Never Say Duke

by Erica Ridley

  Theo clenched his jaw. “Neither. Please relay to Virginia—”

  “Miss Underwood.” Swinton’s diction was clipped, and his expression detached, but the rebuke was clear.

  Theo stared back at him. He had never been interrupted by a butler, or a servant of any kind, much less reprimanded by one.

  He reminded himself that Swinton was unaware of Theo’s rank. For all the butler knew, “Mr. T” could be a street sweeper or a boxing-master or a common cutpurse. Nonetheless, he had arrived bearing a promise of hospitality sealed by the duke’s own signet. Swinton ought to behave accordingly.

  Theo forced himself to reply in cold, even tones. “I did not know her name was Miss Underwood.”

  “Now you do.” The butler’s lack of expression indicated Theo was the one wasting his time. “Front parlor or guest parlor?”

  Theo unleashed his infamous quelling glare. No one had ever withstood its devastating effect without cowering in its wake.

  Swinton practically yawned.

  Theo gritted his teeth. Bloody bandages. A man could not unleash a proper glare when trussed up like an Egyptian mummy.

  “Look here,” Theo said. “Did your master not give you explicit instructions on how to extend hospitality to a houseguest?”

  “He did, indeed.” Swinton pulled the folded letter from an inner pocket and handed it back to Theo. “Look here.”

  Theo read the letter in disbelief.

  As promised, Azureford had respected Theo’s wish for anonymity. He was indeed granted the run of the cottage and referred to only as T. That was the first sentence of several paragraphs.

  The rest of the contents recounted Theo’s “surly disposition,” “tendency toward reclusive behavior,” and “devil’s own stubbornness.”

  The final lines humorously implored the staff not to allow Theo to “get away with too much” and for Swinton in particular to treat their houseguest exactly as he would treat Azureford himself. The duke no doubt had enjoyed a hearty laugh as he penned his instructions.

  Sourly, Theo handed the letter back to the butler.

  Swinton’s expression did not change, but his eyes hinted at the humor he no doubt found in their circumstance. “Following my master’s orders to the letter, sir.”

  Theo gave a thin smile. “Can you please inform Miss Underwood—”

  Virginia rushed around the corner and into the corridor, the wicker basket clutched in her hands.

  “There you are.” She dug inside the basket and handed him a spoon. “If you don’t eat quick, it’s all going to melt.”

  Theo accepted the spoon out of reflex. “All what will melt?”

  “Your favorite ice cream, as requested.” She swept past him into the guest parlor, relocated the writing desk from the tea table to the floor, and began unpacking the contents of her basket.

  Theo wheeled over to her as quickly as he could. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “What I can. You must know a surgeon cannot replace your head, nor does Christmas offer limb exchanges.” She placed dish after dish atop the table. “You did not mention which flavor of ice cream was your favorite, so I asked the castle kitchen to make every choice they could think of.”

  Theo stared at the growing selection of ice cream, swung his gaze up to her, then back to the ice cream. He hadn’t expected Virginia to interpret sarcasm as an actual suggestion. Or to return for another visit at all.

  But she had, and the tea table looked delicious. His stomach growled in appreciation. It was nigh impossible to maintain a haughty attitude to someone who arrived bearing every flavor of ice cream.

  “How many spoons did you bring?” Theo said gruffly. He was not going to eat all this without her.

  “One.” Virginia pointed encouragingly. “It’s in your hand.”

  Theo knew where his spoon was. He glanced over his shoulder, where he fully expected the gloating butler to be blatantly eavesdropping on the conversation.

  He was not disappointed.

  “At once, sir.” Swinton disappeared to fetch a second spoon.

  Virginia stared at the untouched dishes of ice cream. “You’re not eating.”

  “I’m waiting for your spoon to arrive.”

  “I see.” Her gaze slid to the empty basket. “I should have brought more.”

  “You displayed extraordinary resourcefulness,” he said firmly. He could not let her think he had found fault with such a selfless gift.

  She did not lift her eyes to his.

  He wished she would.

  Yesterday, Theo had been desperate to chase her out of his guest chamber. He did not want anyone to see him like this. Not even some mystery beauty who climbed trees and owned an attack cat.

  All night long, he had wished he had taken a closer look. He could recall every wave of her red-brown tendrils, the angle of her cheekbones, the dusky rose of her lips, but he had not managed to register the color of her eyes.

  He had believed this hole in his memory was due to the lack of candles in his chamber. Theo had no desire for anyone else to gaze upon his injuries, and even less wish to brood over them himself. The only light came from the flickering flames of the fire.

  But perhaps the shadowed interior was not completely at fault. Virginia was right in front of him. Just on the other side of the tea table. And her eyes had not met his even once.

  Swinton stalked into the room. “A spoon for the lady.”

  Virginia’s gaze briefly met Swinton’s as she accepted the spoon. “Thank you.”

  He did not excuse himself.

  Theo slid him an impatient glance. He had no wish to be unchaperoned with any marriageable young lady, but nor did he need the butler literally looming over their shoulders.

  Swinton cleared his throat in submission. “I will instruct a footman to be on call in the doorway.”

  Although the butler left with obvious reluctance, Theo suspected Swinton’s interests lay less in maintaining propriety than witnessing whatever surprises Virginia would unveil next.

  He wheeled closer. “Now we’re ready.”

  She pointed at the ice cream with her spoon. “Which one is your favorite flavor?”

  “I don’t have one,” he admitted. “I like all ice cream.”

  “Then I did bring the right ones.” Her gaze briefly met his in triumph.

  Green. His breath caught. Her eyes were a brilliant, unblemished green. Lighter than jade or emerald or the forest green pelisse she had been wearing the day before. A brilliant, crystal green. As beautiful as the sea sparkling beneath the sun.

  “Eat,” she commanded. “He who waits for the moon to come to him wastes the night without having traveled an inch.”

  Theo prided himself on not obeying any chit’s authoritative commands, no matter how poetic. But perhaps just this once…

  “You, too,” he commanded as authoritatively as a half-mummified lord with a smear of ice cream on his upper lip could. “Before it melts.”

  They passed the sweet, creamy dishes in surprisingly companionable silence. Just two people, unabashedly more interested in devouring a cornucopia of flavors than wasting time with conversation. She was the strangest woman he had ever met, and oddly refreshing. He was surprised how much he liked her unpredictability.

  “I do not require a nurse,” he informed her after the last drop of ice cream was gone.

  He expected his stern words to ruin the moment. That was why he had uttered them.

  “You think you don’t,” Virginia agreed as she stacked the empty dishes back inside her basket. “You’ll see.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. Had the daft woman truly just implied she knew his mind better than he did himself?

  “See here,” he began.

  She jerked her head in his direction at once. “You are absolutely right. I should change your bandages.”

  He blinked. “I just changed my bandages.”

  “And now you’ve smudges of strawberry and chocolate on them.” She
rose to her feet and glanced about the room. “Where are your clean cloths?”

  Theo didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Virginia was already washing her hands in the basin, which was conveniently located right next to his supply of clean bandages.

  She brought them over to his chair and knelt at his feet. “I apologize in advance if this hurts you. It is important to keep wounds clean.”

  “It won’t hurt.”

  He clenched his teeth and braced himself for the pain, and the horror that would contort her pretty face the moment she saw the damage that lay beneath.

  She cupped a soft, warm hand to the good side of his face as she slowly unwrapped the bandages from the other.

  Theo’s wounds did not hurt. Not yet. But he had no doubt he would flinch the same moment she did.

  The pad of her thumb brushed lightly against his good cheek as she removed the last bandage. “You look splendid.”

  “You mean my wounds look splendid?” he stammered.

  “I mean you.” She did not lower her palm from his cheek. “When you were bandaged, I believed you were the most handsome man I had ever seen. Now I know without a doubt.”

  His chest thumped in confusion. That was an extremely flattering and extremely forward statement to make. Yet she had delivered her judgment with complete matter-of-factness, as if his beastly handsomeness despite his scars was a fact universally acknowledged and not a quirk native solely to her.

  She lifted her hand from his face and folded her fingers in her lap.

  He felt the loss to his bones.

  “Aren’t you going to redress my wounds, Nurse?” he growled.

  He did not know why he was snarling at her. He did not want her help. Theo could dress his wounds himself and most likely would have to fix whatever she did. The problem was that she had been touching him, and now she was not. It made him feel even more beastly than when covered in strips of cloth.

  “You don’t need bandages,” she said. “You’ve new skin now. It ought to breathe. One must keep it clean and dry, but there is no reason to keep it hidden.”

  He arched his brows. “Other than the disfigurement and raw flesh?”

  “Bah.” She carried the untouched roll of bandages back to the side table. “Duke has come home with worse.”

  He gazed at her.

  “Duke, my cat,” she explained quickly. “Not Azureford.”

  He cleared his throat. “I imagined.”

  Her lips curved. “That’s how Duke and I met. He lost a fight with a much bigger cat and I had to sew him back up from groin to sternum. We’ve been inseparable ever since.”

  “That’s… one way to bond,” Theo managed.

  She gave him an awkward pat on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I have years of experience with strays.”

  “I am not a stray,” he spluttered. “I am—”

  Viscount Ormondton. An Army Major.

  A man desperate to cling to anonymity and privacy for as long as he could.

  He hiccupped.

  Damn it. He clenched his teeth and pressed his lips tight to try to hide the spasms.

  The next hiccup nearly bounced him out of his seat.

  Her expression gentled. “Would you like a cup of water?”

  Theo glared at her. He had developed his infamous cutting glance specifically because sometimes when emotion got the best of him, so did the hiccups. He could not always trust his mouth to respond as he wished. But his eyes… Those were always more than capable of slaying their victims with a single glance. He turned their full force on Virginia.

  She patted his shoulder. “I’ll get you some water.”

  The moment she left his line of sight, he closed his eyes and willed his hiccups to cease using the only trick that had ever worked. Holding his breath, he recited his favorite poem in his head. Either the hiccups would go away, or he would pass out.

  Anything was better than having a slip of a girl pat him on the shoulder as if he were a child in leading strings.

  When Virginia returned with the water, Theo’s hiccups were gone. He gave her his haughtiest glare, as if to say a lord of his stature could not fathom why anyone would think him in need of a cup of water.

  She thrust it into his hand anyway.

  As she took her seat across from him, she motioned toward his ruined knee. “Let me see your leg.”

  “No.” He nearly crushed the cup of water in his hand, so swift and adamant was his response.

  “I can see that it is swollen. Is the wound internal, external, or both?”

  He glared at her. “Internal.”

  His leg had taken a horse hoof right to the kneecap. The fractures had fused back together, but not in all the right places. It was not the kind of break that could be reset. And he definitely did not want anyone looking at it.

  “Clearly you can bend your knee,” she said as she considered him. “Can you straighten it?”

  “Yes.” Any time he wished to pass out from pain, all he had to do was straighten his leg. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be a half-bad cure for hiccups.

  “Can you put weight on it?”

  “Not for long,” he hedged. Not even a full second. Bullets to the cheek hadn’t felled him as quickly as his knee now could.

  She reached toward it.

  He nearly jumped out of his skin.

  She patted his other knee. “Shh. I won’t hurt you. Let me feel.”

  Theo concentrated on not losing the edges of his vision as she pressed her gentle hands to the swollen lump of his knee.

  “Are you taking laudanum?” she asked.

  “No,” he gritted out.

  She frowned. “You are a very strange man.”

  “You are a very strange woman,” he retorted. There. Now he’d proven he had a face to rival Medusa and the clever repartee of an eight-year-old lad.

  “You need crutches,” Virginia announced.

  “I have crutches.”

  “How often do you practice with them?”

  “I don’t need them.” He pointed at his knee. “I’m staying right here until this is back to normal.”

  “It won’t heal properly if you don’t exercise it.”

  “It will heal faster if I leave it alone.”

  She paused. “How many times has this happened to you?”

  He stared at her. “This is the first and only time it shall ever happen to me.”

  “Then I have more experience.” She lifted her chin with confidence. “Tomorrow we will start with small stretches and work our way up. The secret is not to add pressure before you are ready, but to keep the muscle supple and limber.”

  He gazed doubtfully at his ruined knee. “More likely, I’ll never walk again, and you don’t want to tell me.”

  She lifted a shoulder as if him walking or not was as inconsequential as the falling snow. “You definitely won’t if you don’t try.”

  He scoffed. “And you are the only one who can fix me?”

  “No one can fix you,” she said matter-of-factly.

  He waited for the rest.

  She said nothing more.

  “Not the most inspiring of speeches,” he said dryly.

  “You already know I can help you. I told you yesterday.” Virginia inclined her head. “You needn’t worry. Now you have me.”

  Nothing could worry him more.

  Theo folded his arms over his chest. “You intend to spend your holiday playing nurse to a stranger?”

  “I’m not a tourist,” she said. “I live in the castle. We’ll work on your recovery every day for as long as you need me.”

  He frowned. “You live in the castle?”

  She nodded. “Many people do.”

  “I assumed just servants,” he admitted. “And the Marlowe family, of course.”

  “When Mr. Marlowe died, he bequeathed the castle to the villagers.” Her green eyes shone with gratitude. “I was already living there. So was my friend Noelle, and many others.”

  Perhaps
this was a stroke of luck.

  Theo slid his gaze toward the writing desk lying forgotten beneath the tea table. He had been hesitant to write to his father. In part, because he had no eagerness to receive the imminent haranguing, but also because he did not want Azureford’s staff to deduce Theo’s identity from the address on the letter.

  Virginia changed all that. If the letter included no return direction and was smuggled into the castle’s outgoing correspondence by way of his self-appointed nurse, no one need be the wiser.

  The wild card in the plan was Virginia.

  Would she follow his instructions? He suspected she would. She seemed eager to help. Would she recognize his father’s name? He suspected she would not. She lived in the furthest possible point from London Society. She had no reason to memorize lineages of the peerage.

  But it was still a risk. He would have to decide whether to trust her.

  “No crutches,” was all he said aloud. No crutches in front of her, anyway. He preferred his facial contortions and grunts of pain to stay private.

  “Not yet,” she agreed. “Put ice or snow on your knee once an hour. Tomorrow we’ll start the exercises.”

  With that, she picked up her basket and was gone.

  Chapter 4

  Virginia turned to her cat. “Heel.”

  Duke sent her a sullen glance but settled outside the aviary to wait for her as he did every morning.

  He was not angry at her for refusing him entrance to a buffet full of birds. He was miffed at having been disinvited to yesterday’s constitutional.

  “Maybe this afternoon,” she promised him, and slipped inside the aviary.

  He knew as well as Virginia did that she would not be able to leave him behind for long. She loved him too much. They understood each other. Virginia never asked Duke to be anything but what he was or do anything but what he did.

  In return, Duke kept coming back because he liked her just as she was, too.

  She fished in her reticule for a bag of seed and began tossing the treats about the aviary. After having sat in half-finished construction for years, the aviary had finally opened three months prior. On its first day, it contained a single partridge. One month later, Virginia had taken it upon herself to donate one of her own rescues she’d recently rehabilitated.