Page 34 of Tamed By her Duke

“I can’t say I know what ye’re talking about,” he said. Thank goodness he’d been a soldier, not a spy, because he was awretchedliar.

“You do realize they’re never going to come back here again, right?” she asked. “Any chance I had at making a good impression was completely destroyed when you insulted the village.”

He shrugged. “It’s nae a very big village. I dinnae lie about it.”

Grace let out an incoherent sound of fury.

“Besides,” he went on, looking rather smug, “I daenae know why ye care about them liking ye or not. Ye had friends at our weddin’. Why would ye need more?”

“Are you being intentionally perverse or are you just really that unaware? My friends live inLondon. I might like someone to talk to who lives more thantwo days away.”

“Also,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “did ye not consider that perhaps it was those wretched portraits that scared them off? They’d not be the first ones to find the Montgomery line to be a bit alarming.”

Her eyes flared wide. “Thiswasabout those portraits! I knew it!”

And then the most incredible, terrible thing happened. Her husband smiled.

And then helaughed.

It wasather, yes, but, goodness, the way his face transformed when he laughed. It made him look brighter, younger, more carefree. It made him look, she realized with a sudden flash, like the curious man who had glanced at her across a crowded ballroom, not the cantankerous beast who had growled at her ever since.

It made him, she hated to admit to herself, remarkably handsome—so remarkably so, in fact, that she gaped at him for a moment before she remembered that she was cross with him. No, not just cross—furious.

Her cheeks flamed. She seized a pillow from the settee and chucked it at him.

Her aim was poor and her projectile ineffective; what was more, Caleb was used to dodging bullets, not embroidered cushions. Of course, he evaded it easily.

It had, nevertheless, the intended effect, for he left the parlor. And Grace, left behind, tried to banish from her mind the way those blue eyes crinkled when he grinned.

CHAPTER 10

“What are ye doing here?”

Caleb remembered, with a sort of aching melancholy, a not-so-distant time in his life when he never had to ask such questions. Now, it seemed, his days were full of them.What are ye doing? Why are ye doing that? Why did ye think that was a good idea?

In fairness, most of these questions were directed toward his wife, whose quest to do…whatever it was she was doing to the house had not abated. Therefore, it was something of a relief to be asking this question to his solicitor, Mr. Nicholas Proctor, instead of Grace.

Notmuchof a relief, however.

Nicholas grinned at Caleb from the doorway to his study, and Caleb’s relief vanished. Oh, it was going to bethatkind of visit.

“Can a man not come to see one of his oldest friends? Perhaps I want to congratulate you on your nuptials,” Nicholas said.

“We’re nae friends,” Caleb countered. “Ye’re my solicitor. Naught else.”

“Of course, Your Grace,” Nicholas said—as he always did. Caleb scowled. This was the problem with solicitors—and people who had known you all your life. They were bloody hard to argue with.

Caleb rolled his eyes. “What is it that ye really want, then?” he demanded. Nicholas’ practice operated out of London, as did nearly all of the best solicitor’s practices, but as the man did much of his work for aristocrats whose estates were in the North, he did some of his businesses from Newcastle upon Tyne, too.

Even so, it was a fair journey to Montgomery Estate.

“Well,” Nicholas said with annoying cheer, “you would know this, if you paid the slightest bit of attention, but I am here to inspect the estate, something that I do every quarter. I then write it all up in a nice little report for you, and you, I assume, throw it directly into the fire. It’s a delightful little exercise for which I charge you double my other clients, for the sheer trouble of the thing.”

Caleb narrowed his eyes. He assumed the bit about the overcharging was about as true as the bit about chucking the reports into flames, which was to say, about halfway accurate. Caleb onlysometimesignored Nicholas’ missives. Theremainder of the time they simply never reached him; receiving mail in the army was a precarious operation.

Even so, he decided not to quibble about this. There was only one way, in Caleb’s experience, to win an argument with Nicholas, and that way was by walloping him, which Caleb hadn’t done since they were twelve at Eton. Nicholas had dodged in completely the wrong direction, which meant the punch Caleb had aimed for his shoulder had ended up on his nose, which had broken. And even though that had been, as Caleb had passionately argued,entirely Nicholas’ fault, he still hadn’t liked it when Nicholas had refused to speak to him for three full weeks.

Even if they weren’t friends—and theywere not—nobody liked to be ignored.

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