Page 10 of Dare to Love a Duke
She made herself laugh. “Sirrah, you are fulsome in your blandishments.”
He didn’t laugh or smile, his expression utterly serious. “When I set foot outside these doors,” he said, “I don’t need to flatter anyone. What I want, I get. So believe me when I say honestly that I’d much rather talk with you than fuck a stranger.”
Her heart thudded. “Because, unlike everyone else, I tell youno.”
“Because you intrigue me beyond measure.”
She could only stare at him. The part of herself that she’d locked away, the part that longed for comfort and affection and all the things lovers shared, ached with want. Oh, she’d taken men to her bed over the years, but other than physical gratification, she’d made certain those encounters never touched her heart. She had been forged through hardship and loss, treading a solitary path. If sometimes her body throbbed for want of someone to hold her all through the night, if she ached for someone to whisper into her hair that she was to be cherished... she tamped it all down.
Think of Mamma. Her pain and loss.
Yet here was this man, this guest, a person unknown to her. Her buccaneer. Offering a taste of what could never be.
“I must go,” she said. “My duties can’t be neglected.”
His mouth turned down, but he nodded. “I will be back soon. To see you, Amina.”
It wasn’t her real name, yet the sound of it on his lips sent a dark thrill through her. Oh, to hear him call her Lucia as he joined his body with hers...
He gave another bow before turning and striding away. She watched him, her gaze riveted to the width of his shoulders and how beautifully his breeches fit his long, muscular legs. Compelled to follow, she trailed several paces after him, observing him as he walked. He didn’t join any of the couplings but went straight for the door.
Lucia did not follow him any farther. The threshold was where her dominion ended.
Taking a deep breath, she straightened her shoulders and adjusted her mask.
The club’s policy was to be open every week. Perhaps the buccaneer would return then. Perhaps she might see him once more, and they could talk, as they had tonight.
Her breath came faster.
In all her time here, he was the only guest who ever truly caught her attention, the only guest she’d wanted for her own selfish pleasure.
Doesn’t matter. Flirtation is all we can ever share.The establishment—and the profits it generated—was too important to her to throw anything away on a casual encounter.
Drawing herself up straight, she continued on with the rest of her night. There were responsibilities that needed tending—keeping the refreshments circulating, ensuring the staff’s well-being and the guests’ safety, maintaining the club’s spotlessness—a hundred tiny tasks she had to supervise. Yet, like a child sneaking tastes of her parents’ wine, she permitted herself brief thoughts of the buccaneer.
It would be a struggle not to grow drunk on him.
Chapter 3
One year later
Tom waited at the foot of the back stairs, his body both heavy with grief and impelled into motion.
For six weeks, he’d kept vigil at his father’s bedside, barely sleeping, eating only when forcibly urged to by the physician, and hardly stirring from the ducal bedchamber. But for all that, for all the physician had bled Father and applied every technique that modern medical science had devised... the old duke had died anyway.
Tom could still hear the rattle and rasp of his father’s breath stopping. It was that dreadful silence that heralded the end. The man that had both berated and coddled Tom had departed the earth, leaving behind a chasm that might never be filled. That chasm yawned open within Tom. Its emptiness threatened to devour him whole.
Feeling his shoulders bow beneath the weight of grief, he struggled to straighten them. Today was for Maeve, and he had to have strength for both of them.
Only that morning, news of his father’s death had been printed in the pages of theTimesandHawk’s Eye,revealing to the world the loss of one of England’s most staunch defenders of traditional values. They had said nothing about how the late duke preferred roast potatoes every Tuesday, or that, despite the fact that he continually bemoaned his son’s carousing and wildness, he used to give Tom books of adventure stories on his birthdays, even into adulthood. On Tom’s bookshelf in his private study, he had a copy ofGuy Mannering,with a typically terse “To My Son on His 32nd Birthday—Yr Father” inscribed on the inside cover.
None of that had been in the papers. There were aspects of the Duke of Northfield that no one but those closest to him would ever know.
But in theTimes,there had been a paragraph that, hours later, Tom could recite from memory. It had burned itself into his mind, and into his heart.
We cannot help but speculate whether or not the new duke will take up his late father’s ideology and principles. His Grace, the previous duke, has left a sizable void in the nation’s political landscape. Further, it is a known truth that the younger gentleman in question has led a somewhat undisciplined existence. Many await his next steps with bated breath. Shall he continue in his riotousness, or will he take up the mantle left behind by his father, and preserve England’s established institutions?
We cannot foretell.
