Page 34 of Dare to Love a Duke
“Before you make your decision,” she said, “grant me one favor. Come to the club tomorrow night.”
He frowned. “It’s closed on Fridays.”
“When your father died, I feared that the club’s days might be limited.” She spread her hands open. “So I’ve changed it to twice a week to ensure that the staff and I could glean the most profit from it with the time we had remaining.”
He was torn between anger that she could be so mercenary in the midst of death and admiration for her drive.
“I’m to come to the club and do what exactly?”
“See what it’s truly like, not as a place where people go to have sex, but as a business.”
“The money there proves it’s a business,” he said coldly. He nodded toward the bundle of cash.
“Please,” she entreated, “just come. And don’t dress too finely.” When he remained silent, she nodded, as if resigned. “That’s all I will say on the matter. At present.”
She moved past him and opened the larder door.
For a heartbeat, she hesitated. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, pinned in place by disbelief, anger, and confusion.
Then she was gone, shutting the door behind her.
He staggered to the pound notes resting atop the cabinet. His hand hovered over the money, yet his fingers refused to close around the stack of cash, no matter how much he commanded himself to take hold of it.
Because once he did, everything would become real.
Chapter 9
Lucia found Kitty and Elspeth in the kitchen, the scents of frying sausages filling the air with the aromas of domesticity. Elspeth sat at a small circular table and played with Liam as he sat on her lap, while Kitty stood over the hob, tending the food.
The moment Lucia stepped into the chamber, her friends both looked at her with expressions of expectancy.
“And?” Kitty asked anxiously.
“Was he very horrified?” Elspeth added.
Lucia drifted into the room. She set a pale blue box tied with brown satin ribbon on the long table in the center of the kitchen. It was her habit, on the day of the month that she delivered the owner’s portion of the profits, to stop at Catton’s on her way home.
“Cherry-and-plum tart for you,” she said to Elspeth, then glanced at Kitty, “and ginger cake for you. I... was too distracted to get anything for myself.”
“Much as I appreciate you bringing us sweets,” Kitty said, taking the pan off the fire, “bugger the cakes. What happened with the new owner? Did he scream? Laugh? Set slavering dogs on you?”
Lucia leaned against the table, both weary and humming with nervous energy. As briefly as she could, she explained what had happened in the larder of the duke’s Mayfair home. When she was done, she looked back and forth between her friends’ stunned faces.
“Damnation.” Elspeth blew out a breath. “You’d no idea who he was when you rogered him senseless?”
“None,” Lucia answered.
Her own mind spun with the knowledge of who Tom truly was. The world had turned completely on its head, leaving her dizzy and disoriented.
“What a damn muddle,” Kitty said ruefully. She dished up the sausages and brought the plates over to the smaller table where Elspeth sat with Liam. She offered a plate to Lucia, but set it down when Lucia waved it away. “He didn’t know about his father’s ownership of this place, either?”
“If I’d shown up at his door and told him he was the next king of Napoli, he wouldn’t have looked so surprised.” Needing to move and release some of her uneasiness, Lucia pushed away from the table to pace. “Oh, but the horror on his face when I told him.”
Elspeth transferred the bundle of Liam over to Kitty, who placed him in a tall chair.
“But he’d come here all the time,” Elspeth said, “so why be horrified? It’s not as though he walked a straight and moral path.”
“Can’t say.” Baffled, Lucia lifted her shoulders in a shrug, as if that one gesture could encapsulate the whole of her utter confusion. The man who’d adored her body with such skill wasn’t merely a duke, he controlled the fate of her livelihood—and her dreams.
