“You shall run me ragged with your zest for bloody wakefulness,” he called out as he entered the room. But she wasn’t there. The room was empty. A small wrapped box sat on her desk. His name was on the little tag.
Inside, another note: You will find your gift in the cupboard below the bookcase.
The hairs pricked along the back of his neck. He opened the cupboard and peered inside. On the shelf was a small leather whip, with short, soft fronds and a filigreed silver handle—rather feminine and delicately made and nothing like Elena’s. Four twined bundles of sturdy velvet ribbon, the kind used for binding hands and limbs without abrasion. A switch of fresh green birches, soaking in water in an enameled tub he recognized from Poppy’s workshop. And beside them, a thin, leather-bound book embossed with the words Les Interdits.
He opened it to the first page, where he found an inscription.
Archer,
I’d like to propose a cordial agreement. I will look forward to a happy lifetime of re-creating whatever images please you. And you will keep me up late at night exploring the ones that please me.
All my love,
Poppy
It was only later that morning, as she drowsed lazily in her husband’s arms, that Poppy realized why she felt so happy.
It was after she found Archer in her library wearing nothing more than his dressing gown and a gratified expression, paging through a book of erotic engravings so shocking they could only have arrived from a particular address on Charlotte Street. After she’d taken the book and confessed to him her very great interest in plates IX and XIV. After he’d suggested that before they undertake them, she make him earn the privilege of her favors. After she’d whispered that a man who was planning to do such unspeakable things with her no doubt deserved to get on his knees. After he moaned under the snap of a lovely green birch twig from her garden and lost himself deliciously. After he carried her to bed and she allowed him to return the favor.
It didn’t have to be a struggle, she realized. It could simply be a gift.
Her husband pulled her to him tighter and took down the pins that held her hair and let it fall into a tangle around her shoulders.
“Aren’t you the picture of innocence,” he said, his voice a tired, approving rumble.
And she was. Save for a black leather cord around her neck, and an iron key that fell between her breasts.
He dragged her against him. “I love you, Cavendish.”
“Show me, Your Grace,” she whispered.
And he did.
Epilogue
Constance stepped down from her carriage and onto the lawn of her brother and sister-in-law’s home in Hammersmith. The lawn was riotous with the blooms of early August, and the insufferable insects they attracted. She yelped and fended off a bee with her fan. A group of Poppy’s hired lady gardeners giggled at the sight of her as they passed by with a cart bearing a haul of fuzzy purple flowers.
How perfectly typical. One would think that given the momentous event that had taken place here just this morning, these grounds would be quiet and peaceful in honor of the blessed occasion. But leave it to Archer and Poppy to celebrate the birth of their first child with more of their favorite pastime: work.
Alison met her at the door, looking positively misty-eyed. At least someone here knew a miracle when he encountered one. And her brother, ensconced in a house teeming with color and disorder, with a wife with whom he was besotted and a healthy baby in the cot, was a miracle indeed.
She threw herself into Alison’s arms.
“Is my niece amazing?”
“Amazing,” he confirmed, politely disentangling himself from her grip as butlers were wont to do when overly emotional young ladies assailed them. “They are in Her Grace’s bedchamber expecting you.”
“I will show myself in.”
The house smelled like growing things and trickled with light and moving air. At Poppy’s door, she stopped.
What a sight.
In all her years, Constance had never imagined her brother in a scene of such domestic tranquility. And yet, there he was, sitting in a chair beneath the window, nestling a tiny baby in his arm. So natural you’d have thought he’d been born to cradle infants.
She had meant to say something arch, but instead, damn her and her sentimental heartstrings, she started crying.
“Oh my,” she sniffled. “Oh my, let me see her.”
Archer met her eye with a smile and beckoned her forward with a nod.
She bent down to make eyes at the sleepy creature in his arms. She had a smashed little nose and a tuft of riotous dark hair—clearly her mother’s daughter. The baby opened her eyes just a glimmer, and they were brown, the picture of Archer’s.
She put her lips along the child’s tiny, downy head.
“She’s perfection,” she warbled.
Poppy and Archer laughed, but she could not help it—she continued crying. Archer handed the baby to Poppy and draped an arm around her shoulders.
“What, distressed you are no longer the baby of the family?”
She must be forgiven just this once for speaking with no artfulness. “It’s just that it feels like we’re a family now. I’m so happy.”
He pulled her toward him in one of the rough hugs he had taken to giving her so frequently of late. “Constance. We were always a family.”
She wrapped her arms around him and cried into his shoulder. Perhaps he was right. But before the arrival of Poppy Cavendish, they had not been a happy one.
When she finally collected herself, her brother put her in his chair, covered her with a blanket, and allowed her to hold his daughter, breathing down her neck all the while in case she proved unequal to the task. Fair enough, as prior to this day she had never touched a baby so new and small, and certainly never wanted to.
“What will you call her?”
“Plumeria,” Poppy said.
“What a glorious name. I should not have expected my brother to allow you to call her something so whimsical. In my day he was a very stern and joyless figure.”
“Archer chose her name,” Poppy said with a mysterious smile.
Constance whirled around and looked at him, properly shocked. He merely shrugged.
“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lady Plumeria,” she said to the baby’s impossibly perfect rosebud lips. “You and I are going to get into ever so much trouble together. In fact, I shall start planning for your christening. We will dazzle them, won’t we?” She sighed, thinking of all the parties that must be arranged before she left for Paris. “It is going to be a very busy autumn. I’m in an agony with all my planning.”
“It’s August,” Archer said. “The season’s months away.”
“I know! There’s barely any time at all. I have a little project in mind, you see, and one must arrange these things delicately.”
“Dare I ask her what that means?” Archer asked Poppy.
“You remember my friend Miss Bastian?”
“Indeed,” he said. He got a funny look in his eye, no doubt recalling he had once had the tortoise-headed plan to marry her himself, until his gallant sister had had the good sense to rescue him.
She grinned at him over the baby’s head. “I have decided to wed her to Apthorp.”
“Wed her to Apthorp!” Poppy laughed. “You speak as though the two in question have no choice in the matter.”
Archer, who knew her powers, clearly did not find the idea so amusing or far-fetched.
“Whatever conspiracy you are plotting,” he said, “please give me your word you will not get that poor girl into trouble.”
“Of course not!” she objected, as though she had not done that very thing to Poppy. But had it not led to this shocking display of happiness? She wished her brother would accept that she had a genius for seeing people to their fate, and leave off questioning her. She worked in the service, ultimately, of love. One had to place divots in the path to give the seeds of romance a place to blossom. She coul
d not be blamed if unsuspecting people sometimes bruised themselves falling into them.
“I shall only use the power of suggestion,” she assured him, not entirely prevaricating. “But you must agree that something must be done about your Apthorp. Thanks to your precious waterway bill, he is always about, perfectly dull and in the way. And since you are busy, it is me who is left to entertain his opinions on hounds and waistcoats. Given his affection for bland conversation, Gillian’s prattle will no doubt delight him. Plus, it would be an exquisite coup for her to snag an earl. And you know how I love to stage a coup.”
“May I offer a suggestion?” Archer asked.
“Certainly.”
“Don’t do it. Apthorp isn’t as harmless as he looks.”
“I agree, he is perfectly deadly.” She tapped the baby’s nose. “That is,” she told the infant, “his attempts at conversation.”
“You,” her brother said, “suffer from too much time on your hands. I should put you to work in my counting-house.”
“No, let me have her for the nursery,” Poppy said. “She can use her gift for letters to deal with all my dreadful correspondence.”
They exchanged a look of perfect understanding. You would think they shared a single brain, the way they finished each other’s sentences.
Constance rolled her eyes at both of them. The downside of bringing couples together and making them fall hopelessly in love was that they could then unite to plague her.
“Mock me if you wish, but I should have far less time at my disposal had you not forbidden me to gossip. It is only because I have been so very obedient and virtuous that I find myself adrift.”
“Surely we can put your talents to good use. Why don’t you write something?” Poppy suggested. “Like poetry. Or a play.”
Constance tapped a finger to her lip.
“You know, little Plum,” she mused to the baby, “I do think I should be frightfully good at it.”
THE END
Thank You!
Thank you so very much for reading The Duke I Tempted. If you enjoyed Poppy and Archer’s story consider leaving a review on your retailer of choice or just talking about it in real life to your cleverest romance-loving friends. (This is my first book, so every peep of word of mouth is greatly appreciated!)
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* * *
And if you want to spend more time in the world of Charlotte Street, Lady Constance Stonewell—to absolutely no one’s surprise—is about to get into a whole world of trouble:
* * *
When a rebellious young lady accidentally ruins the life of the most boring peer in London with a single salacious rumor, she does what any honorable woman would do: proposes a whirlwind sham engagement to save his reputation. But when her bland-as-stale-toast faux intended proves he is decidedly less dull than meets the eye—not to mention shockingly adept at unexpected forms of wickedness—she finds herself falling for him.
* * *
There’s only one problem: he can’t forgive her for breaking his heart.
* * *
Read on for an excerpt of the The Earl I Ruined.
Excerpt: The Earl I Ruined
“Heavens, Apthorp, what is this place?” Lady Contstance Stonewell asked, wrinkling her nose at the damp. “Tremont said you’d taken up residence at Apthorp Hall, but he didn’t mention it was abandoned.”
Julian Haywood, the Earl of Apthorp, could only stare at her in horror.
Above them the old floorboards settled with a sickly creak and a large false widow spider lowered itself from a rusted iron chandelier and dropped onto Constance’s gloved hand.
She raised a pale, wry eyebrow and flicked it off. “Tell me, is it the ghosts that drew you here, or the spiders?”
He finally found his voice. “You mustn’t be here. We must get you out of here. I’m going to find a litter to take you home.”
She waved this off. “No need, my coachman is waiting in the mews. I told him I’d be an hour. I need to speak to you. Have you somewhere more…tidy…where we might have a little chat?”
“Constance!” he said more forcefully than was polite, hoping his improper use of her Christian name would shock her into listening to him. “You must leave. Right now.”
In answer she craned her head quizzically, leaned toward him and sniffed. Her eyes lit up with that glow of mischief that made her such a divisive presence in the nation’s most aristocratic drawing rooms.
“Apthorp,” she said, with a sly smile. “Have you been drinking?”
“Not nearly as much as I’d like to,” he muttered. “Please, you have to leave.”
She chuckled as if he had made a splendid joke and remained planted where she stood.
It physically hurt to look at her, standing in this filthy kitchen with her laughing eyes in her beautiful yellow dress, her pale hair frizzing in the damp.
He had to save her.
“Come with me upstairs,” he said urgently. “If you take a sedan chair and keep the drapes pulled no one will know you were here.”
“Very well, if you insist. But first, I must speak with you.”
He drew a shaky breath. There was only one explanation for her resistance: she must not have seen the papers. Which, in keeping with his luck, would make today the only time in history Lady Constance Stonewell was not the first to know every scrap of gossip on two continents.
He had to do the honorable thing.
The miserable, humiliating, but honorable thing.
He had to tell her what was being said about him.
He drew up his last shred of dignity. “Lady Constance, I hope you will forgive me for speaking of improper matters, but you see, there has been a scandal. If anyone were to learn you were here you’d be—”
“As ruined as you are?” she cut in cheerfully.
He sank back against the door. “So you know. Of course you do. Everyone knows.”
The amusement in her eyes faded and she let out a shaky breath. “Not exactly. I know because I wrote the poem. Saints & Satyrs is my circular.”
She gave a weak nod and stood stiffly with her teeth bared in a guilty grimace, blinking, as though she couldn’t quite believe it herself.
His frantic desire to get her out of his house by any means necessary was suddenly replaced by a very still kind of quiet. A quiet that began in his bones and rose up through his blood. The kind of quiet the body undertook when the mind needed all the energy one possessed to make sense of what one had just heard.
A statement that could not—must not—be true.
He had never begged for anything in his life. He was far too proud.
But today, in this moment, he could only whisper a plea: “Tell me that I misheard you.”
Constance looked up into his eyes, then quickly looked away. “I suspect you must be very cross with me,” she said in a small voice.
Cross was not the word for it.
He gripped the dusty table to keep from retching.
She walked around the table to come closer, the butter-yellow hem of her dress collecting grey strands of dust as it dragged across the dirty floorboards.
She was saying things as she came closer, speaking in a rapid, high-pitched clip that he barely understood.
“I really didn’t mean you any harm! I thought I was averting a disaster. But then, what is disastrous for Miss Bastian and what is disastrous for you are not quite the same, and in any case, it was an accident. I regret it now, but you see all is not lost because—”
She was rambling, but her incoherence hardly mattered. His heart was so cracked that had she said his own name he would have struggled to understand her.
“Why are you here?” he croake
d out.
He could hear the misery in his voice and didn’t care if she could hear it too, because for the first time in his life he did not care what she thought of him.
She turned, and looked at him, and her big blue eyes were soft and plaintive.
“To fix it,” she whispered.
And then, as if by magic, the light in her eyes hardened into the bright cobalt glint he had admired so many times: a look of fierce, glittering resolve.
“Lord Apthorp, I am here to do what integrity demands when one’s actions have, however inadvertently, ruined the reputation of another person. I have come to offer you my hand in marriage.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my delightful, kind and clever agent Sarah Younger and the Nancy Yost Literary Agency for helping put this book into the world. Thank you to my editor Peter Sentfleben for understanding my vision and also insisting I remove that clichéd sub-plot about the evil one-dimensional villain. (RIP.) Thank you to my copy editor Michele Alpern for the delicate yet precise hand with tracked changes and to Kerry Hynds for the gorgeous cover and forebearance in the face of my particularlity about fonts. Thank you to DoyDoy and Emily for pep talks and early reads. Thank you to RWA for the Golden Heart; please don’t kill it it is so rad. Thank you to the Rebelles for your camaraderie and advice and to all the friends and writers who helped make this book better—I owe each and every one of you wine. Thank you to my editorial assistant Nonie, who is a cat. Thank you London. I miss you already.
And thank you to my husband. Hey we’re still married. That’s pretty cool.
About Scarlett
Scarlett Peckham is a four-time Golden Heart® finalist in Historical Romance who writes steamy stories about alpha heroines. Her Secrets of Charlotte Street series follows the members of Georgian London’s most discreet—and illicit—private club. She splits her time between London and Los Angeles. When not reading, writing, or thinking about romance novels she enjoys drinking wine, watching The Real Housewives, and admiring her cat.
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