Dukes Prefer Blondes

by Loretta Chase

  She inched her hands upward to tangle in his hair, so thick and black and beautiful, like a raven’s wing.

  Raven.

  She heard the groan, deep in his throat. He pulled her closer still.

  A moment later, she felt him tense.

  Then she heard it. So quiet the room was, the tap sounded like thunder. She tried to push the sound to the back of her mind, but it wouldn’t stay there. She felt him withdraw, though he didn’t let go.

  A knock. And another, sharper one.

  Then came Tilsley’s voice, pitched to be audible through the closed door.

  “The tea being ready, madam and sir, only wishing not to interrupt at inopportune junctures and breaking a train of—­erm—­thought.”

  Mr. Radford lifted his head and looked at her for a moment as though he didn’t recognize her. Then he took his hands away and stepped back so casually. She stood, meanwhile, her world upended, and broken bits of the life she used to know scattered about her like a child’s discarded toys.

  It was only thanks to years of training that she didn’t cry out or stagger or even look about her like one stupefied, which she was. All these things happened inside.

  She’d never been kissed before. Whatever she’d thought those things were, they weren’t kisses. She’d never known desire before. Whatever she’d felt before was merely the thrill of being naughty—­and not very naughty at that.

  She’d thought she was sophisticated. She was the greenest of greenhorns.

  Standing on shaky legs no one could see, she looked up at him, into grey eyes like an approaching storm. Years of training kept her composed on the outside while inside her heart was stumbling about in her rib cage, and all she could think was I’ve made a very bad mistake. And the next thought was I don’t care.

  “Yes, yes, come in, Tilsley,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

  The door opened a crack.

  “Permission, sir,” came the voice behind it. “Having received instructions on two separate occasions regarding the same subject, to wit, not bursting in on those intervals of Mr. Westcott or Mr. Radford being with clients. Them pointing out the degree of urgency to be considered, for instance, the premises not to be equated with Newgate. And as to that, the gentlemen offering the kindly reminder how it’s not like anybody’s waiting on the scaffold with the rope round his neck and I’m running in with a royal pardon.”

  Mr. Radford bit his lip. “A good boy, but talkative.”

  He walked, perfectly steady—­while her knees were hanging on by a thread—­to the door and opened it fully.

  Tilsley, his face scarlet, stumbled slightly over the threshold, but managed not to drop the large tea tray he carried.

  He placed it carefully on the table nearest the fire. He livened up the fire with more coals and a deft application of poker. He did not look at her or Mr. Radford once.

  After urging them to let him know if anything else was wanted, and promising to stay within easy calling distance, Tilsley went out, closing the door behind him.

  A moment’s silence followed, while the candlelight and firelight glimmered over the book-­filled shelves and the walls and tables and chairs, and made shadows on Mr. Radford’s face. And while she thought, What am I going to do? What am I going to do with him?

  Then, “I’m not going to ask if you’re done being hysterical,” he said. “It would be plain to the meanest intelligence that you’ve stored up years of that article, and it’s bound to break out at intervals. I’m not going to apologize for kissing you. I’m not going to make excuses for doing so. The facts are simple and obvious. You were in a passion. Lady Clara Fairfax in a passion is very exciting. I’m a man. I succumbed to a normal and natural masculine urge.” He met her wondering gaze. “And I will not promise never to do it again. If you choose to continue plaguing me, you will have to take your chances. My self-­control is above the average, but I am not an automaton, and my mechanism is not clockwork.”

  “Firstly,” she began. Her voice was unsteady and hoarse.

  He held up his hand. “I’m going to unfasten your cloak and you will try with all your might to resist impulses to scream at me or do me an injury or demand a discussion.”

  I’m not plaguing you, she’d been about to say. But that was a lie.

  She’d plagued him from the start. And it was all very well to tell herself she wanted to see this thing through and help a girl who was trying so hard to make a decent life. But Clara wasn’t needed. She only wanted to be needed. She was merely tagging along, the way she’d tagged along after her brothers until Mama put a stop to it.

  This is what comes of letting her do as she likes, Mama had raged when, days after the Vauxhall contretemps, she’d discovered the chipped tooth. This is what comes of letting the boys indulge her. She will spoil all her looks, and never learn how to behave, and then where will she be when she’s of age to wed? She’ll be a hoyden and a bluestocking and nobody will want her.

  Clara had never told anybody how she’d chipped the tooth.

  She wasn’t sorry for what she’d done and she didn’t care about the tooth. At least she’d done something.

  And it was a good thing she’d done it, because she’d been permitted to do almost nothing to any purpose ever since.

  She refused to be sorry now for wanting to be needed. She was two and twenty, and her life, it turned out, was a great, big froth of pretty nothing. She was desperate.

  She put up her chin, though she still did not seem to have full control of her muscles and wanted very much to sit down. “You may unfasten my cloak, and I will try not to molest you, but I cannot make any promises in that regard, unless you can do the job without speaking.”

  His mouth quirked, very slightly, upward.

  The mouth he’d had on hers only a moment ago.

  She strangled a sigh.

  He advanced, undid the cloak fastenings, slid the garment from her shoulders, and draped it over a chair.

  “Firstly?” he said.

  “Never mind,” she said. She needed a new tactic, but the kiss had fogged her brain and the light wasn’t coming through yet. She needed to think, to find a way not to be sent home and told to leave him alone.

  She tried to find a clue in what he’d said, but her mind wouldn’t cooperate. All she knew was, this was the only man in the world who’d follow a kiss like that with a speech like that.

  She walked as steadily as she could to one of the chairs by the table holding the tea tray. “One thing I do know how to do is preside over tea.”

  “Your shoes are wet through,” he said. “You ought to take them off.”

  She looked at her half-­boots. The ribbons threaded through long sets of tiny eyelets, a dozen or more pairs of them per boot. These were not conveniently placed down the front or even the outer side, but along the inside.

  She looked up at him. “I know how, in theory. In practice, I should have to be a contortionist.” Not to mention she was on fire at the mere thought of exposing her stockinged feet to his view. “I’ll put my feet on the fender while I drink my tea. Not that I ever take cold, but I know you’ve got it into your head I’ll expire of a little exposure to damp. It seems I’m not the only one in this room afflicted with hysteria. I may be a lady, and useless in many categories, but I’m not delicate.”

  She sat and concentrated on the tea tray. A fine-­quality black tea. No tea cakes or sandwiches but fresh bread and butter, cut and arranged neatly. Fresh, rich milk, too, a discreet sniff told her.

  He took the other chair. “I thought you said your maid was to meet you here.”

  “Maybe she ran into Mr. Westcott and they were overcome with passion and commenced an affaire d’amour. That will be interesting. She’ll arrive with her hair in wanton disarray and her clothes buttoned incorrectly.”

  He smiled, and her hear
t squeezed.

  It was only a ghost of a smile, here and gone in a heartbeat, but it changed his face, and she glimpsed, too briefly, a man just out of her reach.

  She performed the hostess task she could have done blindfolded in the middle of an artillery bombardment.

  He took a lump of sugar and no milk and made two-­thirds of the bread and butter disappear with smooth efficiency.

  She’d never thought of him eating. She’d never thought of him hungry. She wasn’t sure she’d thought of him as human, except when she recalled the boy at Vauxhall.

  And a moment ago, when he’d touched her. When he’d kissed her.

  Passionately.

  Or so it had seemed. How could she be sure?

  She’d wanted passion. She’d rejected the man supposedly meant for her because she knew he didn’t feel it for her nor she for him. She still wasn’t sure what passion was. She’d only had a chance to experience its possibility.

  She drank her tea, but eating was beyond her ability to feign normality. She told him to finish the bread and butter, and he did. And for some reason, her heart ached, watching him.

  “It seems I was famished,” he said when he was done. “But it was a long night with our young criminal. He held out until the last possible minute, ­terrified of hanging but more terrified of what Freame—­or, more likely, one of Freame’s favorite assassins—­would do to him if he tattled. Then there was the judge to deal with. He’s been wanting to hang Daniel Prior this age. Persuading him not to took more time than was convenient. Time is an article we haven’t much of in this situation. But Bow Street is ready to move in. And so we go out tomorrow morning, not long after daybreak, to collect Toby Coppy and, with any luck, a clutch of criminals.”

  He paused, and she waited for the speech listing the reasons she would not be allowed to participate.

  Firstly . . .

  He said, “You may join us if you promise, solemnly promise, to do exactly as I say.”

  And that was Mistake Number Seven.

  Five: Taking her to the office instead of telling the hackney cab driver to take her back where she came from.

  Six: Kissing her. What had happened? What had happened? He was still . . . unsettled. No, aroused was the brutal truth, and he was experiencing an unusual degree of difficulty in calming himself.

  That must explain his making Mistake Number Seven.

  The color washed out of her face, and Radford nearly sprang from his chair, thinking she’d faint.

  But the color washed back in, a shade pinker than normal. She opened her mouth, briefly revealing the chipped tooth. Then she closed it.

  Her beautiful, luscious, untutored-­in-­kissing mouth.

  His other self was gnashing his teeth.

  If Tilsley hadn’t banged on the door and shouted . . .

  But what-­ifs were nonsensical.

  Tilsley had interrupted in the nick of time, and that was that.

  “When you say . . .” Her voice had climbed half an octave higher than usual. She paused, lifted her chin, and went on in her normal tone, “When you say I must promise to do exactly as you say—­”

  “That is precisely what I mean,” he said. “If you can’t promise, on your sacred word of honor—­”

  “Suppose somebody kills you,” she said. “Then how am I to do exactly what you say?”

  “You’d better not try splitting hairs with me,” he said. “I do it for a living, and I’ve been doing it since before I earned a living. I’m requiring you to do what I require clients to do. If they will not be guided strictly by me, if they interfere or question or fail to cooperate, I can’t answer for the consequences.”

  “Very well, I promise,” she said. “But—­”

  “No buts,” he said. “I can’t believe I’ve offered to bring you along. I devoutly wish I hadn’t. But it’s too late. You murdered my brain, and I’ve said it, and if I go back on my word you’ll cry, and I’ve had enough of that for the present.”

  That wasn’t altogether true.

  He was used to women crying. Usually women needed him because they were in trouble. Women in trouble wept. Copiously.

  What troubled him was far more upsetting than her tears.

  What troubled him was her raging, despairing speech. He couldn’t detach himself from it or push it to the back of his mind. It stuck in the front of his consciousness like the sharp instrument she no doubt wished to plunge into him.

  He remembered the little girl, intelligent and brave and full of life. And now he saw how the life of a lady had closed about her like a cage. He understood, because he was too intelligent not to, that she was suffocating.

  That was why, he realized. That was why he’d made Mistake Number Seven.

  “Please,” she said. “I promise to do what you say.”

  Please. Oh, good. Stab to the heart follows stab to the head.

  “Very well,” he said. “Firstly, you may not bring your maid. It’ll be bad enough, my bringing a female into it. Two females is not to be contemplated.”

  She opened her mouth, and he knew she was going to argue. Then she took a deep breath, folded her hands, and nodded.

  “Secondly—­”

  He broke off because he heard voices in the outer office.

  “What the devil do you mean?” Westcott was saying. “It’s my office.”

  “Yes, sir, but—­”

  “Get out of the way.”

  Lady Clara kept her hands folded and merely looked toward the door, eyebrows very slightly upraised in the manner of one witnessing a gaffe.

  The door opened and Westcott strode in, Davis close behind him. “I say, Radford, this is the outside of enough. The dratted boy stood in front of the door—­my door—­and said—­”

  “Mrs. Faxon, you will remember Mr. Westcott, I believe,” Radford cut in.

  Lady Clara gave a regal nod. Her hair was coming down and her dress was wrinkled but her damp clothing directed blame to the rainstorm rather than to Radford. Not by so much as a twitch or a blink did she betray the truth of what had happened recently, and not even Westcott would suspect that his friend and colleague had kissed her in a most ill-­considered manner, might easily have gone further than was remotely acceptable or safe, and had not yet recovered fully.

  “I was beginning to grow alarmed, Davis,” Lady Clara said. “I expected to find you here waiting for me.”

  Westcott did not give Davis a chance to respond. As though she were a client, he went into full attorney mode, and answered for her. “Miss Davis would have been here in a matter of minutes, but for the crowd in Old Bailey when the session ended,” he said. “As often happens, her hackney driver made a detour to avoid the crush. But there was an accident near the Fleet Prison. Somebody injured and a vehicle smashed.”

  “I didn’t see it,” Davis said. “I couldn’t see anything, between the rain and the dirty window. My driver told me why he had to stop. A crowd had gathered. We were obliged to wait for some time.”

  “Did you make the same detour?” Radford asked his friend. “I’d expected you long before now.”

  “I decided to wait out the worst of the rain at the coffeehouse,” Westcott said. “When it had abated somewhat, I made use of the umbrella you so kindly sent to me, and walked. I met Miss Davis at the gate.”

  “Then we’re all accounted for,” Lady Clara said.

  “Yes, my lady, and time to be returning,” Davis said “Lady Exton will be expecting your ladyship.”

  “The lady—­that is to say, Mrs. Faxon—­will not be returning quite yet,” Radford said. “We have business to transact. We’re going to retrieve Toby Coppy, and I require the lady’s assistance.”

  The maid’s eyes widened and her mouth opened. Then it snapped shut and set in a tight line.

  Westcott, not being a servan
t, didn’t feel any need to subdue himself. “Are you quite mad?” he said. “You cannot take La—­”

  “Mrs. Faxon is vital to the mission,” Radford said, with a glance toward the door. Tilsley, to his knowledge, wasn’t a habitual eavesdropper. The door was thick, in any event. Yet he must have heard something, to make him decide to play sentry.

  Radford moved to close the door. Then he said in a low voice, “Let’s keep our clerk out of this for the moment. The fewer who know, the better.” He looked at Davis. “I give you my word no harm will come to your lady. Neither she nor I will participate directly. This is a police matter, and they don’t want amateurs bollixing up their plans. But the enterprise will proceed more smoothly and rapidly if the lady is on hand to identify Toby. If he balks, she’ll persuade him to cooperate.”

  “It’s all right, Davis,” Lady Clara said. “I’ll be surrounded by police. Armed with batons.”

  “Yes, my lady. If you say so.”

  “If I may say so, I must strongly advise her la—­the lady—­against it,” Westcott said. “If anything goes wrong—­”

  “I realize there’s a possibility of unplanned-­for events,” she said. “Rest assured I’ll bring a weapon. And if that isn’t enough, Mr. Radford will be by to talk the villains to death.”

  It was a good thing Radford had a dictatorial personality. A great deal of arguing ensued—­or tried to ensue—­before he quashed it.

  The maid was furious about not being allowed to come, and he wasn’t happy to exclude her, but the last thing they needed was another woman, especially one who might easily make misguided attempts to protect her charge. He’d already complicated matters more than sufficiently.

  A dozen times in the next hour he told himself to go back on his word. What was the worst Lady Clara could do? Hate him? Strike him?

  He was a rational man. He prized logic. He knew his promise was irrational and he needed to take it back. He tried to do so once, twice, thrice—­and each time, her taut speech about her life echoed in his head, and the words, the sensible words he ought to say, stuck in his throat.