Duke Du Jour

by Petie McCarty

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Duke du Jour

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Ari did not pull back as he had feared.

  Her small hands gripped his jacket lapels and tugged him to her.

  My little spitfire. Jared couldn’t help it—he smiled against her lips.

  She did pull back at that. “Why are you smiling?”

  “You delight me.”

  He could not have stripped the smile from his face if he had wanted to. He was just too damned happy. Ari wasn’t smiling, however.

  “I am honored you allowed me to give you your first French kisses,” he said quickly. At her confused look, he added, “A kiss with tongues is a real kiss.”

  “How did—” Her fingers pressed to her lips.

  “Trust me. I know these things.”

  Ouch. That sounded arrogant even to him.

  Evidently to Ari, too. “And only a rake would find it humorous to give a woman her first real kiss.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.”

  He reached for her. She lurched back, just missing the statue of David.

  “I told you, I’m a different man now.”

  Stick to the truth. It is always best.

  Ari looked uncertain.

  With her gaze keenly settled on his face, he managed to slip a step closer. “I’m a reformed rake.”

  And Jared realized he felt like one.

  “You reformed me,” he whispered and leaned in to kiss her.

  “And when your memory returns, you’ll go back to the old Jared,” she said, easing back.

  Duke du Jour

  by

  Petie McCarty

  Lords in Time Series

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Duke du Jour

  COPYRIGHT © 2018 by Petie McCarty

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: info@thewildrosepress.com

  Cover Art by RJ Morris

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Tea Rose Edition, 2018

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1810-3

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1811-0

  Lords in Time Series

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  Dedicated to

  my Walt Disney World Tour Guide “sisters.”

  After decades apart, fifty of us reunited last summer and all with the same love and support

  we shared long ago.

  Thanks for the memories.

  Chapter One

  Summoned to Haverly Manor on a dreary day in May, Hartman Wells had just accomplished the impossible. He had stunned Jared Phillip Bartholomew Langley, the thirteenth Duke of Reston, into silence. The retired lieutenant from Scotland Yard was a private investigator for the wealthiest peers in England and was also considered the best money could buy, but the man had to be wrong this time. No way could the investigator’s news be true. Jared could only stare in disbelief.

  “I’m sure this has come as a shock to you, Your Grace,” Wells was saying.

  A shock? How about the last thing on earth Jared would believe to be possible? Things like this did not happen to Reston dukes. They happened to others less fortunate, less titled.

  “Maybe you’re wrong,” Jared tried. “Have you checked your sources carefully? Checked and double-checked?”

  “I have pictures, Your Grace,” the investigator replied, his second Your Grace decidedly clipped. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to see them.”

  The man repeated his earlier feat. Jared Langley again sat speechless. Wells had pictures of Edwina? Cheating on him?

  Good Lord, no!

  He did not want to see the pictures. He did not want anyone to see them. Hell, he didn’t want Wells to see them. This was worse than embarrassing. This was a scandal, even for the twenty-first century. The fiancée of the thirteenth Duke of Reston—the most eligible bachelor in all of England, maybe the entire continent, and wealthier than anyone in England, even the Queen—had conducted an illicit liaison.

  How could Edwina do that to him? Jared thought he had chosen wisely, going for the proper bloodlines as all his previous ancestors had done. Edwina Montrose, only child of the Earl of Chesterton, was heir to some of the oldest and bluest chromosomes in all of England, dating back to William the Conqueror, no less.

  He stared at the fiftyish, balding gentleman seated on the other side of the massive ducal desk. The wealthy of England sent this man to search out their secrets or problems because he was astute, completely confidential, and never wrong. Jared had selected him for those very qualifications. Wells was supposed to come back and allay all of Jared’s concerns about his fiancée, not create new ones.

  “We have been engaged for eleven months,” he informed the investigator, as if somehow that would change the facts in Wells’s file.

  “And she’s been cheating on you for at least six of those,” Wells said, still looking miffed over Jared’s suggestion he check his sources, “give or take a month.”

  “Six mon—” He took a deep breath. No need to let Wells see him upset. “Who?”

  “Her old boyfriend, the one just before you started seeing her.”

  “Ah, Connor Danes. Viscount Groville.”

  “It is pronounced Grow-ville, not grovel, Your Grace,” Wells corrected.

  “Is it? Well, he will learn to do that if he expects to keep her,” Jared muttered, and his head began to pound.

  Groville had never stopped sniffing around Edwina Montrose—Eddy to all her fortune-hunting girlfriends and, it would seem, boyfriends alike. Since his fiancée had traded up, Jared had entertained the mistaken assumption he had no cause to be concerned over a mere viscount.

  It was not as though he had wanted to monopolize Eddy’s time. He was still getting used to not playing the field himself. Margaret Langley—unhappy wife to the twelfth Reston duke—had brought an ignominious end to Jared’s string of supermodels and beauties with one slash of guilt. His mother had adopted the role of watchdog for him when Jared’s father had died unexpectedly of heart failure, five years earlier.

  Margaret had made her
annual pilgrimage—from the chalet in Switzerland she called home—for Jared’s thirtieth birthday with the pronouncement that Jared owed his ancient lineage an heir. And not just any heir, but a worthy heir. That was what Dukes of Reston did, even in this modern era, she had said. Too much money was involved to ignore the ancestral covenant of providing the requisite heir and spare.

  Jared loved his mother, though her maternal instincts had all but evaporated, so he did as she asked even without the club she so loved to wield—that being she was of ill health and would not be with him much longer. Hell, she was never with him now.

  “Will there be anything else, Your Grace?” Wells was asking.

  Well, yes, now that you mention it. You can break Groville’s legs for me.

  No, he didn’t even want that. He had always liked Groville, even after Jared had stolen Eddy from him. Or not stolen, as it now appeared.

  “Just prepare a legal report for my attorneys,” he said with a noncommittal wave. “You know the drill, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “I do not think I need to tell you—”

  “No, Your Grace. My firm is built on confidentiality.”

  There he had gone and insulted Wells again, but he could not risk this news getting out. The press would have a field day.

  “Yes, I am quite sure it is, Mr. Wells.” Jared stood. “If there is nothing else, I will have Burgess show you out.”

  He led Wells from the cavernous library and turned him over to the butler waiting outside, then locked away in his desk the scandalous file Wells had handed him. He couldn’t bring himself to look the file over or even to remain in his library. The walls were suddenly closing in on him. He needed a stroll to clear his aching head.

  Eddy’s infidelity had not angered or even upset him. His own complacence was responsible for his headache. He should at least be a little hurt, yet he felt only…What? Relief?

  Their courtship had lit up the Internet gossip blogs for several months before their official betrothal, but the courtship had not lit him up. Oh, he cared about Eddy. She was intelligent, exceptionally beautiful, and very talented in bed, and those qualities were usually enough for most men to fall in love, but Jared was not most men. Maybe she had been a little too talented in bed.

  As a young man, he had conceived the odd notion he would marry for love until his fifteen-year-old girlfriend Sophia Coutreau—when asked if she loved him—had confessed that yes, indeed, she loved him because he was a marquess now and a would-be duke. She then added insult to injury by informing him all the girls in school were envious of her and wanted to date the future duke. Not Jared Langley, but the duke, the wealthiest duke in England, the Duke of Reston.

  Realization had dawned that day. He would never find a woman who just loved him—Jared. So, he had bandaged up his broken heart, cast off his remaining innocence, and moved on with his life as a jaded duke-in-waiting who trusted no woman with his heart. Lineage may force him to eventually share his title with a woman, but never his heart.

  Nothing in the last fifteen years had changed Jared’s attitude. He had never lacked for a girlfriend or even a wide selection of girlfriends, and every single one wanted a duke. Thus, he had walled up his heart and concentrated on enjoying himself. When a woman got too serious or inquired as to his plans for a future duchess, he moved on. Every woman eventually showed her true colors—some within days, most within weeks, and a few stealthy ones held out for a few months. Regrettably, each fell short in his estimation, and enough of them passed through his life to convince him love was not fated for his unique universe.

  His father had shared his lineage with a woman and look where that had landed him. His lousy marital luck stretched back through the generations. Jared had found a stash of ducal journals in the Haverly attic, while searching for a family portrait, and none of those ancestors’ journals had spoken of love, only duty to the lineage of Reston. Had they all suffered the consummate rejection of a wife who had loved them only for their title? Had they all been forced to forsake love for the bondage of ancestral lineage and its inherent responsibilities?

  Even his sole present cousin had succumbed to duty and married. Jared barely knew the man—Jackson Langley was the cousin’s name—and had been invited to the man’s wedding, but had not attended. He was not close to his cousin, had only met him once, several years earlier at some society event. Jared’s parents had never expressed a need to know, or even be close to, other branches of the Reston family tree, and Jared felt a bit embarrassed by their years of reticence.

  Part of the blame for not knowing his relatives, few as they were, rested squarely with Jared. He had never bothered to question his father about extended family or his ancestors either, never cared. When he did finally begin his record search—after finding the attic journals—he discovered the government building storing his family’s records had burned to the ground decades earlier. The fire had occurred one month before said records were scheduled to go on microfiche.

  Thoughts of ancestral marriages made him abandon the stroll of the grounds he had intended, and he headed instead for his suite upstairs and the Reston journal he had been reading the night before. The unusual journals provided a legacy, begun by the astute and very-thankful-to-be-titled first Duke of Reston, for those who would follow. Maybe the last journal would provide some words of wisdom on the subject of Reston marriage and heirs.

  ****

  Edwina Montrose strode into the library at Haverly Manor like a magnificent Valkyrie, her long blonde curls swinging madly about her shoulders.

  “Well, Jared, you have succeeded in dragging me to this musty old stone ruin. Why the summons here? I had a wedding-gown fitting this afternoon, I will have you know, and you forced me to reschedule. And Amberly frowns on reschedules.”

  “This is not a musty old ruin. This is my ancestral home.” Seated behind his mahogany desk, Jared resisted the urge to grind his jaw a time or two.

  “Do you not mean our ancestral home?”

  “Time will tell,” he muttered.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “We need to talk, Edwina.” He ignored the flash of temper in her eyes at his use of her given name. “About us.”

  “Us? What about us?”

  “Our future—or lack thereof.” He rose from his seat and came around the front of the desk, leaned a hip on the edge.

  Instantly wary, Edwina assumed a contrite moue. Her acting skills, as always, were superb.

  “Why, whatever do you mean, darling? Of course, we have a future.” She pulled her purse off her shoulder and set it on a nearby table.

  “I know about the boyfriend, Eddy,” he said drily.

  She hesitated for only a breath. In that instant, he witnessed a spate of guilt suffusing her shock before she managed to blank her expression. If he had needed a final proof of her infidelity, he now had it.

  “You shouldn’t listen to idle gossip, Jared. Geoffrey and I are just old school chums.”

  “Geoffrey? Well, that does shed new light on things.”

  He watched her shoulders sag in relief. She gave him a smug smile, which set his teeth on edge.

  “I was speaking of your boyfriend Connor, Viscount Groville.”

  “It is pronounced Grow-ville, not grovel,” she snapped.

  “My mistake.”

  “And Connor is just a friend, too.”

  “Like Geoffrey.”

  Edwina finally had the grace to pale, but not for long. One second. Two seconds. Then came the temper he had come to know so well. “Who is feeding you all these lies?”

  “My private investigator—who is the best my ancestral money can buy.”

  Shock reappeared as she mentally scrambled for a defense. He watched with interest at the play of emotions across her face. Shock, disbelief, anger, surprisingly fear, then anger again.

  “I need friends to do things with since you spend all your time either here in this mausoleum or studying
it,” she fumbled out. “I like to travel, to party, to go riding, and all you care about are those dusty journals you found up in your attic space. You spend more time with the diaries of all those dead Reston dukes than you do with me.”

  “That is not entirely true.”

  Though she was close enough. He had spent days, weeks even, poring over the lengthy fastidious journals kept by the first six Reston dukes. Journals written in a multitude of historical eras, yet all telling the same tale—how each duke came into his money, took care of his responsibilities and tenants, and made enough investments to ensure the next duke was wealthier than the last. The next six dukes must have continued their money-making legacy, leaving Jared the wealthiest of the thirteen and the richest peer in all of England.

  “It is true,” she wailed, pressing her sympathy ploy. “We haven’t spent any length of time together under the same roof in months.”

  “And that would be my fault? When you are gallivanting about the continent with your friends?”

  “Yes, you bloody ass!”

  “Wait just one damned minute! You cheated on me, with not one, but two men, and I am the ass?”

  “That’s right. If you had spent more time with me, I would not have wandered.”

  “You cannot be serious!”

  Her chin came up defiantly.

  “Maybe you’re right.” He narrowed his gaze. “I let you do what you want and spend what you want and thought by spoiling you, I could make you happy—could make us happy.”

  She watched him warily.

  “It didn’t work,” he said on a hard exhale. “We did not suit before, and we certainly don’t suit now.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” she mimicked his earlier words and sidled over to place her palms on his chest. “We always managed to suit in bed.”

  He grabbed her wrists as they slid down his torso. “It won’t work this time, Edwina. I do not share. Settlement papers are there on my desk to sign, granting you a dissolution of betrothal contract.”

  Real shock appeared on her face. Profound shock. “You cannot mean that! We both agreed to that contract and the prenuptial clauses.”

  “Why don’t you check the documents before you go off half-cocked as usual? Your settlement is more than fair for not having had to suffer even a day of marriage.”