a tiny sliver closer to the end, and when your head hits your pillow at night, you can sleep well knowing that you did everything you could that day to support your men and the cause you’re fighting for.”

  “And now?”

  “Former soldiers don’t have that.” He slowly wrapped the linen strip around her hand to protect the cut and let it heal. If she were lucky, the scar would be small and would fade with time. But it would never completely go away. “They’ve returned to a country they barely recognize, where they can’t find work or support their families. The crown would rather renovate a palace or throw a party than give out the back pay that the men are owed or fund hospitals to care for them, and Parliament makes it even harder by putting into place laws to protect its own interests by driving up the price of corn until the same men who fought so hard to defend English liberty now have to beg for food in the streets in order to survive.”

  He tied off the end of the bandage. Then he lifted her hand to his mouth to place a kiss against the wound, his eyes fixed on hers.

  “So when they see how their brothers in arms have been treated,” he finished with somber sarcasm, “men who were just as heroic on the battlefield as those given peerages, why would any former officer not want one?”

  She trembled, but he knew it wasn’t because of the cut. Of all the civilians he knew, she would be the only one who understood what he was telling her, who would be just as outraged about the plight of former soldiers as he was.

  “But you, even now as a duke, you’re still fighting.” She touched her hand to his face, and the bandage scratched softly against his cheek. Her voice grew somber. “Are you ever going to stop waging war and find peace, Marcus?”

  Nineteen

  For a long moment, their gazes locked, and Dani held her breath, waiting for him to answer.

  But the only reply she received was silence as he took the glass of brandy from her and tossed down what was left in a single swallow, then walked away to refill it.

  Her chest tightened as the limits of their newfound trust were so clearly exposed. They’d shared their bodies intimately tonight, but there were still some places that were off-limits. Unfortunately, that included his heart.

  She’d promised Claudia that she’d help Marcus to find a sense of purpose. But how on earth was she supposed to do that when he refused to talk about himself?

  Wrapping the coat around herself, she slid off the settee to gather up her clothes. She hesitated when she reached for her stockings, and an unbidden heat stung at her eyes.

  With a curse at herself for being so sentimental—and now emotional, as her sight blurred from the unshed tears—she snatched them up and tossed the lot of her clothes onto the settee. Her hands shook as she reached for her chemise, the neckline of which had been stretched out of shape from Marcus’s hands in his
eagerness to touch. She’d have to throw it away. There would be no explaining this to Alice when her maid—

  “How do you stop waging war when it’s all you’ve ever known?”

  His deep voice twined around her spine. She paused as she slipped the cotton material over her head, her heart skittering at his sobering question that revealed a vulnerability and doubt she never would have suspected lurked within him. Needing a moment to absorb that, she let the material caress down her body and fall into place around her legs.

  “You start by laying down your arms.” The irony of that! Even as she said it, she let her gaze drift around her at the weapons affixed to the walls. “All of them.” And then you open your heart to me.

  “Not when you’re in the middle of a fight.” This time, his voice was much closer, but she ignored both it and the sharp pang of longing in her belly.

  She slipped on her corset, only to curse herself when she realized that she’d need his help to lace it up. And again with the buttons of her dress. Undressing had been so much more fun. Then, he couldn’t seem to come close enough to her, not even with bare skin against bare skin, not even when he’d been inside her…

  But now, even as he stood just behind her and reached out to tie up her corset without being asked, he felt half a world away.

  “This isn’t that kind of a fight,” she whispered. But she knew what he meant, and when he finished with her laces, she surrendered the argument—for now—and changed battle tactics by changing topics. “Lady Hartsham didn’t seem to know about how Elise died. When I told her that she had been murdered, Beatrice was shocked by it.”

  “Are you certain?”

  She nodded, having no doubts at all about that. “But not by the fact that Elise was running her own network and rescuing women by herself.” Passing over the stockings, she reached for her dress. She couldn’t have borne to have Marcus watch her as she put those on. “Beatrice said that she’d told Elise about the girls in the brothels, but she never expected your sister to try to rescue them on her own.”

  “You think she told you the truth?”

  “About that? Yes.” She pulled the dress on over her head and carefully twisted the satin into place. “Beatrice has never been able to hide her emotions. That was one of the reasons why I never gave her more responsibility inside Nightingale.”

  Not turning to face him, she waited with her back toward him for him to button her up, just as he’d done with her corset. He did, and she reflexively shivered at the inadvertent scrape of his knuckles against her back. She closed her eyes to keep herself collected. How would she ever be able to look at him again without thinking of the intimacies they’d shared tonight?

  “But Elise gave her responsibility,” he drawled, his mouth so close to her shoulder that his warm breath tickled at her ear.

  “I don’t think so, not based upon what Beatrice said.”

  He took her hips in his hands and turned her to face him. “What did she say, exactly?”

  “She and Elise had been having discussions about the prostitutes, the women that Nightingale couldn’t help because vanishing them would have been too dangerous. Beatrice knew that some of the women had been kidnapped from the mills in the north, brought to London, and sent into the brothels. She told Elise about them.” She dropped her gaze to the floor, the stab of betrayal still fresh. “Apparently to complain about me and how overly cautious I was being, how there were women whom we’d turned our backs on.”

  His hands tightened on her waist. “So Elise set about attempting to save them by herself.”

  Dani blinked hard and nodded, only for it to turn into an uncertain shake of her head. “But from what Beatrice told me, she didn’t know what Elise was doing and so didn’t directly help. She warned Elise to leave the women alone, that it was too dangerous. She said she didn’t know anything about the people Elise was working with.”

  “You believe her?”

  “Beatrice has always been worried that we’d be discovered. Even when she had easy responsibilities within Nightingale—running messages, arranging money transfers, collecting clothing—half the time, she’d lose her nerve and not do them. I cannot imagine her doing the kinds of risky work that Elise must have been doing.”

  He took her chin and lifted her head until she had no choice but to look at him. “At Vauxhall, you said it was Hartsham. That you knew he’d killed Elise.”

  “I thought so, from the way Beatrice stared at him…” Her shoulders sagged in frustration as her doubts rose to the surface, now that the heat of the moment was over. “But it’s Beatrice! She’s always overly dramatic, even at the most relaxed of times. She’s always been worried that the earl will discover what she’s been doing with Nightingale. Maybe…” She shook her head. “I don’t know… Maybe that’s why she looked at him like that.”

  “Because he’d finally found out?”

  “Perhaps.” She frowned, then shook her head. “No—as if she were terrified of him.”

  “Then possibly he already knows what she’s been doing.”

  “Or worse, that he found out and might have hurt her over it.” Her stomach sickened, and she placed her hand on her belly to press down the guilt churning there as she turned away from him.

  “Or hurt Elise.”

  She’d already thought of that, too. After all, that had been her first gut reaction when Beatrice had looked at the earl, when she’d warned Dani that the same fate might happen to her. She’d said it so intensely, with so much anger and hatred… Lord Hartsham had played a part in Elise’s death. Dani had been certain of it.

  But she knew him, for heaven’s sake! He was good friends with her father, had come over for dinner countless times before her parents left for the continent—that was how she’d gotten to know Beatrice, why she’d invited the countess into working with Nightingale. How could the same man who laughed so heartily at Harriett’s stories and gave both women guidance in her father’s absence be a coldhearted murderer?

  “I know that it doesn’t make sense,” she whispered. “But I saw her reaction. She knew who had killed Elise. I didn’t even have to mention Porter or Scepter—she just looked directly at Hartsham, and her face… Good God, Marcus!” The cold accusation she’d witnessed on Beatrice’s face had ripped the air from Dani’s lungs with its intensity. “But why? Why would Hartsham want to harm your sister for helping prostitutes when Beatrice apparently had nothing at all to do with it? What could be gained by murdering Elise?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m damned well going to find out.”

  Fingers of worry played along her spine. “What are you going to do?”

  “Whatever I have to in order to learn the truth.” He stepped away from her, grabbed up the iron poker, and jabbed at the fire, and not because the fire needed to be stirred. If she weren’t here, would he have taken out his anger with the weapons on the walls? The flaring glow of the fire lit his face and dark eyes, making him resemble the devil himself come from the fires of hell for vengeance. “Starting with Hartsham’s whereabouts the night that Elise was killed.”

  Dread swelled coldly inside her. Already, the man was undoubtedly forming battle plans in his head. “Marcus, whatever it is that you’re planning—”

  “I’m not planning anything.”

  “And I’m a blue goose.” She picked up one of the stockings. “We don’t have any real proof that Hartsham was involved. All we have are his wife’s nervousness and my instincts, and I wouldn’t place a bet on those, let alone accuse him of murder. The man’s a peer.”

  “So am I.” He jabbed the fire and sent a shower of sparks rising into the chimney. “You keep forgetting that.”

  Never. He wore the authority of the dukedom and his generalship like a second skin. “You cannot confront him about this.”

  “I don’t plan on directly confronting him.”

  �
��And indirectly?” she threw over her shoulder, knowing him too well.

  He rested the poker against the side of the fireplace and turned to face her, his eyes darting immediately to the stocking in her hand. “Need help with those? I’m very good with stockings.”

  Her body heated with wanton desire, despite her knowing that he was simply attempting to charm her into distraction. For a moment, she nearly let him. “I’m fine on my own, thank you.”

  “Pity.”

  Ignoring that, she propped her foot on the edge of the settee. She struggled to ignore his gaze on her leg as she set about pulling on the stocking, but she couldn’t forget how wonderful it had been when he’d removed them in the garden’s shadows. Her throat tightened. Baring bodies proved to be so much easier than baring secrets and souls.

  She pulled up her skirt to tie off the stocking around her thigh, and her fingers shook beneath his stare. But she steered the conversation back to topic. “We can’t be certain of Hartsham’s involvement one way or the other. I think we should try to pry more information from Beatrice. I’m certain she knows more than she’s sharing.”

  She switched feet and slipped on the second stocking. She’d never imagined that a man’s stare could be so inviting. Or so torturous.

  “So I’ll approach her again.” She tied off the stocking. Being so fully dressed in front of him now felt odd, especially since he wore only his trousers, his chest remaining deliciously bare. “I’ll question her again on who else Elise might have been working with…innkeepers, pub owners, other men like Porter—”

  “The hell you will.”

  She dropped her foot to the floor and faced him. The hardness of his expression stunned her.

  “I will not let you put yourself into danger again.”

  “I won’t be.” The stone-cold look on his face must have terrified new recruits in the field. But not her. She smiled to reassure him. “I won’t do anything more than talk.”

  “Like how you talked to her tonight?” He raked his hands through his hair, although she suspected that he did it to keep himself from shaking her. “For God’s sake, Danielle! Someone tried to kill you.” When she began to argue, he cut her off. “They’ve made the connection between you, Elise, and the women at the brothels.”