The place was packed. All of the women and most of the men greeted him by name. He shook hands and kissed cheeks European-style and patted backs. Then, as soon as he could extricate himself, he took a stool in the back.
“The usual?” Angelo, the bartender, asked when he had managed to work his way down the crowded bar.
Sam nodded.
Angelo put a pint of warm Guinness in front of him. “You look like shit. You must have watched the Chelsea game, eh? Nil-nil. Bloody hell.” The man shook his head in disgust.
“I just read the story of my life,” Sam said.
“Yeah? I’d like to read that,” a blonde said, sidling up to him. It was Veronica’s best friend, Sarah. Or Sylvie. Or something. She cooed, “Or better yet, we can start writing the sequel. Together.”
“Another night, kid.” The bartender gave her an icy stare and she backed off with a little wave and a, “Bye, Sammy. Call me.” She mimed holding a phone to her ear.
When she was gone, Sam started up again. “I’m a character in a romance novel, Angelo. A two-bit duke.”
“Congratulations!”
“Congratulations?”
“My girlfriend reads those. I think those guys get lucky every ten pages or so.”
“Lucky!” Sam said it too loud, and heads turned. He inhaled a long, warm chug of the dark, bitter beer until everyone went back to his or her own business. Sam leaned in and lowered his voice. “I’m telling you, Angelo, it’s spooky. The guy even looks like me. Well, except he’s got this hair that sticks up all over the place.”
Angelo looked at Sam’s head and sucked in his cheeks but didn’t comment. “Since when did you start reading romance novels, tough guy?”
Sam considered joking, but he wasn’t in the mood. His head was swirling. He told Angelo about Granny Donny and Paula and Ally leaving her book behind. “It’s like we’re the same guy. For instance—”
“The hair.”
“What? No. My hair’s fine. Listen, every eligible female this duke meets wants to marry him for his money.”
“I see the resemblance.” Angelo put his elbows on the bar and watched Sam. “But let’s face it, English, that describes half the SOBs in here.”
Sam drained the rest of the beer while he looked around the bar filled with strutting men in Hugo Boss suits and Bagatto loafers. He knew he could count on Angelo to put things in perspective. He was, as usual, getting carried away. Exuberance and creativity were what made his advertising work shine, pushing ideas to their limits and making connections where ordinary people didn’t see them, but in the real world, those attributes made life dicier than it needed to be. Got him into all kinds of trouble. Like this. Because, frankly, despite his body’s traitorous reactions, Ally wasn’t his type. “You know what makes me want to eat my own head?”
“The Italy-Germany game last Wednesday?” Angelo asked hopefully.
“The duke doesn’t go near a respectable woman with a ten-foot pole—”
“Are we still talking about that book?”
“He won’t consider a woman who’s respectable.”
Angelo sighed. “Because of the marriage problem.”
“Right. But the writer of the book, Somethingor-other Lancet, implies that this is a weakness. A character flaw!”
Angelo nodded. “Well, Lancet is most likely female.”
“Exactly! Just because a man doesn’t commit to marrying every woman he beds doesn’t mean he’s miserable.”
“Right.”
“Or childish.”
“Certainly not.”
“Nothing wrong with fun, mate. Right? Places to go, people to meet.”
“Party on, buddy.” Angelo pulled a light beer from the tap then passed it over Sam to a blonde in a black dress behind him.
“I have my work, which is important,” Sam asserted.
“Yeah? I thought you sold your ad agency last year for a coupla mill.” The blonde sidled closer. “That you just take advertising freelance gigs now when it doesn’t interfere with your other, er, pursuits.” Angelo watched the blonde with the light beer rub up against Sam.
Sam shook off the woman and Angelo’s observation, but the truth of it stung. Only working when he felt like it was more a gentleman’s hobby than work, wasn’t it? Panic was starting to rise in his gut. I am the duke.
When Angelo came back from mixing a martini, Sam said, “Last week, Angie, I flew to L.A. for a Nike shoot with Anthony DeGenisis, the tennis phenom. We made an ad with him that’s gonna sweep the award shows in Cannes and New York. It’s bloody brilliant. Then when I got back, another grateful client gave me behind-the-plate Yankees–Red Sox tickets. Yanks and Sox! I work hard for my pleasure.”
“It’s a book, Sam. Don’t you think you’re getting a little worked up?”
“A damn bad one.” Sam gazed into his half-empty beer. He was getting worked up, and he had drunk enough by now to face the worst part of The Dulcet Duke, the part that even his beloved Guinness couldn’t touch. “This Duke Blackmoore meets Princess Alexandra, and he’s reduced to a trembling vat of jelly.” He drained the rest of his beer, willing it to take hold. “A grown, successful, happy man, reduced to jelly! By a sixteen-year-old virgin.”
“You’re in love with a sixteen-year-old virgin?”
Conversation around them stopped as everyone looked at Sam.
“No! That’s the book. Me, I’m…” Trying to waltz in Central Park with a twenty-something schoolteacher in horrid, vintage clothes.Wanting to understand a woman who despises me. Curious about the whys and hows of reaching her. Damn, that was even worse. At least the teenage virgin made some kind of sense. “Me, I’m in need of another beer.”
Angelo pulled the tap slowly, waiting for the hum of the bar to go back to normal. He set the glass down in front of Sam and leaned in close. “So you met your princess,” Angelo said. “This is good, Sammy.”
Bloody hell, even Angelo was going soft on him. Sarah—or was it Sandy? Sally?—was watching their exchange. She was a knockout, and yet, Sam didn’t care. The woman looked like every other woman in the place: carbon copies. Beautiful carbon copies, but they all wore the same pointy heels, had the same highlights, and even the same vine tattoos peeking out from under the spaghetti straps of the same baby-doll dresses. If Ally was here, which she never would be, she’d look— He hesitated. Different. Real. Sam lowered his voice, looked both ways, and said, “What am I gonna do, Angelo?”
Angelo nodded. “Get on your wild steed, grab your sword, and get your princess. Or something like that. I dunno. I only read the juicy bits. Turn the corners down to mark the pages when I need a little reading material in the loo.”
Sam ran his hand through his hair. “The duke has to beg the princess to consider him. She despises him. She treats him like a—”
All at once it hit Sam like a freight train. He looked toward Sarah/Sally/Sandy; she winked at him, and he felt sick.
I’m her.
I am Ally’s Veronica.
Less than her Veronica, because Ally wouldn’t even condescend to sleep with me.
A rage beyond any he’d felt in years took hold of him.
He tried to drink down the anger in a swig of Guinness, but it was stuck to him, part of him. Who did she think she was? He wasn’t a man to be used and disposed of with scorn because he wasn’t serious enough to rate better treatment.
“You okay, Sam?” Angelo asked. “You went a little pale and quiet there, mate.”
“I don’t beg,” Sam growled. “Not for a woman in flats!”
“Met your challenge, eh, English?” Angelo delivered the barb, then darted down the bar to pour drinks for another couple.
He should have been frightened, because Sam was mad enough to lunge over the bar and grab the man. A challenge. Hell, he was no floozy. He was Sam Carson. Ally might hate his guts, but she wanted something from him, too. Not just help with her grandmother, but something else, something she kept trying to hide behind those brown ey
es and granny glasses.
She wants me.
He looked around the bar. For a minute, he lost his bearings. Who am I? What am I doing here? In this strange, adopted country, thousands of miles from his home, from his nearest blood relative, he was no one. He might as well not exist. If he left this bar tonight and got stabbed in a back alley, who would care? Misha? Angelo? The clients who called only when they needed help? He watched Angelo mix a whiskey sour for another man in expensive clothes. That man would slip onto Sam’s empty barstool, and Angelo might wonder a few weeks later, What ever happened to English? Or he might not.
Sam drained his beer in two long swigs. What number was he up to? He didn’t care. He was getting blotto tonight to get his mind off that woman.
But two beers later, his rage had turned to a kind of despair he hadn’t felt in years. “Angelo, what in bloody hell are rippling thighs?”
“Don’t know, friend, but if I were you, I’d find out. Because there’s a princess out there who needs her duke in shining armor. And he’d better be rippling, or else all the begging in the world isn’t going to get him anywhere. At least, that’s how I think it works. Plus, you have to grow a mullet. Those guys on the covers always have the mullets. Oh, and lose the shirt, buddy. They never have those either. Plus, I have two words for you that you’re not gonna want to hear.”
“Hit me.”
“My girlfriend must have a stack of these books waist-high by the bed, Sammy. I’ve studied these things for clues about what women want. It is my business, after all, to know. So I can give advice.”
“You read the books, Angie. Just admit it and spit it out, mate.” Sam was exhausted, wrung out, grasping for anything that he could use to understand that blasted woman.
“Chest-waxing, Sam. Those romance-novel dudes always have smooth, shiny chests. Not a hair in sight.”
Sam left the bar alone, which was disturbing enough. He had drunk all night and was still stone-cold sober. Which didn’t help explain his tripping over that bloody curb. Or the spinning ground. Or the way he couldn’t stop thinking about Ally Giordano.
She made him laugh and made him hard and made him think about things he hadn’t thought about in ages. What was happening with his family in England? Was the ancient, crumbling mansion waiting for his stewardship in Leicestershire still standing? Who was sitting at his father’s side, learning to lead the Carson Financial Group in his absence? Did his parents ever think of him, or was he truly dead to them forever as they had declared with their cold, clipped words when he left England with his new wife, Hana, at the age of twenty-one? Of course he was still dead to them. Not a single word in response to Hana’s funeral. Not a visit. Not a flower. Total silence. Until the plane ticket came with a terse note: We will forget this ever happened. Naturally, he had ripped it to shreds.
He tripped over another curb. He hoped it was a curb. It definitely was as hard as a curb. Two women walking the other way gave him wide berth.
He sat down on the next slab of dangerous concrete before it could attack. He held his head in his hands, but his world didn’t stop spinning. Ally, like the princess, like everyone, wasn’t all good. He had felt her fingertips press against his skin, her warm lips grow hot under his. It didn’t matter a whit what she thought of him because lust was irrational, physical.
And love? He stared into the gutter. A crushed Star-bucks cup. Cigarette butts. Wasn’t love also irrational? He wouldn’t know. He’d experienced it only once, in the whirlwind with Hana. And then she died. And before Hana? Nothing. Hell, at one point he must have loved his parents, his brothers and sisters. Was love that shooting pain in his side he’d felt when he was loaded alone at noon on Christmas Day into the chauffeured car to go back to boarding school after just twelve hours home? Was it the burst of agony left radiating through his head after the blind, mad anger of being told that if he married that commoner, he wouldn’t receive his position at Carson Financial Group, and he might as well go to America and never come back? You’ll be dead to us. And then Hana was dead and here he was alone, on the hard sidewalk, feeling sick as a dog.
Oh, he knew love. Love was the empty, blank rage of having his letters returned and his calls not answered by his mother. To be treated as if he were dead, with hardly a backward glance, because he had dared to want something other than finance and the uptight aristocrat they had picked out for him to marry.
He stood warily as he reminded himself, I don’t love Ally. I don’t even like her. She surely had no idea how to please a man. No woman who wore glasses like hers could possibly care about pleasing a man.
But if I took the glasses off…
He walked slower now, carefully, toward home. Cabs slowed behind him, hoping for the well-dressed drunk’s extravagant tip, but he waved them off. This was Manhattan of the twenty-first century, not Regency England. If he was going to be a hero in a romance novel—which he was not—it sure as hell wasn’t going to be one about him changing into a good wee lad, like clay in a moralizing author’s hands. No, his book would be about the “good” woman realizing that comfortable shoes and vintage prints do not make a woman good any more than loving fun and women (and fun women) make a bloke bad. In this day and age, it was no terrible thing for a woman to give in to a rake now and again, just for the fun of it. Because life was short. Shorter than Ally knew.
He stumbled into his lobby. Bollocks. Misha stared him down like he was coming home from a mass-murder spree. Got a towel for my bloody knife, mate? Misha just stared. Why did that man despise him? Sam ignored him and rode up in his private elevator, remembering Ally stepping out of it, taking him in hungrily with her eyes, stumbling over her endless words. Rubbish that a woman with decent legs like Ally’s would go willingly at twenty-five onto a shelf, when what she really wanted was to bed a naughty, wealthy duke.
The doors opened and he stumbled out. He knew she wanted him. Not just by the hungry look in her eyes, but also because The Dulcet Duke was a guidebook to “good” women like Ally Giordano. It explained in endless adverbs how Princess Alexandra really felt around the man she fought to despise. Sexually, Ally had been his from the first time their eyes met.
He threw himself onto his bed fully dressed.
What did he care what she wanted? What did he want?
Why would he want to bed Ally when there were so many other women out there willing and able, better dressed and experienced, and way more fun?
He sat up and kicked off his shoes.
I don’t beg.
He took off his shirt and threw it across the room.
I don’t want her.
He’d see her grandmother this weekend as promised, return Ally’s purse and that cursed book, and he’d never have to see or even think about either one of them ever again. Never have to feel the pain and hurt of his past that she and her grandmother dredged up in him.
But as he drifted off to sleep, one blasted thought circled through his mind, trumping all others: No duke worth his title would let two women venture into the depths of Brooklyn in an open carriage without being at their side to protect them, no matter how much one of the women despised him.
The princess had a way of always being in the midst of doing good whenever he saw her, making whatever he was doing feel downright silly and selfish the moment he laid eyes on her.
—From The Dulcet Duke
Chapter 12
Sam left his apartment the next day at eight. He dropped off Ally’s purse at the Plaza with the doorman, but he didn’t go up to see Lady Giordano. It felt too early to call on a lady. Plus, he was in his soccer gear. Jockstrap and shin guards hardly became a duke.
He took a slow jog around the lower park to warm up for the game. He had barely slept last night, dreaming of Ally, which was disturbing enough. Now, his mind was racing faster than his feet seemed able to manage, as if his past were about to catch him. He had to get rid of his obligation to her and get back to his old life.
After his lap, he walked t
o the soccer field. This Saturday morning game in Central Park was a rough, fast, take-no-prisoners pickup game. (Game, ha! As if soccer was ever a mere game.) The European Union expats joined forces against the Brazilians and other assorted South American ringers. Once in a while, a brave, fool-hardy American tried to join the carnage, but he almost always was handed his head on a platter. This was the real deal.
Two Brazilians were lacing up. Sam sat next to them. “Hey, Paulo,” Sam asked as casually as he could, “you ever hear of a player named Mateo? Drives a horse and carriage around the park. Brazilian. Midfielder.”
Paulo shook his head. “Sorry, English. But if you’re looking for some real skills, I could teach you a few things.”
“In your dreams, Paulo.”
“So who’s this guy? Someone we should see? Not like we need more talent to kick your pussy European asses.”
“Nah. Just met him, that’s all. Let’s get out there so I can make you eat your words, eh, caras?”
The game was brutal. That Misha showed up and joined the Latin team, determined to take Sam’s head off, didn’t help any. The players cursed in twenty different languages. By the second half, blood flowed freely down Sam’s leg, most of it his own, and he was covered in mud. The park was starting to fill around them with couples pushing babies in strollers. Wide-eyed tourists took pictures of one another on benches.
A line of picnic blankets began to form around the field as people settled in for their vigil to receive free Shakespeare-in-the-Park tickets. The park service handed out the free tickets at one o’clock, first-come-first-serve, and the crowd was thicker than usual today because the theater group was doing Hamlet tonight. Sam hated playing on the days they handed out the tickets, as whole families came with elaborate picnics, small children, and old people, prepared to spend a peaceful day in the park, ignorant of the battle taking place on the soccer field just yards from their crosswords and potato salads. The makings of a Shakespearean tragedy, indeed.
How to Tame a Modern Rogue Page 9
