No doubt she would have a flair for something else, too. Her thinly veiled derriere, displayed at his eye level, gave him an excellent view of certain feminine charms. She moved with an economy of motion so fluid that he wondered if she would move the same way in bed.
Holy God, what was he thinking? He wasn’t here for that, and she was the last person he ought to be noticing in such a fashion. Though it was hard not to notice when she was dressed so . . . informally, her raven hair tumbling down her back in a welter of black curls that shimmered and swirled with every step.
And the scent of some elusive French perfume that wafted down to him in her wake—
“Do you live here, Miss Bonnaud?” he asked in an attempt to keep his mind off the seductive form ahead of him. “Or are you just visiting?”
“This is my home.” She reached the top and moved down the hall to stand before an open door. “I manage the administrative portion of Manton’s Investigations for my brother.”
“Ah.”
As he came abreast of her, she gestured into the room. “If you’ll wait in here, sir, I’ll go make myself more presentable.”
He would prefer that. Even in the dim light, he could see the ripe curves of her breasts outlined in semitransparent linen.
He suppressed a groan. “Of course.”
After she left, he shook off his absurd preoccupation with the woman’s appearance and glanced about, noting the cheap but clean draperies, the battered oak furniture, and the surprising touches of feminine color—a vase filled with lilacs and an elaborately embroidered cushion. The place didn’t look sinister, but then, what did?
He strode to the desk to see what he could find, but Bonnaud’s sister must be a very capable office manager indeed—nothing worthy of perusal lay on top. The drawers were locked, probably to keep their contents from the prying eyes of servants, and the bookshelves revealed only tomes with such titles as Elements of Medical Jurisprudence and The Newgate Calendar and The Proceedings of the Old Bailey. Clearly Manton took his duties as an investigator very seriously.
“Find anything of interest?” Miss Bonnaud clipped out from the doorway.
Returning the book he was holding to its shelf, he said unapologetically, “You know I did not. You have everything in this office locked up tight. It makes a man wonder what you are striving so hard to hide.”
“No more than you are, I imagine,” she said in that same throaty voice that had first made him mistake her for Manton’s mistress.
Her gown did little to correct that misapprehension. Oh, it was respectable enough, but its excellent cut showed her figure to good effect, and the blue and green stripes set off skin as creamy as Sevres porcelain and a red mouth as lush as it was unsmiling.
She was a French rose growing wild amid the hothouse flowers of London. And when she sat down behind the desk and shimmied to adjust her billowing skirt, his eyes again went inexorably to the impressive bosom that filled out her bodice.
“Now, what exactly has Tristan done to have you show up here at the crack of dawn?” she asked bluntly.
He jerked his gaze up to meet the cool blue eyes glittering at him from beneath a fringe of riotous black curls barely contained by hairpins.
“For one thing, your brother asked me to meet with him at a tavern last night, then disappeared before I could arrive.”
The color drained from her cheeks. “Tristan really is in London? No, it’s impossible. He wouldn’t come here.”
“Why not?” he asked as he approached the desk.
Her gaze grew shuttered. “Because . . . because he doesn’t like England.” She forced a smile. “And he has a very good position working for the . . . authorities in France.”
That was so vague as to make him suspicious. “What authorities?” He leaned forward to plant his hands on the desk. “Where? Doing what?”
Her gaze shot up to his, obstinate once more. “I’m not telling you anything until you explain what he’s done wrong. I hardly think missing a meeting with you is a crime.”
Pushing away from the desk, Maximilian bit back a curse. How much should he say? At the very least, he had to explain what the rest of England had known since he was a boy. It was the only way to impress upon her the seriousness of the situation. “Tell me, Miss Bonnaud, what have you heard about my family?”
“Nothing, I’m afraid,” she admitted almost apologetically, which made him inclined to believe her. “I lived in France until recently, and I didn’t keep up with the English papers. Since I’ve been here, I’ve had little time to do more than help Dom organize his office.”
“So you’re unaware that I had an elder brother.”
“If that’s true, then why isn’t he the du—” She halted with a flush. “Oh, you had an elder brother.”
“Precisely. Peter was kidnapped very young, and we had no word of him until the year of his seventeenth birthday, when he was found dead in Belgium.”
He could still hear Mother’s voice in the hours before her own death. Where is my son? I want my son! And she hadn’t been calling for Maximilian.
Shoving that painful memory back into the fortress he kept it in, he went on. “Last night a boy came to my London town house while I was at dinner with friends. He bore a note for me from a gentleman at a tavern near the docks, who turned out to be your brother, saying he had information regarding Peter.” He fixed her with a hard gaze. “He claimed that Peter is alive.”
She paled, clearly recognizing the ramifications of that.
“He knew that would draw me out,” Maximilian went on. “He said he would wait for me at the Swan and Bull until three a.m. But when I arrived before midnight, your scoundrel of a brother was nowhere to be found.”
“What did the messenger boy have to say about that?” she asked shakily.
“Nothing. He disappeared the minute he saw that the ‘gentleman’ was gone.” Anger roiled in him again. “I waited until three, but neither the boy nor your brother ever returned. Thinking I might have somehow missed Bonnaud, I went home to see if another note had been left there. Nothing. So I remembered his connection to Manton, woke my friend Jackson Pinter to learn of Manton’s whereabouts, and came here, hoping to find Bonnaud here as well.”
He could tell from her agitation that he’d shaken her. Good. She needed to understand how important this was.
“I swear to you that neither of my brothers is here.”
“I believe you.” If she were hiding Bonnaud, she would have tried to hurry him out the door instead of inviting him upstairs for this chat. “But he must be somewhere in London, or he wouldn’t have requested that meeting.”
“Are you absolutely certain it was my brother?” she asked, clear worry in her voice. “There must be any number of Frenchmen with his name.”
“Ah, but none that I know. You see, I met Bonnaud once at a race when your father brought him and introduced him around. Rathmoor said he was planning to buy your brother a commission in the cavalry when he came of age, so he spoke to my father about the regiment Father supported. While they talked, Bonnaud and I chatted about horses. The note alludes to that.”
She swallowed. “You have the note with you?”
He hesitated but saw no reason to keep it from her. Drawing it out, he tossed it onto the desk.
She snatched it up and read hastily. He knew exactly what she was seeing. He’d already memorized every word.
Dear Duke of Lyons,
You may not remember, but we met on a hot summer day when I was fourteen. At the time, I remarked on the handsome handkerchief you refused to use to wipe your brow, and you explained that it had sentimental value, being a special one made just for members of your family.
I recently saw another of its kind and realized that the man carrying it, whom I consider a friend, bore a remarkable resemblance to Your Grace. Judging from things he has told me, I believe he may very well be a certain missing relation of yours whom you and I discussed briefly on that day years ago.
Your servant,
Tristan Bonnaud
“Well?” he snapped. “It’s his signature, is it not?”
She raised a stunned gaze to him. “Yes. But I don’t understand. How could Tristan possibly have come across your brother’s handkerchief?”
“That’s what I want to know. More importantly, I want to know what he’s trying to get from me. I doubt seriously that he has noble intentions. He wants money, I daresay, for introducing this impostor to me.”
“Now, see here,” she protested. “If he had such nefarious motives, then why didn’t he show up for your assignation?”
The question was a valid one. “Perhaps after he considered the matter, he feared I would bring the authorities. Or perhaps he got cold feet. Or . . .” He scowled at her. “I don’t know. But I could ask you the same thing—if this is not a nefarious endeavor, why didn’t he show up?”
“Obviously he was prevented by something or . . . or someone.”
The way she said “someone” gave him pause. “Like who?”
“I-I don’t know. An enemy of some kind. He did mention being afraid that the note would fall into the wrong hands.” She frowned. “Though it is odd. I mean, if Tristan really had found your brother and wanted to reunite the two of you, he should have just brought Peter to see you. That would be simplest.”
The fact that she would point out something that cast even more suspicion on her brother’s actions made him feel better about trusting her with the story. She truly didn’t seem to know why Bonnaud had approached him.
He fixed her with a dark glance. “He didn’t bring the impostor to me because he wanted me to come to him. That’s how sharpers work. The swindler lures the target of his fraud away from his friends, to get him alone and confused. It makes the target easier prey.”
“My brother is not a sharper!” she protested. When he lifted an eyebrow at her, she said stoutly, “He isn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
Two spots of color appeared in her pretty cheeks. “Yes,” she said, though she dropped her gaze to the desk, where she was worrying the note with her hands. “I’ll admit he can be wild sometimes and he gets into trouble occasionally, but he’s a good man. He’d never prey on someone’s grief.”
She’d gone right to the heart of Maximilian’s anger. “Then he’d be the first to have such scruples,” he said bitterly. He paced the room, fighting his churning emotions. “Do you know how many men have approached me and my family in the years since my brother was kidnapped? How many have claimed to know Peter? To be Peter?”
And how many his parents had momentarily been swayed by, desperate to have their son back. The son that mattered. The son that hung golden in their memory.
“There’s a great deal of money and property at stake,” he said coldly, “and everyone realizes that.”
“Yes, I imagine finding him alive would change your life considerably.”
Her matter-of-fact tone and searching gaze roused his ire. “What are you implying? That I want to find him for some other reason than just having my brother back?”
“Do you?”
Anger roiled in his gut. “You think I want to hunt him down and murder him, so I can hold on to the dukedom.”
She had the good grace to color. “I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you did.” A harsh laugh escaped him. As if he would actually want to keep the legacy that his family had handed down to him. “But unlike you, who have a plethora of brothers, I had only the one, and I would give anything to have him back.”
Indeed, he would gladly give up the confounded title to Peter, if only to avoid feeling obligated to marry and risk passing on the madness that seemed endemic to his line.
“Besides,” he went on, “if I did wish to eliminate my brother, wouldn’t it be foolish to come here and reveal that I’m searching for him? It would make more sense to refuse to tell you who Peter is to me. Was to me.”
He glared at her. “But I abhor such deceit. Which is why I do not like being made a fool of by swindlers and impostors. I’m an easy target, since anyone who has heard the tale knows I would never recognize Peter. I was only three when my . . . when someone absconded with him.”
He wasn’t about to reveal the truth of who that someone was. And how the abduction had shattered his parents’ lives, his father’s in particular. Father had taken the truth to his grave. Maximilian intended to leave it there.
But he wouldn’t be able to if Peter was alive.
The last words he had heard Father say, during the final stages of his dementia, came abruptly to mind: Do I have only the one son, then?
Maximilian had answered, Yes, Father, your other son is dead.
No! Father had protested, violently. You don’t understand.
Could Father have been saying that Peter was alive? But then, why ask if he had only one son?
Maximilian scowled. He was letting himself be taken in already. Peter couldn’t be alive. Bonnaud was merely a scoundrel of the worst kind.
“Clearly Tristan is somehow mistaken about your brother,” Miss Bonnaud said, a trace of pity in her voice. “I’ll write to him in care of his employer in France to tell him so, and that will be an end to it.”
Whirling on her, he snapped, “Oh no, he will not escape me that easily. The handkerchief that he enclosed a rubbing from is most assuredly Peter’s. And I damned well want to hear how he acquired it, when my brother and all his earthly belongings went up in flames in Belgium fourteen years ago!”
As the angry words echoed in the room, a knock sounded at the door. He jerked his gaze to the aging woman who stood waiting in the doorway, a tray in her hands.
Miss Bonnaud rose slowly, as if afraid he would pounce on her if she didn’t use small, careful movements. “Ah, Mrs. Biddle is here with our tea, Your Grace.” Instead of calling the servant in, Miss Bonnaud swept toward the door, keeping a wary eye on him.
It unnerved him. He’d seen that look before, leveled on his mad father. That look was why Maximilian generally took great care with his every remark, his every action. People were always watching and waiting for him to exhibit the same symptoms. And Maximilian would never give them the satisfaction of thinking they had seen something . . . off in him.
It annoyed him more than he liked that Miss Bonnaud had just seen him lose his temper. This situation had him all out of sorts.
Taking the tray from the servant, she brought it back to set it on the desk. “Will you have some tea, sir?”
Tea. It was so normal, so everyday. Right now, he wanted nothing more than to feel normal and everyday. “Yes,” he clipped out. “Thank you.”
The calm he’d forced into his voice seemed to translate to her as well, for she relaxed her shoulders. “And how do you take it?” she asked as she prepared the brew.
“Strong. Black. No sugar.”
“How odd,” she said as she set the cup and saucer on the desk in front of a chair, unsubtly inviting him to sit down. “So do I. So did my father. Maman thought us both quite mad.”
Had she mentioned madness on purpose to provoke him? He slanted her a wary glance. “Then she would have to consider me so, as well.”
“Ah, but she would not. You’re a duke.” Her voice turned acid. “Dukes are above reproach.”
She couldn’t possibly know about his family’s dance with madness, or she wouldn’t speak so glibly of it. And she hadn’t even known about Peter, so she wouldn’t know the rest. “I take it you do not share your mother’s opinion of dukes.”
“She’s dead now,” she said with a small hitch in her voice, “but no, I did not share her opinion.” She met his gaze boldly. “In my estimation, no man is abov
e reproach.”
“Except your brothers?” he drawled.
She released a sigh. “Not even them. They often try my patience sorely.”
In spite of everything, he smiled. She was making small talk to put him at ease, and it was working. She must be good at managing Manton’s clients.
Watching as she poured her own cup of tea, he took a seat and sipped the brew. It was exactly as he liked it. And it was of surprisingly good quality, given the obviously strained finances of her and her half brother.
“Now then,” she asked when she took her own seat, “how can you be sure that this handkerchief belonged to your brother? You said you were young when he . . . um . . . left.”
“Was kidnapped. Let us not mince words. And the handkerchief has certain distinguishing marks. The embroidery is distinctive, for one.”
“But any embroidery design could be copied. I copy designs in my own embroidery all the time, whenever I see something pretty on a gown.”
“You’ll have to trust me when I say it can’t be copied. It’s more than what was in the design. Each handkerchief’s embroidery is unique to its owner. No one but the family knows how. Unfortunately, it requires that I see it to be sure it’s the right one.”
“How would you even recognize it? I mean, if your brother was taken when you were barely old enough to remember anything . . .”
“Before we received word of Peter’s death, my father gave me a written account of everything Peter was wearing or carrying when he was abducted, including the handkerchief. That’s why it’s imperative that I meet with your brother. So I can get to the bottom of this.”
Furrowing her brow, she sipped her tea. “It makes no sense, you know. If Tristan had uncovered an heir to the dukedom and then had traveled to England to reveal that, he would have told Dom and me.”
“Perhaps he did tell Manton. And Manton left you out of it.”
“Dom would never do that.”
“Then where is he? It can’t be a coincidence that Manton ran off right before I was supposed to meet with Bonnaud. He has probably gone to join the scoundrel somewhere.”
The Duke's Men [1] What the Duke Desires Page 4
