How to Tempt a Duke. Кейси Майклс

I—Pardon me, Charlotte,” Fitz said, quickly inclining his head in her direction.

      “Oh, don’t mind me, Fitz,” Charlotte assured him, smiling with what Rafe believed was unholy glee. “It has been a while since I’ve heard a good argument.”

      Rafe hoped his friend would at last listen to reason. “Fitz, you know what the man said. I would have left you in London if you hadn’t sworn on your mother’s head that you’d follow his orders the moment we arrived.”

      “Then aren’t you the fool for believing me. I won’t do it, Rafe. Lie mouldering in a bed for two full months? A man could go mad.”

      Rafe signaled to the footmen, now numbering four, he noticed. “Take him, please.”

      “No! Rafe, I’m warning you! Let me go, you miserable—”

      Rafe watched as the servants carried Fitz up the winding staircase, shaking his head as Fitz alternated between cursing him and cursing the footmen…and then going silent as the pain from his injured leg forced him to give in to the inevitable.

      “Poor man,” Charlotte said. “What happened to him?”

      “I could let Fitz tell you, I suppose. He’s been working on a fine story this past week. I believe the latest version has something to do with how he was injured saving a child—no, two children, and their nurse—from a runaway cart. Quite the hero, our fine captain.”

      “But that’s not true?”

      Rafe took her arm once more, thinking to return to the main saloon, but then he remembered that his sisters were there and steered her toward the back of the house instead. “He was in such a hurry to step foot on solid ground again after a fairly stormy voyage that he ran down the gangplank and lost his footing on something slick on the dock. Went hell over lampposts into a stack of sea chests.”

      “Oh, dear, how ignominious. Well, his secret is safe with me. Um, don’t you want to return to the main saloon?”

      “I’d prefer to return to Elba and relative boredom, actually,” Rafe said honestly. “I feel like an interloper here. And my sisters, quite frankly, scare me spitless. I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m rather nervous around females after so many years as distant from polite society as a person can be without traveling to the far side of the moon.”

      “Do I make you nervous, Rafe?” Charlotte asked as he pushed open a door and they entered his late uncle’s private study. Now his private study. Although he’d had to fight down the feeling that he should first knock on that door and request entry.

      “Do you make me nervous? Truthfully, I think everything and everyone here makes me want nothing more than to go find myself a good war.”

      “Sorry, there are no wars here. I’ll give you a few moments to yourself, to look around,” Charlotte said quietly. “Nothing’s really changed very much.”

      He followed her with his eyes as she pretended an interest in a row of books on one of the bookshelves, seeing the young girl who had chased after him and George and Harold sometimes, and gone out of her way to ignore them at others. She’d been such a funny creature, he remembered. Tall for a girl, and rack-thin, all arms and long legs and too much hair that he’d more than once had to untangle from a branch when she got caught up chasing after them as they cut through the woods to the village.

      A pest. She’d been a pest. Eight years younger than George, half a dozen years younger than Harold, four years Rafe’s junior. And female into the bargain. A child, really; fifteen to his nineteen the day he’d gone off to take up his commission.

      He hadn’t recognized her out there on the drive. She was still tall, still thin, he supposed, but also nicely rounded. Her unruly mop of sable-brown hair seemed at least fairly tamed, most of it ruthlessly pulled back from her face to hang in loose curls partway down her back. Her hair looked…touchable.

      Her warm brown eyes hadn’t changed, hadn’t aged…unlike his, which sometimes startled him with their haunted intensity when he caught a glimpse of them in his shaving mirror. He liked her nose, straight and yet somehow pert, and her wide mouth was full-lipped, and slightly vulnerable.

      It was, in point of fact, only when she opened that mouth that the Charlie he remembered actually appeared. Charlie said what was on her mind, always, and never dressed her comments up in fine linen. He’d liked that about her, he remembered, even when he was thinking up ways to avoid her.

      He had no inclination to avoid her now. Quite the opposite.

      She’d believed herself in love with him, half a dozen years ago. Did that embarrass her now? She’d joked about it, out there on the drive, but there was no way he could be sure. How did he appear to her now? He wasn’t the raw youth he’d been then, and very much doubted he looked lovable.

      What happened to the innocence of young love, and to youthful stupidity, once the persons involved had moved on through the years? Was he really the duke now, with the Rafe he’d been banished to the past? Was she really Charlotte now, all grown up, and Charlie left behind in her childhood?

      They were strangers now. Strangers who once believed they knew each other very well…

      “Rafe? I asked you a question,” Charlotte said as he stood in the center of the large, darkly paneled room that had been the scene of many a dressing-down from his uncle, who’d worried that Rafe’s character might be tainted by resembling that of his flighty mother.

      “I’m sorry, Charlotte,” he said, giving a slight shake of his head as he quickly improvised a reason for his silence. “I was remembering the day I’d knocked George down for calling my mother a well-dressed trollop. Uncle Charlton warned me that I might be taller than George or Harold, stronger—even smarter—but I would never be more than who I was, so I should remember my place. I’m half expecting Uncle Charlton to come blustering in here at any moment, ordering me out of his private sanctuary.”

      Charlotte settled herself into one of the large leather chairs flanking the fireplace. “But he’s gone, Rafe, they’re all gone, the three of them, and you’re exactly where no one ever thought you would be. Do you feel vindicated at all, Rafe, or overwhelmed?”

      Yes, that was his Charlie. No one else would dare to ask him that question, ask the fourteenth Duke of Ashurst if his title sat uncomfortably on his shoulders. Even Grayson, whose opinion of Rafe had never been one of unmitigated admiration, wouldn’t have dared to broach such a question.

      Rafe approached his uncle’s desk and perched himself on one of its corners as he smiled at Charlotte. “How do I look to you, Charlie? Do I look at all ducal?”

      She shook her head. “I can’t tell. Sit in his chair behind the desk, Rafe. Sit in your chair. It is yours, you know. Yours, and someday your son’s, and then his son’s. You are the Duke of Ashurst.”

      “Uncle Charlton must have thought much the same thing about his sons,” Rafe said as he circled the large desk and gingerly sat himself in the great leather chair. “George and Harold never went to war, never risked life and limb for our King. And yet I’m here, and they’re gone. Is it fate, do you think, Charlie? Or am I simply the accidental duke?”

      Charlotte leaned forward in her chair, clasping her hands together on her knees. “May I tell you something?” she asked quietly.

      “Please,” he said, daring to lean back in the chair, happy to believe he was not sharing it with his uncle’s ghost.

      “You’re an ass, Rafe,” Charlotte said, sitting back once more.

      Rafe laughed in spite of himself. “Such language! I beg your pardon.”

      “And so you should. You’re the duke. The title is yours, all the titles are yours. You’ve had several long months to become used to that unalterable fact. This room is yours, this great hulking house is yours, the lands and farms and forestry and mills and all the rest of it are yours. George’s yacht would have been