Page 20 of Her Runaway Duke
It seemed to take far too long until Levi was out in the field, giving Lucky free rein. The horse took his offering and stretched his legs out, sleekly galloping over the wide expanse of land.
It gave Levi the chance to consider his houseguest, and just what he was going to do with her.
He couldn’t very well turn her out, but she had said that she had a place to go. He had promised that one of the servants would see her there, but he wasn’t sure if he trusted any of them enough to accompany her.
He couldn’t very well do it himself. If they were discovered, he’d have to marry the girl, and then he would never be alone again.
And solitude was what he wanted.
Or was it?
Siena was headingup to the long gallery to begin on the most voluminous collection of paintings in the house when a flash outside the window caught her eye. She walked over to the small keyhole window, stood on her toes, and looked out over the soaked green fields before her.
She wondered if the duke had ever ventured into the hills in the distance.
She would ask him when he returned.
If he returned. Or even wanted to speak to her.
She was well aware that he had been avoiding her. The thought made her shrink a little inside. Was she truly that terrible to be around?
She had always been the girl whose company everyone enjoyed. The amiable one. The dutiful daughter. The lady who could make pleasant conversation without drawing much attention to herself.
None of that seemed to matter to the duke.
The duke who everyone talked about.
He was hiding something – that much was obvious.
The scandal sheets were rife with speculation as to what had happened to his parents, his brother, his family’s entailed estate.
Siena didn’t read the scandal sheets, but her mother did, and she was forever commenting on the latest gossip.
In this case, she said there were tales of everything from the duke murdering his brother in cold blood and then setting their estate on fire to hide the evidence, to the duke going mad in battle and then returning home and hiding from society due to the shame of what he had done.
The only parts of it that Siena knew were true were that the duke had no other remaining immediate family and he had fought Napoleon until his brother died when he was home visiting. She wasn’t sure that anyone truly knew the rest of the story.
Siena was not a woman who based so much of her decisions on fact and rational thinking. She just knew, deep within her, that the duke was not a man who would ever hurt someone close to him.
Even if he had killed one of the highwaymen without any inkling of remorse – at least that she could see. She supposed that was a result of his time in battle.
The motion outside returned, and she was startled to see a streak of black across the expanse of land before her. There might not be much in the way of cultivated gardens on this estate, but the natural landscape was breathtaking.
As was the speed of the horse. Lucky. He suited the duke, the two moving together in grace and fluidity. Perhaps Lucky wasn’t so inaptly named. If it hadn’t been for him, she would never have been discovered by the duke. She shuddered to think what would have become of her.
The Duke of Dunmore was a mysterious man, that was for certain.
Whether she would ever solve him was another story.
Levi could admitthat his spirits were much improved when he returned to the house after his ride. Lucky had also been appreciative, snorting with a shake of his head as they returned to the stables, as though thanking Levi for ignoring the rain.
Levi entered the house with some trepidation, on the lookout for Lady Siena. He didn’t know what he had been expecting of her, but he had thought she would be far more… passive, perhaps remaining in her room as she waited for the skies to clear and the roads to dry.
He didn’t like how she, instead, wandered the estate as though she was a house guest at a country party.
He asked his valet, McGregor, to draw him a bath, sitting and resting his sore leg while the footmen prepared it.
It wasn’t until everyone had departed except for his valet that he started removing his rain-soaked clothing.
