Duke of Secrets (Moonlight Square, Book 2)

by Gaelen Foley

  That had not sounded entirely like a rebuke to him, and when her lashes swept upward, he saw lightning in her eyes.

  His pulse leaped with want. She made no effort to flee as he gathered her closer.

  “That,” he whispered, “was my recompense for saving your pretty neck. But this I collect as the price for my generous forgiveness for your naughtiness, sneaking into my party.”

  “But I was invited.”

  A sensuous smile curved his lips. “Yes, you were.” Then he kissed her again, sliding his arm more firmly around her waist and pulling her closer.

  The feel of her supple body against his set his blood on fire.

  Just a taste, he vowed, though he thrilled to the featherlight touch of her palms landing uncertainly on his chest, as though to temper him, but making no move to push him away.

  Azrael kissed her lips apart and indulged for a long moment in the treasure that might’ve been his, if things were different. Serena allowed it; he could feel her virginal curiosity about his tongue’s incursion into her mouth, and he could fairly smell her arousal deepening.

  He gripped her in his embrace, but when his hardness began to throb painfully against her soft, flat belly, he fought off the hunger to lay her in that bed, and somehow tore himself away.

  Panting, he released her abruptly, before he lost the will. “I think it’s time for you to go, my lady.”

  He stepped away, turning his back on her in an effort to get himself under control. The taste of her lingered on his lips.

  Behind him, she was silent for a heartbeat. “But you haven’t answered my question yet.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking for. If you want my best advice, let this matter go.”

  “Let it go?”

  He did not turn around, striving to tame his lust, and staring at the floor, acutely aware of her just a few feet away.

  “Please, I’ve only ever had your best interests at heart, Serena. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. These are dangerous men—tangled up in a sort of secret society. So I suggest you forget what you heard and, for God’s sake, don’t go stirring up the past.

  “I understand how it must’ve hurt to lose your beau over things beyond your control. But the boy is a coward and a fool. Find another suitor. It won’t be difficult for you. One who’ll accept you for exactly who you are.”

  “But that’s just it, Your Grace. I don’t even know who I am anymore, who I’m supposed to be. Don’t you see? My whole life has been a lie! All this time I thought I was Lord Dunhaven’s daughter, and now I have no idea who I belong to. Please, won’t you help me?”

  Drawing on all the ice that ran in his veins as part of his Rivenwood heritage, he lifted his chin and flatly said: “No.”

  “I see.”

  He turned around again just in time to see her flinch as though he had struck her.

  “Very well.” She pivoted toward the door. “Then I shan’t trouble you further, Your Grace. I’ll see myself out.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” He grabbed his coat off the bed, blew out the candles, then joined her near the bedroom door.

  He could feel her stewing, and got the impression the headstrong beauty was not used to having anyone, especially males, tell her no.

  “What?” he prompted in a low tone.

  She huffed. “I can’t believe I let you kiss me, and you still won’t budge. You tricked me!”

  “You liked it,” he muttered.

  “So what if I did?” She paused, tilting her head with a coy glance. “Would a third kiss be sufficient to get me what I want, Azrael?”

  “The price for what you want, darling, would cost you much more than a kiss.” He tapped her on the nose. “But we both know that is never going to happen.”

  “So you’re really going to leave me in the dark?”

  “We are all in the dark, my lady. ’Tis the human condition. Come now. Since we both know you cannot be trusted to wander about the house unchaperoned, I will escort you out personally. I’ll take you down the servant stairs,” he added as he put his coat back on. “That way, you won’t be seen by my other guests.”

  She gave him a pretty glower, but waited while he opened the door and glanced out into the corridor. “All clear.”

  Turning to beckon her out, Azrael paused when he saw her mutinous expression by the lamplight coming from the hallway. Her lips were pursed in a tight bow, and veritable flaming arrows shot out at him from her eyes.

  “Serena,” he said with a sigh.

  “How can you do this to me? If you know who my real father is—”

  “I don’t know,” he interrupted. “The only thing I can tell you with any certainty is that, given your choices, the answer wouldn’t please you. The wisest thing you can do is forget what Toby told you and settle your mind on Dunhaven as the only earthly father you need. Trust me, he was the least bad of the lot. Not evil, merely—thick. Now, if you don’t mind,” he said with an impatient gesture at the doorway, “after you.”

  “Humph.” Serena marched out over the threshold with her nose in the air.

  It was bad of him, but he found her righteous indignation amusing under the circumstances. After all, the girl had trespassed in his house and spent the past half-hour with him alone in a darkened bedchamber—and now she wished to play the wronged, virtuous heroine?

  Still, he had not exactly been on his best behavior himself.

  He winced at the thought of the yelp from her that had interrupted Bianca’s audition for the role of his mistress. He scratched his eyebrow awkwardly with one hand as he pulled the door shut with the other.

  “Er, my lady, may I say I…I do wish you had not seen me with Miss Burns,” he ventured as she marched off ahead of him.

  A short, cynical laugh escaped her. “What does it matter? You can do as you please with any woman, I’m sure.” She sent him a pointed look as he caught up, walking beside her down the red-carpeted corridor.

  “It’s not as though we are engaged.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You are innocent.”

  “Am I? On the contrary, it sounds like I was born with wickedness in my blood. Just like you, my dear duke.”

  He frowned, perturbed by her words. They were truer than she knew.

  Then he shepherded her through a simple service doorway near the end of the corridor. “Just through here,” he said none-too-patiently.

  “So eager to be rid of me?”

  “No, it’s just that I have no idea how we’d explain your presence here without your chaperone, never mind a costume. Come along—and mind your step, you little minx.” He led her down a creaky wooden staircase, dimly lit by an overhead lantern.

  The stairs led down to an unobtrusive side entrance on the ground floor. She watched him undo the locks when they reached the door at the bottom.

  “So you really won’t help me, then?”

  “No!” he exclaimed, exasperated. “How many times must I tell you? Not in this matter. If you had asked for anything else, I should have done it, gladly.” He felt bound to this girl in ways he could not explain. “But not this. It’s too dangerous. Now, wait here for a moment,” he ordered sternly, “and I’ll go fetch the cloak you dropped.”

  She sighed, sounding very put-upon. She did not thank him for this favor, of course. Apparently, the beauty was used to having peers of the realm run and fetch for her.

  Azrael harrumphed. Stepping outside, he strode off to collect her domino from the grass beneath the balcony, shaking his head at her impertinence.

  Perhaps it was for the best that she had driven him out of the room with all her pestering about things he dared not discuss. Otherwise, he might’ve been tempted to keep her in there all night.

  Ah well. He marched through the cool grass while the wind played with his hair, and fortunately, the indigo night soothed away his annoyance.

  He supposed that at least one had to admire the girl’s persistence. He felt sorry for her, in truth.
He could see that she’d had her world upended by Lord Toby’s findings. Still, there was nothing he could do.

  Then he spotted her lost domino and went to snatch it off the grass.

  When he brought it back to her, warily, Serena let him drape it over her shoulders. He resisted the urge to inhale the enticing scent of her hair. Having set her domino in place for her, he stepped back and studied her by the light of a moonbeam while she put her mask on again.

  He couldn’t help smiling as he watched her. “You didn’t fool me, you know,” he remarked. “I recognized you at once.”

  “How?” She propped her hands on her waist.

  “I’m not sure.” His gaze lingered briefly on those much-too-kissable lips. “I only marvel that you went to such lengths with this ruse. Next time, just come and talk to me.”

  She shrugged. “What good would it do me?”

  Before he could think of an answer, she forced a brisk smile and pulled up her hood.

  “Well! At least you needn’t worry about me stalking you anymore, Your Grace. As I said, I shan’t trouble you again. Farewell.”

  As she pivoted to go, he reached out and captured her wrist. “Come, Serena,” he cajoled her. “Let us not part on bad terms. I would help you if I could.”

  “But you could, Azrael,” she said, boldly using his first name again, as he had used hers. “You merely choose not to, for reasons of your own. But that is your prerogative, and so be it. You may go back to your life, and I shall go back to mine. Only, do not imagine that we are now friends.”

  He lifted his chin, stung. “Is that so?”

  “They who are not for us are against us.”

  “I am not against you, Serena,” he said, but she just pulled away.

  “It does not signify, Your Grace. Farewell.” Yanking her wrist free of his light hold, she traipsed off alone into the darkness, her black cloak billowing around her.

  Azrael’s heart sank as he watched her go, his lovely almost-bride.

  Aside from being slightly stunned at the way she had just put him in his place, frustration overwhelmed him.

  He banged the heel of his fist into the lintel of the doorway and muttered a curse.

  All the while, his heart pounded with the familiar litany of his defenses—or excuses—running through his head.

  They seemed so inadequate just now. I keep to myself. I mind my own business. I keep my head down and the bastards leave me alone.

  She has no idea what she’s asking of me. I can’t risk being drawn back in, or I might prove as bad as he was.

  Maybe even worse.

  One did not simply shrug off being named after the archangel of death, after all. It was not a name he wanted to live up to.

  Letting out a sigh, he leaned against the frame of the open door, half in shadow, half in moonlight.

  Trying to help her would’ve been extremely unwise. He knew that, of course. Blast and damn, though, he hated to disappoint her.

  He glanced at the waiting doorway and felt no desire to return to his own party or even to participate anymore. Hell, his whole life was a masquerade, and if he were honest, he was a lifelong expert at playing a role. Wasn’t he the boy who, years ago, had convinced his father’s twisted cronies that he wasn’t quite right in the head?

  Too scarred, withdrawn, and unstable after seeing his sire murdered that day in the woods to live up to his dark destiny. They had hoped to groom him to take his father’s place one day as the leader of the next generation of Prometheans—but he was damaged goods.

  At least he’d taken pains since the age of twelve to make sure that they believed so.

  Once he had realized the sort of men who had control of him after his father’s death—the trustees of his fortune, headed up by his chief legal guardian, Lord Stiver, his father’s right-hand man—Azrael had quickly grasped the danger he was in.

  The mysterious man in the woods that day, the so-called vagrant, had driven that point home with his dying breath. “Don’t grow up to be like him, and if you ever need help, go to Dante House on the Strand. My colleagues there will assist you…”

  Meanwhile, by some blessed stroke of luck, in his studies at the time, his old tutor Mr. Foxham had had him reading Hamlet.

  With the dying agent’s warning seared into his mind, Azrael had seized upon the Danish prince’s strategy of fooling the villains with a charade of weakness, eccentricity.

  And by God, it had worked.

  By the time he’d turned fifteen, he had convinced the evil bastards that, sadly, he would never be the great man his father had been, alas.

  He wasn’t raving mad, they concluded, not like King George, for example.

  Merely mad around the edges, like the Bard’s overcautious Danish prince. Unable to deal with much, certainly not with the occult high darkness they dabbled in.

  Obsessive. Withdrawn. High-strung. Too intense.

  Ah, these true believers were filled with such regret to have to admit defeat where he was concerned.

  They’d had such high hopes and tried with all their might to mold him into the monster his sire had envisioned, the next powerful leader destined to guide their future followers down the left-hand path.

  But Azrael had thwarted them at every turn with his wits and his lies.

  He remembered staying up late into the night as a lad, somberly designing what his next bout of madness should entail. He had to be convincing, but it was vital not to overdo it. And he remembered crying sometimes into his big old dog’s fur, hugging the animal’s neck. But for his pets, he was sure he had been the loneliest boy on earth.

  Friends? They were but liabilities, as he had cruelly learned. A real friend was someone you told your secrets to, and his secrets could get people killed.

  Like his poor old tutor.

  Mr. Foxham had been his sole accomplice for a time, early on. But the old man had made the fatal mistake of standing up to Lord Stiver once.

  The aged scholar had disappeared the very next day and was never heard from again. That happened to a surprising number of people in his guardian’s orbit.

  After that, Azrael had been more alone than ever, full of aching despair and the futile wish that someone out there would’ve magically noticed somehow that the duke’s heir with his supposedly tragic story was actually a prisoner inside the palace he’d inherited.

  No one but the servants ever knew the truth, but of course, they wanted to live, too. He couldn’t blame them for turning a blind eye. They were as kind to him as they dared be.

  By the time he had attained his majority, his jailers had given up on him for the most part and generally left him alone.

  Of course, they still kept an eye on him, watching for any sign of his desire to return to the fold.

  Indeed, Lord Stiver still held out some faint hope that Azrael’s “madness” could be a portent of an even darker greatness in him than his father had possessed, yet to unfold.

  In ancient times, after all, lunacy could signify that one had been touched by the gods, like the oracles and prophets.

  They left him alive for that reason, and out of respect for his sire.

  Of course, his guardians had been highly displeased when Azrael, immediately upon attaining his majority, had freed himself from the arranged marriage and moved to London as his permanent residence, forsaking his country estates.

  Unfortunately, Town life hadn’t brought Azrael the happiness he’d hoped for. It seemed he himself was the problem.

  Slowly he’d begun to realize it was already too late for him—his untrusting habits and solitary mode of life were already set, too deeply ingrained.

  What he’d seen in the woods on that day had cut him off from the rest of humanity, and now he did not know how to scale the walls he had built around himself. He’d been independent of his former masters for over a decade now, but he was still trapped somehow in the solitude that had been his safety for years.

  Trapped by his secrets.

  Wi
th a sigh, he dropped his chin to his chest, wearily pushed away from the lintel, and stepped back inside.

  Pulling the door shut, locking it, he returned to his tedious duties as host with a creeping sense of futility.

  Maybe, he thought, some people were simply destined to be alone.

  # # #

  Fool! How could you let him kiss you? Angrily, Serena hurried back through the park, casting the gazebo a glare as she passed it, and disregarding the moon as it leered down at her from between the clouds.

  Dreadful man. Thank the Lord above she had not been forced to marry such a creature. How dare he take such liberties and then make a mock of her quest?

  Her breath clouded as she gusted through the park, refusing to admit how much she had enjoyed Azrael’s kiss, but the cold air helped somewhat to cool her simmering temper.

  Ordinarily, a night like this would have been eerie enough to unnerve her, but after what she had just been through, really, this was nothing. She couldn’t believe she had almost been eaten by a leopard and then nearly fallen to her death—all for naught!

  But that wasn’t even the worst part. She had risked her reputation and her life, spending the better part of an hour in a bedchamber with a man she’d been warned was evil. A man who might’ve committed patricide as a mere tender youth!

  She was probably lucky he hadn’t murdered her for some bloody Hallowe’en fun while she was there, she thought with a huff. Well, that was admittedly an exaggeration, because in truth, he hadn’t seemed evil-evil to her. But he was certainly exasperating.

  And selfish, she reminded herself as she trotted along the winding graveled path.

  Why wouldn’t he help her? It didn’t make any sense. He claimed his refusal to get involved was for her own good, but who was he really protecting? Himself, or the members of his father’s twisted little club?

  But so be it. His refusal changed nothing. Even without Azrael’s help, she would not be deterred in her search. Her real father might turn out to be as bad as his, but she at least had to know who the blasted man was.

  After all, how could she ever marry without knowing? God forbid she unwittingly fall in love with some fellow she was related to.