Elizabeth hadn’t meant to rant at Haverford much less confide in him, hadn’t meant to disclose her past, or even discuss Charlotte’s inchoate schemes with him. The dratted man listened, though. He was a duke, and yet he was also like no kind of aristocrat Elizabeth had met—or kissed—before.
Haverford was trying to convince her he was a lazy kisser, but he was lazy like a prowling lion, bringing infinite patience and focus to his advances. His lips moved over Elizabeth’s in gentle brushes, and she scooted closer, the better to grip him by the lapels.
He came closer as well, spreading his knees, and sliding a hand into Elizabeth’s hair.
His kisses were lovely. Tender, teasing, maddeningly undemanding.
“I want—” Elizabeth muttered against his mouth.
His tongue danced across her lips. She braced herself for an invasion, for a crude imitation of coitus, but Haverford surprised her by pausing to caress the nape of her neck.
“If you don’t like it,” he said, “you show me what I’m doing wrong. You are gifted at chiding and correcting. Chide me.”
Oh, gracious. Oh, yes. Elizabeth explored the shape and texture of his mouth, the contours of his lips, the arch of his eyebrows. His jaw was only slightly bristly—he must have shaved before dinner—while his eyebrows were soft.
Elizabeth took a taste of him, and his every movement, from his breathing to the susurration of his clothing, to his slight shifts on the hassock, stilled.
“Again,” he said. “Please.”
Elizabeth liked the sound of that, liked the feel of the word please whispered against her mouth.
And as the kiss deepened and became a frolic followed by a dare, punctuated by a challenge, she rejoiced.
I was wrong. I was so very, wonderfully wrong. Every man wasn’t an inconsiderate lout. They weren’t all monuments to self-satisfaction. At least one bachelor could kiss and kiss and kiss.…Elizabeth took one more taste of pleasure, then drew back enough to rest her forehead on Haverford’s shoulder.
“I need a moment, Your—Julian.”
He stroked her hair, his cheek resting against her temple. “Take all the time you need. I’m in rather a state myself.”
Elizabeth hugged his admission to her heart. He’d restored her faith in something—perhaps in herself. The fault had lain not with her, but with the men she’d chosen, and if she could be wrong in this, she might be wrong about the joys of marriage, about her own dreams, about anything.
Elizabeth sat back and smoothed the duke’s cravat. “My thanks. You deliver an impressive counterexample. You’ve given me something to consider.”
One mink-dark eyebrow quirked. “Such effusive praise will surely turn my head, Miss Windham.”
“Elizabeth. If I’m turning your head, you may address me as Elizabeth when private.”
They shared a smile, conspiratorial, sweet, and a bit dazed. This was how it was supposed to be between a man and a woman, both comfortable and daring, a private adventure…
Order your copy of No Other Duke Will Do!
How to Steal a Duke
(in Ten Days, Give or Take a Few Days, But Definitely in Less than a Fortnight)
by
Shana Galen
Contents – How to Steal a Duke
About How to Steal a Duke
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
About Shana Galen
Books by Shana Galen
About How to Steal a Duke
Dominick Spencer, the Duke of Tremayne, is a powerful man used to having his way. When he and two other members of the Bibliomania Club set out to find the lost volumes of The Duke’s Book of Knowledge to present to their favorite Oxford professor, Dominick takes his task seriously, even hiring a cat burglar to help him gain entry to a remote castle in Cornwall inhabited by a mad earl.
Rosalyn Dashner knows accepting the duke’s assignment is dangerous, but her impoverished family and sick brother need the money. The daughter of a gentleman, Rosalyn is not impressed by titles. She’s not impressed by the haughty duke until she comes to know the kind but lonely man under the gruff exterior. The duke might be looking for a manuscript, but she’s found a man she loves. When Rosalyn must risk her life to obtain the manuscript, will Dominick choose her or his quest for the Duke’s Book?
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Kelly Snyder for suggesting the title of this novella.
And much appreciation to Grace Burrowes for saving me from sickening readers with my original plot. (And no, I won’t tell you what it was. Well… I might if you write to me and ask.)
Of course, thanks goes to Carolyn Jewel as well for being such a fabulous co-author and to Miranda Neville for her help with the book’s theme and concept.
And I want to acknowledge Joyce Lamb for her stellar copyediting. She tries to make me perfect, but if there are any mistakes, they’re still my own. Same goes with Sarah Rosenbarker, who proofed the manuscript. I always send her what I think is a flawless manuscript, and she always finds more mistakes. Thanks, Sarah.
Chapter One
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“What do you mean you don’t have it?” Dominick Spencer, the Duke of Tremayne, slammed his fist on the desk, rattling the tea cup perched on its delicate blue and white china saucer.
“I’m s-sorry, Your Grace,” the agent stammered, shrinking back as though he wished he could blend into the wood paneling of the duke’s London town house. “I have exhausted every avenue—”
“Damn and blast your every avenue.” Dominick stood and stalked around the large oak desk that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s and his great-grandfather’s before that. “You didn’t exhaust every avenue, or you’d have the book in your hands by now.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” The man hung his head, staring down at the hat he had crumpled in his hand. “I will keep trying—”
Dominick waved an arm. “Get out.”
The agent looked up quickly.
“Get out of my library and my house, and while you’re at it, get out of my employ. Mr. Jones, you are relieved of your position.”
“It’s Jarvis, Your Grace.”
Dominick took two more menacing steps. He was a large man, three or four inches over six feet, with brawn he had cultivated from fencing, pugilism, and riding. He did not drink spirits. He did not gamble. He did not socialize.
He had a half-dozen estates to oversee and thousands of tenants, servants, and others relying on him. The Duke of Tremayne was one of the most powerful men in England, and he ruled his dominion with an iron fist. Either an employee did as he or she was hired to do, or he was out.
Dominick glared down at the agent. “I don’t bloody care what your name is. You are through.” He pointed to the door, and Jones or Jarvis or whoever the hell he was scurried out.
As soon as the agent was gone, Quincey entered. The secretary was a man of about sixty, of average height and build, with white hair and small, round spectacles. He knew not to speak until addressed, and so he waited patiently while Dominick leafed through several papers on his desk. They were in a neat stack precisely in the center of the desk and arranged alphabetically. He found the one he wanted easily and removed it, straightening the stack again before turning to his secretary.
“Tell Fitch I want my hat and coat.”
“Yes, Your Grace. Shall I inform the butler you will not be dining at home? He will want to notify Cook.”
Dominick waved a hand without looking up from the paper. “Fine.” He didn’t care about food. He cared about the book. He and two other members of the Bibliomania Club had pledged to find the four volumes of a manuscript known as The Duke’s Book of Knowledge. Dominick didn’t need another book. He had a library full of rare and extraordinary books, as did the other members of t
he club. They were all collectors, usually in competition for the ancient volumes. But this was not about his own library. Not this time. This was about Professor Peebles, who had been his instructor at Oxford. Peebles’s literature class had inspired Dominick’s love of rare and unusual books. And for as long as Dominick had known the professor, he’d been searching for The Duke’s Book.
Now Peebles was an old man and ready to retire, his one regret that he had never found any of the volumes of The Duke’s Book. Three members of the Bibliomania Club, Peebles’s students at Oxford, had agreed to find the four volumes, and they planned to present them all to Peebles on the eve of his retirement. Even now, Viscount Daunt or the Earl of Ramsdale might have a volume of the manuscript in hand. Dominick had nothing, and the professor would retire in a little more than a fortnight.
Unacceptable.
“Is there anything else, Your Grace?” Quincey asked.
“Yes.” Dominick folded the paper neatly and slid it into his pocket. “Make a note that I have fired Mr. Jarvis.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Quincey’s lined face betrayed no emotion. “I assume Mr. Jarvis did not manage to find the volume.”
“He did not. It appears if I want something done, Quincey, I will have to do it myself.”
“Your Grace?” Now Quincey’s brows rose, and he managed to look both composed and slightly alarmed.
“That’s right, Quincey. Jarvis is the third man I’ve hired, and not a one of them has found the volume. I don’t have any time left to waste. Have Bateman pack me a valise. Tomorrow I leave to find the volume on my own.”
Once at the club, Dominick climbed the wide stairs to the second floor, which housed a drawing room, where the members often met to discuss their acquisitions, and an extensive library, full of books about… well, books. This was the room members visited if they wanted to research a particular book to ascertain its value. Some books were valuable because of their content. Others were exceedingly rare. Still others were not so rare, but were volumes any bibliophile worth his salt would have in his collection.
Dominick opened the door to the research library and inhaled the smell of leather, ink, and old parchment paper. It was an intoxicating scent. The room was dark, as no fire or sconces were allowed inside, and Dominick took a lamp from the table just outside the doorway, lit it, and stepped inside, closing the door after him. He set the lamp on the polished oak table in the center of the room and strode to the medieval section of the library.
The Duke’s Book of Knowledge had been commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici in the fifteenth century. The volume Dominick sought was filled with arcane medical knowledge. He had consulted experts in the field, but thus far, all of their suggestions as to where the medical volume had been hidden had proved fruitless.
He pulled a book off the shelf, one he had perused many times, and read silently under a section titled The Duke’s Book of Knowledge.
… secretly commissioned book of knowledge to be assembled from the greatest scholarship, written in a fine Italic hand by a team of Florentine scribes, and illustrated by great artists. Very few eye-witness descriptions of the book exist.
Dominick skipped ahead. He didn’t care where the eye-witness descriptions might be chronicled. He knew those descriptions from memory at any rate. There were four bound volumes, each with a Roman numeral on the spine. His finger slid down the page.
… in the possession of François I of France, Philip II of Spain and, finally, the Duke of Buckingham, James I’s favorite, who was said to have brought the volumes to England. After the Duke was assassinated in 1628, the manuscript disappeared from view…
Dominick knew all of this. He replaced the tome and pulled down another. This one stated that the Villiers family, Buckingham’s surname, did not possess the manuscript upon the duke’s death. The scholarly author suggested the four volumes had been dispersed.
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Your Grace. I did not mean to intrude. Just making my rounds.”
Dominick glanced over his shoulder at the elderly man in the doorway. “You are not intruding, Mr. Rummage. In fact, I am just about through here.”
Rummage, who served as the club’s Master of the House, had been in that position ever since Dominick had joined. It was impossible to tell how old the man might be. He could have been sixty or eighty. His hair was gray and rather unruly, sticking up at all angles. His beard was just as bushy, but his watery eyes were sharp and keen. He was a tall, thin man, who dressed in black and who seemed to wander but always managed to be where he was needed. “Did you find what you were looking for, Your Grace?”
“Not exactly.”
“Might I be of assistance?”
Dominick almost shook his head, then reconsidered. Rummage had been here a long, long time. Mightn’t he have overheard a conversation or perhaps read a passage in one of these books that could be useful to Dominick?
“What do you know about The Duke’s Book of Knowledge?” Dominick asked.
“Professor Peebles’s manuscript?” Rummage stepped inside the room and closed the door behind him. “I know there are several of you searching for the volumes. You seek the medical volume, do you not, Your Grace?”
“I do, and I’m having a devil of a time finding it.”
“I can well imagine, Your Grace. That’s the one—well, I doubt I can be of use.”
But Dominick had seen the hint of something in Rummage’s eyes—a memory that caused a flicker of a smile and a slight crease in the older man’s brow.
“I would not be so quick to dismiss you,” Dominick said. “Come. Sit with me a moment and tell me, do you recall ever hearing anyone speak about The Duke’s Book, specifically about the volume on medical knowledge?” Dominick took a seat at the oak table, but Rummage remained standing.
“I don’t think it would be proper for me to sit, Your Grace, but I will say that I remember many, many conversations about The Duke’s Book. The professor used to speak about it at length.”
“Yes. I’ve consulted him, and I’ve had every location on his list searched to no avail. There must be somewhere else.” He resisted the urge to scrub his hand over his tight jaw, which he assumed was darkening with stubble by this hour of the night.
“Then it wasn’t in that old keep on the Cornwall coast?”
Very deliberately, Dominick straightened. “Cornwall, you say?”
“Yes. The Temples. To hear the professor talk about it, it sounded like a setting from one of the Gothic novels the ladies like to read. It always seemed more like a myth than a possible location for The Duke’s Book.”
Myth or not, Cornwall was not one of the locations Dominick had searched.
“But you did search The Temples, Your Grace?”
“No, Mr. Rummage, I have not. And now, I insist you sit right here and tell me all about it.” He held up a hand. “Do not argue. I will call for tea, and we shall take our time going back over the conversation as best you recall it.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Rummage sat, and Dominick went to the bell-pull to summon a servant.
The Temples. This was it. He could feel it, the same way he knew when a horse was of the best stock or an investment was sound. Dominick believed heartily in books and documents and research, but there was something to be said for instinct as well. The Dukes of Tremayne had been famous for their instincts for centuries. Instinct was how they’d known who among their vassals were traitors, which side of the War of the Roses to fight on, and which women to take to wife to ensure the bloodline.
Dominick trusted his instincts, which meant The Temples was where he would find that lost volume.
*
Miss Rosalyn Dashner had been called a cat more than once in her life. She’d first climbed out of her crib at the tender age of ten months, whereupon she then proceeded to crawl across the room and claw her way onto her toy box to retrieve the doll she wanted. Her nanny had returned to the nursery to find her charge scaling the railing to return to her crib.
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And this was before Rosalyn could even walk.
As she grew older, she climbed bookshelves, trees, and even a trellis or two. But by the time she was fifteen, she was no longer climbing for fun. Her father had died, leaving her mother and her three siblings in dire straits indeed. Then Rosalyn’s youngest brother, Michael, had become ill. The cost of doctors and medicines had been exorbitant. The once genteel family had fallen deeper and deeper into debt. They’d had to sell their small country house and move to the unfashionable Cheapside area of Town.
Rosalyn did not mourn the move. She adored London. London was alive. It reminded her of an enormous beehive that had hung from a tree on the path she liked to walk back in country. When she’d been five or six, she barely noticed it. But by the time she was twelve, the hive was so large it bent the branch on which it hung. Rosalyn had worried that a stiff breeze would send it tumbling to the ground, angry bees swarming about.
That was London. Year after year, it seemed to grow and expand until it became so dense and so large the mass of people within could barely be contained. And just like that beehive back home, London buzzed and hummed with constant activity. Rosalyn never felt alone in London. There was always someone awake and about, and usually their intentions were as dishonorable as her own. But now that summer was upon them and with it warmer days, tempers were shorter and foreheads damper. It seemed everyone was on edge, waiting for that stiff breeze that would dislodge the hive and catapult the city into violence.
Rosalyn had seen it before—brawls that turned into riots, riots that created mobs. London was woefully unprepared for such lawlessness. There was no centralized police force, and the watchmen snoozed more than they patrolled. Rosalyn had long thought she was fortunate to be a cat. Cats could tiptoe away when violence erupted, looking down on it all from the safety of a high branch.
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