Nothing Compares to the Duke

by Christy Carlyle

  “Bella?”

  Her mind had wandered while she’d stared at him, and he’d stepped closer without her noticing.

  “I’m banking on your reputation. Being pursued by you never crossed my mind.”

  “I see.” He wore an irritatingly amused expression, as if he knew some great secret she did not. “But you are aware of my reputation.”

  “Of course. You throw a lot of parties and drink to excess and there are a great many women.”

  He tipped his head and glanced up at the ceiling thoughtfully. “Accurate enough that I won’t quibble.” When he looked back at her, his gaze had changed. No more amusement, just seriousness. “My concern is for your reputation.” He paused, pursed his lips, and then continued. “If I dance with you, they will think we’re enamored.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” The entire notion made her pulse jump at the base of her throat. A single dance meant nothing. “People dance at balls who don’t even like each other. I assure you, I’ve partnered with many men I’ve never spoken to again.”

  Rhys dragged a hand across his jaw and stared at her dubiously.

  “Fine,” she told him a little too loudly. “We needn’t dance.”

  The more she thought about it, the more the prospect seemed a step too far. Face-to-face, body to body, hands clasped and his palm against her waist. That much nearness was entirely unnecessary.

  “I’m not saying I don’t wish to, but rumors will start soon after.”

  Bella laughed. “You’re very sure of yourself.”

  “I am.” He spoke the two syllables without a hint of bravado.

  For a man who’d once doubted his intelligence and let his father’s disdain weigh on him, she was pleased to hear the confidence in his tone.

  But he was wrong if he thought they’d start a scandal.

  “Louisa knows why I’m inviting you, and my parents still think of you as the boy who spent his days at Hillcrest. No one will think we’re paramours. I promise.”

  “If you say so.” His smile was too knowing, but then he turned away from her and lifted his cravat from the back of a chair. “The steward was due today, but I don’t think he’ll appear. I’d be pleased to join you for dinner.”

  She desperately wanted to inquire why he was in such a state of undress, but held her tongue. He slid the fabric around his neck and then focused on the task of rolling down his sleeves.

  The motion drew her attention to his bare forearms. To the muscles flexing as he moved and the dusting of blond hair against sun-kissed skin.

  For a man she’d once known well, she found herself intensely curious about him. In the years since they’d last spoken, he’d lived much more than she had.

  How many raucous parties had there been? How many ladies?

  Good grief, she’d never even been kissed.

  Lifting a hand to her mouth, she willed the thought away. Then she found herself staring at his lips. His was a generous mouth, always twitching into a smile or bravado-filled smirk and rarely turning down in a frown.

  But what would it be like to kiss those lips?

  He let out a little chuckle, and she realized he’d caught her watching him.

  Bella moved toward the messy desk in the center of the room.

  Ledgers. Numbers. Those were things she understood.

  She opened one of the large leather-bound books to a page that had been crumpled and torn at the edge. A tally of expenditures from four months past. Some lines had been struck through, some amounts crossed out and then rewritten. Always in a lesser amount. Either the account keeper was error prone or the cost of goods had changed drastically.

  Bella lifted the book into her arms to examine some smaller notations and turned the page.

  “You needn’t look at those now.” Rhys approached from behind.

  Bella jumped at the sound of his voice and lost her grip on the heavy ledger. One side flipped open and bumped the others stacked precariously at the desk’s edge. As the thickest on top slid off, Rhys reached around her and caught it, his body pressed to hers.

  He was all heat and firm muscle and it frightened her how much she wanted to lean into his warmth.

  “I’ve got it,” Bella told him as she clasped the volume’s front cover. She pushed back against him and he retreated instantly.

  It took her a moment to catch her breath.

  “We can have a look at those,” he said quietly, “another time.”

  “I know.”

  After taking one deep breath and vowing not to let her gaze snag on his bare neck or full lips, Bella turned to face him, bumped another of the ledgers and sent the whole pile tumbling onto the carpet.

  She knelt down to collect them. Rhys knelt beside her.

  When she grabbed for a spine of a ledger, he reached out too and his hand brushed hers. Rather than pull back, he wrapped his fingers around hers.

  “You’re trembling.” He swept his thumb over the back of her hand. “Don’t worry, Arry. I’m sure you’re right. My attendance at the party will disturb Hammersley and the others so thoroughly, they’ll scurry back to London at first morning light.”

  Bella slid her fingers free of his and the friction sent a jolt of warmth along her arm. “We will see.”

  She did her best to ignore him and continued gathering the ledgers. He wouldn’t let her do the task alone and moved in front of her to retrieve one that had fallen farthest.

  “You don’t trust me anymore,” he said quietly.

  Bella snapped her gaze to his and the pain there struck her like a blow.

  “I’d like to earn that back.”

  “Rhys—”

  “I understand,” he said before she could finish. “You’ve put me out of your mind for years.”

  Bella collected several of the ledgers and pivoted to face him.

  “Here.” She held out the volumes and he took them, then she reached for the last. As she leaned forward, she felt something catch at her neck and raised a hand.

  The daisy pendant was cool against her fingers. She closed her fist around it quickly, but she was too slow.

  Rhys fixed his gaze on her neck a moment before he reached for her.

  Bella opened her hand and let the pendant drop. He caught it between his fingers and stroked the opal petals with his thumb, almost as tenderly as he’d stroked her hand.

  “So you didn’t hate me,” he said on a husky whisper.

  Bella’s heart pounded so hard it hurt. She tugged on the chain of her necklace and the flower pendant slipped from his fingers. She got to her feet, ignoring his offered hand to help her up.

  When Bella stood before him, Rhys remained kneeling, as he’d attempted to do the night before. His full, far too appealing mouth flickered into a hesitant smile that faded almost as soon as it appeared.

  “We were friends for so many years, but I’m not certain you ever knew me at all.” She should call the whole thing off. The invitation she’d come to extend would just lead to more of this. Her heart in her throat, all the old feelings that she should have banished years before welling up as if they’d never left at all.

  Turning on her heel, she started toward the study door. The most logical solution was to walk away and move forward rather than looking back. But on the threshold, she looked at him over her shoulder.

  “We’ll gather in the drawing room at six. Dinner starts at seven.”

  Chapter Seven

  Rhys had never hesitated to walk through Hillcrest’s thick carved maple door in his life.

  Lord and Lady Yardley’s country house had often felt more like a home than his own. They’d welcomed him, not as the neighboring dukedom’s heir but as a young man who’d befriended their daughter. And they’d encouraged him to visit nearly as often as Bella had.

  If not for the Yardleys, he would have had no real notion of family after the loss of his mother when he was a boy. No notion of a loving family anyway. They’d striven to make him feel a part of theirs, and as a child he
’d wanted nothing more than to be included in their conversation-filled dinners and silly parlor games.

  He loved Hillcrest and everyone who inhabited the manor house.

  Yet tonight he paused on the steps, pointlessly adjusting his cravat, which his valet had already arranged impeccably, and scraped a hand through his hair as he’d done half a dozen times on his carriage ride over.

  He’d thought about Bella all day. The way she’d shuttered herself earlier haunted him. The stony set of her jaw and the way her shoulders trembled, betraying whatever emotion she wouldn’t let him see.

  She’d always been that way. Where he’d been brash and let every emotion slip out, she’d been quiet. Observant. Calm when he wasn’t. But he knew her well enough to know she wasn’t placid or emotionless. Bella was every bit as passionate as he was, or at least she had been once.

  He wasn’t sure at all who she’d become in the years they’d been apart but he very much wanted the opportunity to find out.

  Through a half-open window, he could hear conversation in the front drawing room. Her cousin Louisa’s lively laughter and the voices of several men. Those bloody suitors Lady Yardley had selected in the hopes they might woo Bella.

  Why did that fact irk him?

  Stepping toward the door, he knocked twice. A moment later the doors creaked open and Mr. Lewes stood on the threshold. The Yardleys’ longtime butler had always been kind, and Rhys was ridiculously pleased to see recognition in the old man’s eyes.

  “Your Grace, it has been a very long while.” He offered a little half bow and gestured for Rhys to enter.

  “I trust you’ve been well.” The man looked far more hail and hardy than Rhys did after a week of London soirees.

  “I’ve no complaints, Your Grace.”

  The honorific still made Rhys want to glance over his shoulder to see if his father was there, but it sounded more right on Lewes’s tongue than it had on anyone else’s.

  “Where is she, Lewes?” His question should have been familiar. It was the one Rhys had asked whenever he came to visit Bella.

  “Miss Prescott has not yet come down, Your Grace.” Lewes stared at him and then glanced at the long stairwell that wound up to the family’s private rooms.

  Rhys couldn’t count how many times he’d bound up those stairs to find Bella in the nursery or her sitting room.

  “Guests are gathering in the drawing room,” Lewes told him quietly. “May I announce you?”

  Propriety dictated he join the other guests. Dashing up to the family’s private quarters might have been forgivable when he was twelve and Bella was eight, but they weren’t children anymore. She was a proper young lady.

  Unfortunately, he’d never been a proper gentleman for a single day of his life.

  “Not quite yet. Good to see you, Lewes.”

  The old man gave one curt nod, and Rhys stepped past him and headed for the stairs. The path to her chamber felt as familiar as if he’d tread the path yesterday, yet when he reached her door, he didn’t knock.

  What the hell was happening to him? He wasn’t a man who ever hesitated. Half the problems in his life could be ascribed to his very bad habit of giving in to reckless impulses.

  Whatever lingering connection he had with Bella felt fragile. He refused to let himself sift what seeing her again had sparked in him.

  Rather than knock and step inside as he would have done years before, he rapped gently and waited.

  Bella opened the door on a frustrated huff, as if he’d interrupted. Her cheeks were flushed, her brow crinkled in a frown, and she held her coiffure in place with one hand. Whether he’d interrupted or not, her green-gold eyes widened at the sight of him.

  “You don’t look happy to see me.”

  “I thought you were the maid. Why are you up here?” She gripped the edge of his waistcoat, glanced both ways down the hall, and pulled him into her room. “You really are determined to start a scandal.”

  “Old habit,” he told her as she let go of him and closed the door. “I always came upstairs to find you rather than waiting for you to come down.”

  She gave him a harried glance over her shoulder as she worked at winding her loose hair into artful pinned curls.

  “I thought it best to decide on our plan of attack.”

  “The only plan is for you to be downstairs making a grand entrance and all of our gentlemen guests nervous,” she told him as she approached her vanity to rifle through a crystal dish.

  Rhys swallowed hard and curled his hand into a fist.

  Three buttons at the back of her gown were unfastened, exposing her lovely freckled skin. Long auburn waves of hair had fallen from her half-pinned coiffure, and he longed to reach out and sweep them aside. To see more of her.

  Good God, what was wrong with him?

  He’d seen Bella disheveled before. Covered in pond muck, rain soaked, even splashed with paint from the one occasion when they’d decided to try their hand at watercolors.

  This was different.

  He’d seen her as a friend then. A child. Now he saw only a woman. An inconveniently desirable woman. And he had taken the liberty of coming to her room, to her bedchamber. Uninvited.

  He wasn’t unused to entering ladies’ bedchambers, but he only ever did so with an explicit invitation.

  Casting his gaze away from her, he noticed a series of documents strung along the wall. They weren’t art. He recognized Bella’s handwriting and what appeared to be sketches of some of her puzzle games.

  “What’s all that?” He gestured toward the wall and started to move closer.

  “A project I’m working on. Nothing I have time to talk about.”

  “Perhaps you’ll tell me some other time.” There was a period in their lives when he knew everything she was up to, all her secrets and plans. He missed being privy to Arabella Prescott’s projects.

  Turning to him with an irritated look, Bella seemed to be suffering with none of the sentiments he felt.

  “Does this look all right?” She’d put a bejeweled comb in her hair but it was crooked and only half in place. “It doesn’t, does it? Would you ring the bell again?”

  Rhys approached the mantel and gave a tug on the bellpull. Her frustration was palpable, and his impulse was to help, but all he knew about ladies’ coiffures was how to take them down.

  “I should be in the drawing room by now.” She stuck two hairpins between her lips and a third into her hair so violently, she dislodged a few other curls. When another strand of hair became dislodged, she let out a little yelp of distress. “I’m making it worse.”

  “Sit down.”

  She snapped her gaze to his, eyes glittering with annoyance at his commanding tone. Then she seemed to realize what he intended and her expression softened.

  Rhys felt something in him ease too. He approached her where she sat on her vanity bench. She straightened her shoulders and held out a palm full of hairpins.

  “I take it the objective is to trap your curls with these.” He drew his fingers along her palm and felt her tremble in response when he took one of the pins.

  “Just these few strands that have fallen down. It needn’t be perfect. I’m not aiming to impress any of the gentlemen downstairs.”

  He looked into the mirror and their eyes met. She watched him, as if gauging his reaction.

  “I’m sure you already have. That’s why they’re still here.”

  That seemed to embarrass her. She shifted her gaze to the wall in front of her and then down at her lap.

  Rhys lifted one long curl and pinned it next to another. He did the same with two others, and did his damnedest to resist the urge to pull the whole thing down. Every time his fingers brushed her scalp or the back of her neck, her body gave a little jolt and he felt the movement all the way to his groin.

  He had no idea why helping a lady pin her hair up was so arousing. His heart beat as hard as if he’d run all the way from Edgecombe. When he’d placed the final pin, he took the
bejeweled comb and settled it among her auburn waves. The more he touched her hair, the more he sensed the tension begin to seep out of her body. Her shoulders rounded.

  When he’d finished, he found he didn’t know what to do with his hands. He didn’t wish to stop touching her.

  “That looks better,” she said quietly. “Thank you.”

  He stepped back and turned to the long mirror in the corner of the room to check his tie and focus on anything other than her. But he was aware of her every movement. In the quiet of the room, he could hear that her breath had sped too. His gaze was drawn to her movements in the mirror. She touched the back of her hand to her cheek, then placed a hand at the base of her throat and swallowed hard.

  Standing up from her vanity, she lifted both arms up and behind her head to try to reach the loose buttons on the back of her gown.

  “May I help you?” he heard himself say.

  Rather than answer, she turned her back to him. He walked the two steps toward her too quickly, and she glanced back.

  “You should go down first,” she told him matter-of-factly. Always practical. Always solving problems. But he’d known her long enough that he didn’t miss the quaver in her voice.

  His own hands trembled as he fastened her buttons and he bit his lip at the softness of her skin against the backs of his fingers. Good grief, he needed to stop touching her.

  When he’d fastened the last button, he stepped away and started toward the door.

  “Five minutes?” she said as he reached for the door latch.

  Rhys closed his eyes, fought to steady his heartbeat, and looked back at her with his mask of bravado firmly in place. “Whenever you wish. It’s your birthday. I am merely here for you to command.”

  “You’ve never let me command you in your life.”

  He chuckled and winked at her. “Consider it a birthday gift.”

  Bella’s plan wasn’t going as expected.

  Fanning herself with her hand dispelled a bit of the heat in the blue drawing room but not an ounce of the tension. The night had turned cool and servants had lit a fire, but the combination of overdressed bodies and the irritation Rhys’s presence stoked made the room stifling.