Don't Tempt Me

by Loretta Chase

  He was not allowed to throttle her.

  He stormed out of the dressing room and, soon, out of the house. He went to his club. He stayed there through the remainder of the afternoon and well into the evening and drank steadily.

  That night

  The Duke of Marchmont was not carried into the house in the early hours of morning. He didn’t even stagger—not so one would notice. He’d drunk a great deal, but it wasn’t enough. Sobriety came and went, and when it came, it was too bright and cold, like a day of dead winter.

  His bride had placed him in an impossible position.

  There was Harrison saying the duchess was dissatisfied with his services and offering to resign if the duke so wished it.

  What was Marchmont to say to that? What could he say but “Her Grace cannot be dissatisfied with your services. Clearly there’s a misunderstanding. I’ll look into it.”

  Look into it!

  Why must he look into it? Why must he be placed in the ridiculous position of negotiating between his house steward and his wife?

  Zoe shouldn’t have put him in this position.

  Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone?

  The arts of pleasing a man, indeed. Drive his house steward to resign. Drive her husband out of his own house. Oh, yes, how pleasing that was!

  As pleasing as his house was at this dreary hour. Dark and quiet as death. All of them abed except the night porter…and Hoare waiting and no doubt whimpering upstairs…and the husband who’d been driven out of his own abode.

  He strode more or less steadily across the entrance hall, through the main doorway and on to the great staircase. As he grasped the handrail, he glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, a glimmer of light to his left. He turned away from the stairs and crossed to the door of the anteroom. A fire still burned in the grate and a lone candle burned in the candelabrum standing on one of the tables. More light filled the doorway to the library.

  He went to the library door.

  She sat at the great table, her back to him. The candlelight shimmered in her hair, which was coming down. Dark blonde tendrils clung to the back of her neck.

  The table was heaped with books and stacks of paper. As she dipped her pen into the inkwell, she must have become aware of him, because she turned and looked over her shoulder toward the doorway.

  “You’re working very late,” he said.

  “It’s most interesting, what I’m finding here,” she said. Her voice was cool.

  He advanced into the room. She recommenced writing.

  “It must be fascinating indeed, to keep you up so late,” he said.

  “It is,” she said.

  As he neared, he saw an ink smudge on her cheek and another at her temple. He was still angry with her, but the smudges were adorable, and she looked so weary and cross, like a child forced to do sums against her will.

  She’d despised sums, he recalled. Yet she’d insisted on studying ledgers, column upon column of the numbers she’d hated.

  “It’s too late for such work,” he said. “You’re all over ink. Come upstairs and let’s get you cleaned up and into bed.” He thought about washing her…everywhere…and his cock began to swell.

  “I’m not quite done,” she said.

  “Zoe,” he said.

  “Marchmont,” she said crisply.

  He supposed she wanted him to apologize. He was tempted. She really was adorable, all smudged with ink and cross. But she was cross with him, and she had no business to be, after very nearly driving his house steward out of the house.

  Then what would become of them? England could manage well enough without a monarch. It had survived a mad king and his not-exactly-mentally-balanced son, even during wartime. Marchmont House could not manage without Harrison.

  “The numbers will still be there in the morning,” he said. “You need sleep.”

  And he did not want to get into his great, cold bed alone.

  “I’ll be along in a little while,” she said. “As soon as I finish these calculations.”

  She gave the slight, go-away wave of her hand.

  Was she dismissing him?

  “As you wish,” he said, and stormed out.

  The Duke of Marchmont’s bedroom faced east. When he woke, the angle of the sun told him it was late morning. No one had to tell him he was alone in the bed.

  No one had to tell him he was an idiot, either.

  He’d figured that out the second time last night he’d woken after a bad dream. In it Zoe rode away on a black horse and disappeared, forever.

  He winced, recalling what he’d said. Bourgeois. Common. What had possessed him?

  He wasn’t sure. Panic, perhaps, because he’d found himself required, suddenly, to do what he’d never done before. He’d found himself required to pay attention and make a decision.

  He’d decided wrong, unsurprisingly.

  He heard a light tap at the door connecting his room to Zoe’s. His sinking heart cautiously lifted. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, come in.”

  His heart lifted another degree when she spilled through the door in a delicious confection of a morning dress. Made of a cream-colored muslin trimmed in pink, it had long, loose sleeves and an abundance of lace. “You look like a sugar cake,” he said.

  She looked tired, too. He saw shadows under her beautiful eyes. His conscience said, Your fault, your fault, you beast.

  She beamed at him, just as though he wasn’t a beast.

  His heart lightened further.

  “Zoe,” he began.

  But before he could embark on his apology, a train of footmen entered behind her, some bearing trays.

  Those unencumbered set about moving a table and chairs in front of the fireplace. Then they set out the dishes. Then they went out via the room’s main door, which the last servant discreetly closed after himself.

  “When I came up this morning, you were asleep,” she said. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “Come here,” he said.

  “Come eat your breakfast,” she said.

  As he did every night, Hoare had laid out Marchmont’s dressing gown on the back of a chair, near at hand. She took it and held it up, playing valet.

  More coals heaped upon the duke’s head.

  He climbed out of bed, donned his slippers, and obediently thrust his arms into the sleeves. He tied the sash and said, “I must beg your pardon, Zoe. I behaved badly yesterday.”

  “Oh, thank you.” She flung herself at him and threw her arms about him in her usual impulsive way.

  He wrapped his arms about her and held her tightly. “I should never, never have taken Harrison’s side against you,” he said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Evidently, I wasn’t thinking at all. Please forgive me.” He buried his face in her hair and inhaled the fragrance of her, clean and warm and summery.

  He stood for a time, simply holding her.

  She’d been lost for far too long. She’d returned. She was his. He’d made her his. No one had forced him to do this. Now it was his job to look after her and honor her, a job no one had forced him to accept. He’d given his word, of his own free will, in the moment he’d said, “I will.”

  After a time, she drew away. “Thank you,” she said. “I wasn’t easy about coming to you this morning. But now that I’m forgiven—”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I asked you to forgive me. I haven’t decided whether to forgive you.” Her eyes widened, and he laughed. “A joke, Zoe. I couldn’t resist. Gad, what is there to forgive? I told you to do as you pleased, not as Harrison pleased.”

  “Come, let’s eat breakfast,” she said. “I must talk about sums, and that isn’t something you can bear on an empty stomach.”

  “Sums,” he said.

  What foreboding he felt was simply due to the prospect of dealing with numbers. She’d been staring at long columns of them. She’d been writing them down. Though she’d scrubbed the smudges off her face, faint ink stains remained on her fingers. />
  She took his hand, and he let her lead him to the breakfast table. “This is the darkest part of the room,” he said. “I thought you preferred to breakfast in the sunlight. My windows overlook the garden.”

  “I assumed your head would ache this morning,” she said.

  “I wasn’t nearly as drunk as I’d planned to be,” he said. “Getting drunk turned out not to be as much fun as it ought to be.” He held out a chair for her and she sat. He took his place opposite. It wasn’t far away. This was a good deal more intimate than even the breakfast room, one of the most informal rooms in the house.

  They ate for a time in comfortable silence. He was used to silence and used to living alone. But he knew she savored the quiet, after so many riotous mealtimes at Lexham House. As for himself, he was content this day simply to have her near and not in a mood to throw things at him.

  He seemed to be in a very bad way, stupidly attached to his wife.

  When at last he set down his cutlery, she drew out a few sheets of folded foolscap from a pocket hidden in the folds of her dress.

  “Those would be the sums, I collect,” he said, eyeing the papers with loathing.

  “A few notes, only,” she said. “Merely some examples to support the main premise. The main premise is that you are being grossly overcharged and overprovisioned, and that, in short, members of this household have been cheating you.”

  It was, perhaps, the last thing he could have expected to hear her say. He understood the words but couldn’t take them in. He looked at the papers in her hand. He looked at her, into her troubled countenance.

  “I never expected this in a household so well run,” Zoe said. “I didn’t suspect anything was amiss until Harrison made such a fuss about letting me see the records. Even then cheating was only one of several possibilities that occurred to me.”

  “Harrison,” he said. “Cheating me.” It was beginning to sink in, though he still felt numb.

  “The first thing I noticed was the quantity of provisions,” she said. “It might have made sense if you entertained on the most lavish scale every single evening. But I know you don’t. You dine away from home most of the time, according to Osgood, who keeps track of all the invitations and appointments. I haven’t yet sent for your cook—or any of those who might be involved—to hear how they explain the quantities and prices. I didn’t want to do this until I’d spoken to you.”

  “I can’t…” He remembered her sitting in the library, toiling over the books until long after midnight. She’d still been at it when he left in a sulk.

  Yesterday afternoon and night and early this morning she’d studied and calculated.

  “Oh, Zoe.” He held out his hand, and she put the notes into it. He looked down, and the notes and numbers were a blur.

  “I know such things happen,” she said. “My sisters warned me. They said I must immediately study the records, and talk to the upper-level staff, to show that I understand how a household is run. They said I must assert myself at the beginning, or I would leave a void and others would move in to fill it. Then I should never have control. I knew this was true, because it’s the same in the harem.”

  He hadn’t understood at all. He’d inherited his title. He’d inherited his position in the world. He’d never had to assert himself or prove who he was. The Duke of Marchmont simply was.

  “Sometimes the cook or another orders more than can be used, and sells the extra,” she went on. “Sometimes they make arrangements with, say, the butcher. He charges more than what the correct price should be, and he and the servants split the profit. But it isn’t only the food and drink. Your laundry bills are ludicrous, even for a fashionable gentleman. Some of the tailor bills are forgeries, I think. I would not be surprised if we discover that some of the merchants whose names appear on the bills don’t exist.”

  He stared blindly at the notes in his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “One expects to discover minor pilfering. That happens everywhere, and it’s nearly impossible to prevent. This is beyond anything I could have expected. It’s very, very wicked. A betrayal of trust of the worst kind.”

  The first blank shock was ebbing, and anger rushed in to fill its place. Harrison, whom he’d trusted, who’d stood before him, so piously correct yesterday.

  A part of him still didn’t want to accept it.

  Yet he knew in his heart it was true.

  His trust had been betrayed.

  All the same, he saw with painful clarity how easy he’d made it for others to betray him.

  He gave the notes back to Zoe, rose from the table, crossed the room, and pulled the rope, to summon a servant.

  A footman appeared within minutes.

  “Send Harrison to me,” said Marchmont. “Now.”

  “I’m sorry, Your Grace,” said the footman. “Mr. Harrison isn’t in the house.”

  Zoe wasn’t surprised when they discovered that the house steward had run away, apparently during the night.

  When his rooms were searched, his belongings—and a number of things that didn’t belong to him—were gone.

  Mrs. Dunstan had gone out to the market early this morning and had not come back. Neither of them had warned Dove and Hoare. These two must have assumed that the new duchess would never in a million years make heads or tails of the household records, else they’d have vanished, too.

  By the end of the day, after questioning every member of the staff, Marchmont was left in no doubt whatsoever that his upper servants, led by Harrison, had been systematically siphoning off a portion of his income—and this had been going on for as much as a decade.

  Hoare, for instance, had cultivated a network of tailors, glove makers, haberdashers, laundresses, and so on, all of whom overcharged His Grace and split the excess with the valet, who paid a percentage to his other partners in crime. The others—cook, butler, housekeeper—did the same in their own spheres.

  Some of the lower servants knew what was going on, some suspected, and some knew nothing. Those who knew had been afraid, until now, to inform. They believed that no one would take their word against Harrison’s, and they were terrified of what he would do if they tattled.

  Situations at Marchmont House were highly paid and of high status. One couldn’t hope to do as well elsewhere. Furthermore, one mightn’t find any work anywhere else, because Harrison let offending servants go without a character. A servant who hadn’t a letter of recommendation was unlikely to find another good position. Too, Harrison could be vindictive, spreading poison about those he’d dismissed. No one within ten miles of London would hire them for even the most menial positions.

  “He was a bully, as I knew,” Zoe said after the last of the servants, a scullery maid, had left the study.

  “I didn’t,” Marchmont said. “I never noticed anything amiss. I had no idea that most of my servants lived in fear of him. Even if I had noticed, I probably would have thought that was as it ought to be. But fear and respect are not the same thing. Gad, Zoe, what a mess.”

  He got up and walked to the fire and gazed into the grate, his hands clasped behind him.

  It was the way her father so often stood, thinking as he stared into the fire.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You trusted these people and they betrayed your trust.”

  He shook his head. “Not everyone can resist temptation. If I had taken responsibility, they wouldn’t have been tempted. I set a bad example. I was not the master of the house. Someone had to be. And it’s too tempting, when one has great power, to abuse it.” He turned back to her. “What would happen in the harem, in such a case? Off with their heads?”

  She nodded. “No one would care whether they were truly innocent or guilty.”

  “I know I ought to have the lot of them—Harrison, Cook, Dove, Dunstan, Hoare—taken up and prosecuted. But they’ll hang—and then I’ll always wonder whether, if I’d behaved differently, none of this would have happened.”

  “If Harrison and the ho
usekeeper have any sense, they’ll be on their way out of the country by this time,” Zoe said. “It doesn’t seem fair that they should escape and the others hang.”

  “The others are equally guilty. We can add to that the crime of stupidity for lingering in the house a minute after you’d opened the ledgers.” He still studied the burning coals.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time servants have underestimated my obstinacy,” Zoe said. “When you came to the library last night and told me to come to bed, I wanted to. I wanted us to kiss and make up. I didn’t want to keep staring at those columns of numbers. You know I never liked sums.”

  “I know.”

  “But I’m like the dog with the bone. As soon as I saw something wasn’t right, it became a challenge, to find out exactly what was wrong and how and where. It was the same in the harem. If I weren’t so obstinate, I should never have got away. But I was determined to master the place. And because I mastered it, when the time came, I found the way out.”

  “Oh, Zoe.” He turned to look at her, but she didn’t need to read his face. She heard it all in his anguished voice. She went to him. It was instinctive. She put her arms around him, the way she’d done this morning, because she loved him—she couldn’t help it—and she wanted him to be happy.

  His arms went around her, the way they’d done this morning, warm and strong and reassuring. He kissed the top of her head, and the tenderness of that small touch made her heart ache.

  “Your mother and father never gave up hope, but I did,” he said tightly. “I gave up on you, on everything. You never gave up.”

  “I’m stubborn,” she murmured against his chest.

  “Don’t give up on me, Zoe Octavia. Don’t ever give up on me.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  And No, I won’t, she thought. I’m afraid I never will.

  Fifteen

  Only a few short weeks ago, the Duke of Marchmont couldn’t be bothered to decide which waistcoat to wear.

  Now he found himself holding the power of life and death over his felonious servants.

  He had to make a decision, and he had to do it quickly. Dove, Hoare, and Cook were locked in Harrison’s parlor, guarded by an army of footmen and maidservants.