Her Duke of Secrets

by Christi Caldwell

  Tension in your body will cause strain and discomfort… Each movement elicits a like response…

  The sage advice she’d given, pinged around his memory.

  Spinning on his heel, William stormed from his room and marched through the corridors. With every step that brought him closer to the minx, William fumed.

  How dare she? They’d had an appointment, one that she’d requested and he’d agreed to.

  And then she’d simply not shown? Instead, she’d remained in the gardens, with that wistful smile and the company of her dog?

  A trio of chambermaids caught sight of his approach and went wide-eyed, hurriedly stepping out of his path. Whispers followed in his wake.

  His neck went hot.

  Of course, the world had grown accustomed to the man who’d shut himself away in his chambers and wandered the halls only when the world slept, who otherwise didn’t leave this self-imposed prison.

  It was just more evidence of the stranger he’d become, a man he didn’t recognize, and he hated Elsie Allenby for opening his eyes to that truth.

  He reached the door that led out to the gardens and stopped.

  No, he didn’t hate her. William swallowed hard. He despised what she’d made him see—that he hated himself. For that was a good deal worse. One could shut away strangers and staff and even family, but one could not alter the visage of the man reflected back in the mirror each day.

  A man who’d so failed the world around him.

  With jerky movements, William tossed the door open.

  A bright blast of sunlight streamed inside.

  Where days before his eyes had strained under that imposition, now he barely squinted. This time, William easily found her. Her hands flew quickly as she cut the overgrown tree. She did not, however, make any move to turn, to stand, or even acknowledge him.

  Bear, however, sprang to his feet. With a happy yelp, the too-stupid-for-his-own-good mutt abandoned his mistress’ side and sprinted over to William as fast as his old, graying legs would allow.

  Elsie’s complete absorption in her task only set his fury ratcheting up a notch.

  “You,” he barked, stalking forward.

  The late spring wind gusted, filling his nostrils with the crisp scent of warm air that had shed its winter chill. The subtle hints of flowers and greenery wafted, the pure scents of his youth, back when he’d innocently raced through the grounds with his siblings.

  Misery stole through him, as unexpected and debilitatingly acute as all the other losses he’d suffered this year, and he jerked to a halt.

  William stood immobile, his hands curled at his sides, frozen under the weight of all he… missed.

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  Uncle William, you may be fast, but you shan’t catch me…

  The echo of his nephew’s laughter, forgotten until now, flooded his mind, as clear as when the boy had last visited William’s country estate. Back when Adeline had been alive, and William blissfully untouched by the ugliness that had visited so many of the men and women under his command.

  “Hullo, William.”

  His eyes shot open. That casual, lyrical greeting was a stark juxtaposition to the bleakness that gripped him.

  He stalked forward. “Where were you?” he snapped. He was a bastard. Even as he knew it was the height of wrongness to take his frustrations and furies out on this woman, he could not suppress the irrational sentiments. William came to a stop over her, with Bear dropping onto his back legs alongside him.

  Elsie paused in midclip of a branch and, with her spare hand, doffed her bonnet.

  The sun’s rays toyed with those dark strands. She wiped the back of her hand along her damp brow. “I trust it is clear what I’m doing.” Elsie snapped another too-long branch, and it landed on a rapidly growing pile.

  He growled. “You know what I meant, Elsie.” How could she be so infuriatingly calm? So immune to him that she should not care whether or not they met, while he was consumed by the need to be with her? To see her. To talk with her.

  My God, what is happening to me?

  Chapter 16

  Elsie’s heart raced, just as it had since he’d stormed the gardens.

  Her reaction was not a product of any fear that he might wish her harm, but rather, her body’s inexplicable awareness of him and his presence.

  Just as she’d been aware of him watching her from the window while she’d worked.

  How to explain it?

  Setting her scissors inside her pocket, Elsie climbed to her feet and at last faced him.

  “Why?” she asked simply.

  He cocked his head.

  “Why?”

  Of his own volition, he’d come to her.

  “Why have you sought me out?” she clarified.

  “Is this some manner of game?” he snapped.

  “No game.”

  He continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “Do you wish to exert control over me in this?”

  “I’ve no control over you, William, or anybody. The only person whose actions I am in full command of are my own. And I’ve given you my word I don’t intend to trick you into complying.”

  “You did not come,” he gritted out. His jaw throbbed in a telltale sign of the effort that reflexive movement cost him.

  She opened and closed her mouth several times. He’d noted her absence. Which also implied that he’d wanted her there.

  Color splotched his cheeks. Was he embarrassed by his own admission?

  Elsie shook her head slowly. “I don’t…”

  William took a step toward her so that only a handbreadth of space divided them. Energy thrummed to life, crackling like the volatile air on the cusp of a lightning storm.

  “We had agreed to meet in my chambers, and yet, you’ve been out here tending trees.” There was a husked quality to his tone, which was stripped of the earlier indignation, gentler, warmer, revealing a man who’d come out here not to compel her, but who’d genuinely wished for her company.

  Butterflies fluttered low in her belly. Over the years, she’d been treated as an oddity with whom the villagers would not even interact. Aside from her father, people had all sneered at her skills and knowledge. Until this man. “Shrub,” she said softly, forcing herself to say something.

  He angled his head. “What?” he whispered. A bemused glimmer sparked in his eyes.

  The air stuck somewhere in her chest. This was who he would have been before his wife perished. He would have been a rogue with gentle tones and a lighthearted gaze.

  Through her sadness for him and all he’d lost, Elsie forced herself to go on. “Trees are generally closer to twenty feet or taller,” she explained. Shielding her eyes with her palm, she glanced to the flowering dogwood at the center of the gardens. “Trees are also in possession of trunks several inches in diameter. Whereas shrubs, on the other hand?” Elsie pointed to the neglected boxwoods, and William’s gaze followed her gesture to the object in question. “They are smaller. Rounder. And…” Catching the amusement in his eyes, Elsie let her unintended lecture trail off.

  A smile ghosted his lips, erasing the last vestiges of tension from his chiseled features. He brought a hand up between them and palmed her cheek. Searing heat spilled from his hand to her skin, and she leaned into that touch. “I cannot determine whether you are attempting to distract me,” he said without inflection, “or whether you’re making light of me.”

  Her lashes fluttered. “I-in this instance, I am not.”

  His smile deepened, setting off another round of wild fluttering in her belly. “But in other instances, you might?”

  Elsie tipped her chin back so she might better meet his gaze. “It would depend upon the circumstances,” she whispered. “One would be wise to avoid speaking in absolutes.” Their breath blended in a union that urged each owner to press their mouths together.

  All lightness fled William’s eyes. The sapphire depths darkened. His throat moved. His gaze went to her mouth. “That
is not altogether true.”

  What was not altogether true? Everything was becoming so very jumbled in her mind. Or it already had been. Even that detail was muddled. “Some things do hold true in all times and in all places, Elsie. Some evidence is empirical and holds that there are some truths because they are logically true.”

  Her lips parted. “Euclid,” she breathed. William was versed in the great Greek philosophers. It was shocking. Unexpected. And contrary to everything she’d come to believe about noblemen and academic studies. And it also revealed him as a man learned in the books she’d pored over since girlhood.

  He chuckled. “Do you take all nobles for indolent lords, unfamiliar with learning and scientific teachings?” he asked, his breath a blend of coffee and hazelnut.

  “I didn’t…I don’t…” Quite simply, she’d never known. Her experience with the nobility had included the wounded gentlemen who’d come to her family’s cottage. During their recovery, they had bypassed the books she’d offered them to read while they convalesced in favor of gossip pages and documents pertaining to their official Crown business. Not a single one of those men, in all those years, had ever demonstrated the slightest interest in any of the sciences.

  William flicked the tip of her nose in an endearing gesture that forced her mind to the present. “By that damning silence, it seems you are speaking in absolutes, Elsie.”

  “You are correct,” she said softly.

  He gave his head a bemused shake. “I’m fairly certain you are the only woman… nay, person in the whole of the world that I know, or will ever know, who is unashamed to claim ownership of one’s mistakes.”

  “I’m not too proud to own when I am wrong.”

  “And that,” he murmured, working the pad of his thumb in small, soothing, counterclockwise circles that brought her lashes down, “is what marks you as different.”

  “Different,” she repeated dumbly. That familiar word, an oft-hurled insult, shattered the splendorous pull. It was all she’d ever been. Elsie stepped away from him and, to give her fingers something to do, urged Bear over with two snaps. The recently disloyal dog remained planted behind William. Suddenly, she fought silly tears… over all of it. Elsie dropped to a knee, claiming a much-needed distance from his stare. Fishing the scissors from her pocket, she resumed cutting the bush.

  “You took that as an insult.” There was a frown in his voice.

  “Isn’t it?” she asked with a forced casualness she didn’t feel. Her father had insisted the world’s opinion didn’t matter, and yet, what made her different had also isolated her. “It’s hardly ever intended as a compliment.” Her time on this earth had proven that to be an absolute.

  “Who has insulted you?” This time, there was such affront in his voice that she paused midcut.

  Aside from her father, who had not?

  “Your father’s patients,” he muttered.

  Patients who’d also happened to be gentlemen who answered to William. She sat back on her heels and shrugged. “My father’s patients. The villagers in the town where I lived.” Elsie resumed shaping the boxwood.

  William dropped to a knee beside her, and she stiffened. “You are different.”

  She flinched, but did not stop trimming.

  He brushed his knuckles along her chin, forcing her to stop, urging her gaze to his.

  “I wanted to send you away the moment you set foot in my chambers,” he murmured. “Until you spoke.” A small grin dimpled his cheeks, shattering the hardened mask he’d worn these past days. “You debated my word selection and did so admirably.”

  “Because you had opted for the incorrect word,” she whispered, her heart doing a little leap.

  William chuckled, the expression of mirth still rough from lack of use, but no longer as jaded as it had been. “I didn’t send you away because you are different. You’ve proved yourself unlike the stodgy doctors and healers to come before you, who alternately preened at their own skill and avoided my gaze. So do not let anyone shame you for being different. Wear it as a mark of your strength and take pride in what sets you apart.”

  A fragment of her heart slipped free from its proper place and into the hands of the unlikeliest holder. Elsie’s grip slackened, and the scissors fell from her hand.

  William cursed, and still dazed, Elsie glanced unblinkingly at the place where the tool had landed… on his lap.

  She gasped. “Blast,” she whispered. Running her fingers over his thigh, she searched for evidence of blood indicating a wound.

  “I’m fine.” His voice emerged as garbled.

  Only… Elsie bit the inside of her cheek. “You do not sound fine.” She probed the slightest tear in his trousers. “You sound hurt.”

  At his silence, she looked up and stilled.

  Desire burned within his eyes, touching her like a physical caress.

  Elsie yanked her hands back. “Forgive me.” Heat exploded upon her cheeks. What are you doing? She’d been required to come here to try to help William, and now she lusted after him in his gardens like the tavern keeper’s daughter in Bladon. And because it was far easier to focus on the task that had brought her to his household and her role here, Elsie stood and took a step away, composing her features… even as an inner tumult waged within her. “We should begin our treatment.”

  His brow creased, William glanced around.

  “Here,” Elsie confirmed, settling more easily into the role she’d been born to in her family’s household. Snapping her fingers three times, she cleared Bear from the blanket. With a purposefulness to her every action, Elsie straightened the wrinkled blanket and then moved the gardening tools off to the edges.

  When she finished, she paused to assess her makeshift workstation. She gave a pleased nod and then glanced up at William.

  She might as well have sprung a second head and was in the process of sprouting a third, for all the horror stamped on his features. “Surely you are not expecting to treat me”—he dropped his voice to a hushed whisper—“here.”

  Elsie lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “There is no better place to treat you.” That had just been one more vital lesson handed down by her father in what had become an unofficial schooling in healing and medicine.

  William snorted and proceeded to tick off on his fingers. “My chambers. My offices. The library Your chambers. One of ten parlors.”

  “Ten parlors?”

  “Mayhap thirteen,” he corrected. “Something ’round there.”

  She laughed. “There is something cleansing about nature, though.”

  With a slightly bemused expression, he did a sweep of the grounds. “London is hardly the epitome of a bucolic landscape.” There was something wistful and something sad, all together, in his tones. Once more, a yearning to know more about this enigmatic gentleman pulled at her.

  “You’ve created a sanctuary amid the city,” she said softly. “One that allows one the illusion of something else.” A kestrel landed at the corner of a long-empty fountain and ducked his beak into the smallest of puddles left by a recent rainstorm. Elsie stared at the bird. “And sometimes, the eye and the soul can come to believe the trick that the mind sought to play.” A life of peace and tranquility and calm… when the mind truly knew the harsh reality that was life.

  Feeling William’s stare on her, Elsie glanced over. They shared a look, an intimate meeting of two people who’d both suffered and struggled and who also kept those secrets close. And then they both looked out at the kestrel once more.

  Until the bird took flight.

  “Since I was born, there has been the expectation that I have no vulnerabilities,” William said unexpectedly, a gruffness to his tone.

  That admission, from a man who’d snapped and snarled with every attempt she’d made to learn more about him, was one that surely cost him.

  Having tended wounded animals, she’d learned the importance of timing in all her exchanges. As such, she let his pronouncement sink around the gardens, not rushing to
a response. “Everyone has vulnerabilities, William,” she finally said.

  He clasped his hands behind him and stared straight on at the brick wall, as though engaging not Elsie herself but the ivy that grew there in discourse. “Dukes do not. Dukes do have obligations. Dukes have responsibilities and strict expectations which they must adhere to. At no point must one reveal any hint of frailty.”

  Sadness tugged at her heart. His was the rote deliverance of one who repeated back a familiar phrase that had been ingrained into him early on. “Dukes are also just men,” she said gently.

  A laugh tinged with bitterness tore from him. “Men who are not permitted any weakness.”

  How very different his life must have been from her own joyous, carefree childhood. For him, having slid into the role of leader of the Brethren, where feelings were a detriment and emotion was stripped from all interactions, it would have been a natural marriage. “Admitting one is human and flawed is perhaps the greatest mark of one’s strength, William.” Elsie sank onto the blanket. “As I promised before, I’ll not force you. I’d have you come to me when you are ready.”

  “And if I’m never ready?” he gritted, the color leeching from his cheeks as soon as he tensed his mouth.

  “You will be,” she said with a sureness that came only from truth.

  He fell to a knee beside her. “You speak with such certainty, Elsie Allenby,” he said, the statement steeped in his usual faintly mocking edge.

  “By your brother’s admission, as well as your own, you do not leave your chambers, which upon consideration, I believe was false anyway. You have not interacted with your staff, stepped foot in the breakfast room or”—she glanced about—“your late wife’s gardens.” Grief contorted his features, her insides wrenching at the agony she’d inadvertently caused him. “And yet, you’ve done all those things in a short while. No, William,” she concluded, sitting back on her haunches, “those are not the actions of a man who truly wishes a life of self-exile.”