Beauty and the Duke Read online

  Her eyes fell on her simple rose-colored gown. Only now did she think she might have better served her purpose wearing something less countrified. She had not thought to change from what she’d been wearing to teach classes that day, though she had repinned her hair. The door opened and the driver set out the step. It was too late to worry about such nonsense as her looks now.

  “Are you sure this is the correct house?” she asked.

  “We be at the right place, miss,” the driver assured her, a hint of a grumble in his voice as he glared at the sky. “I told ye we would not beat that storm.”

  She shoved a coin into the driver’s hand. “My business here will not take long.”

  He held up the coin. “You want me to stay? You’ll pay me more than this here pittance, dovey. This won’t even buy me time with me Delia.”

  She scowled over the rim of her spectacles at him, but deciding she needed this boor’s services more than she wanted to argue fare, she gave him a second coin. “I will give you another just like it when I return.”

  She walked through the gate and into the yard, her sturdy half boots crunching on gravel as she followed the footpath toward the arched entryway. She hurried up the steps, stopped at the front door, and rapped loudly.

  A moment later, the butler answered. He was a tall, aged figure with a head full of gray hair and a bushy white mustache that reminded her of an English general. Other than the rise of one brow, his face showed only the slightest expression. “Miss—”

  “Sommers,” Christine said. “I am here to see Lord Sedgwick.”

  His eyes went over her. “Is he expecting you, Miss?”

  She had told Erik she would get back to him; she just had not told him when. Christine stepped past the butler into the foyer. “Yes,” she lied. “If you will please inform his grace that Miss Sommers is here to see him, I am sure he will see me.”

  “Very well, mum. If you say so.”

  He led her into a tall foyer. A brilliant chandelier colored the walls in rainbows. Christine had barely registered her surroundings when the clink of silverware in a distant room stopped her. She turned and looked down the corridor toward the butler. “Wait!” she rasped. “Does he have guests?”

  The butler turned on his heel, but before he could speak a young girl’s voice came from above. “My brother will not mind the intrusion.”

  Christine looked up. Lady Rebecca sat halfway up the stairs looking down at her from between the spindles on the bannister, her curls wrapped in rags like some adolescent Medusa. She wore a pink wrapper buttoned up to her neck and tied at the waist with a sash. “Are you here about my tooth?” She hurried down the stairs in a swish of pink silk. “Erik said he visited you at Sommershorn Abbey.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am here about the tooth.”

  The girl peered at the butler. “Go tell my brother Miss Sommers is here. But walk slowly…. And whatever you do, don’t say you saw me awake.”

  The corners of his stern mouth softened into what suspiciously resembled amusement. “No, miss, I would not dare.”

  After the butler turned away, Lady Rebecca stuck out her tongue at his back. “He is an informer. If Erik finds me, he’ll know I lied about my dreadful headache. Then I will be subjected to another long and boring lecture.”

  Christine cleared her throat to cover her laugh. She pulled her cloak tighter over her gown. “Do you lie to your brother often?”

  “Only out of self-preservation.” Lady Rebecca lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “You have not met Lord and Lady Willows and their insipid daughter. They are even worse than the Marquess Elderbury’s wife and daughter that we had over yesterday. Did you know they had never even seen a fossil? I showed them one of a partial skull and Lady Elderbury fainted.” Erik’s sister rolled her eyes. “If my brother takes either daughter as a bride, I shall…I shall surely leap off a cliff and drown myself.”

  “That is a little extreme, is it not?” Christine couldn’t help her grin, before she realized the butler would be returning at any moment. “Perhaps I should return tomorrow.”

  “Oh no, that will not do, Miss Sommers.” Lady Rebecca took Christine’s elbow and led her down a hallway. “You cannot go yet. Not when you have come all this way about my fossil.”

  She branched left into a carpeted corridor and dipped into a white-and-blue parlor. Christine stopped. The walls were bright blue trimmed in white wainscoting. A marble fireplace covered one entire wall and warmed the well-ordered room. She had never seen such pure white curtains and polished furniture. Everything shone bright and new, completely opposite the chaos in which Christine reveled in her own life.

  “Now tell me about my tooth before Erik finds us,” Lady Rebecca said, her voice pulling Christine around. She stood inside the arched doorway as if on lookout. “Erik won’t allow me down by the riverbed any longer.” She lowered her voice. “By my estimation, the creature in whose mouth that tooth once belonged must be huge. Imagine a beast like that living in Sedgwick.”

  “Yes, imagine.” Christine felt excitement escalating in her blood. “Tell me what else you have found.”

  She went on in detail about a second tooth and part of what she thought might be a vertebrae. The girl had no idea just how rare and magnificent a find like this was. Though Christine could hardly contain herself, she hesitated to say more until she saw everything for herself.

  “But then Erik found…he found partial human remains.”

  “Yes, he told me.”

  Lady Rebecca’s brown eyes widened. “Do you think that horrid tooth beast ate the unfortunate person?”

  Christine remembered who Lord Sedgwick thought that “unfortunate” individual was. “No. I find it more probable the beast was dead many, many millennium before that particular person crossed paths with its grave, and the river has somehow dredged up both.”

  “Do you truly think so?” Lady Rebecca considered the statement but did not appear entirely convinced. “I wish I could be as logical about such things. But the idea of the beast has not made the tenants wholly confident there isn’t another beast like it living in the crags.”

  “Why would they believe that?”

  “You haven’t walked the crags, Miss Sommers,” Lady Rebecca whispered. “Some who have…never return.”

  “Lady Rebecca—”

  “Oh, please, call me Becca.”

  Voices in the foyer suddenly snapped the girl around. She hurried to the archway and stared into the corridor. “He’s coming.” She looked over her shoulder at Christine. “I have enjoyed our conversation, Miss Sommers.”

  “Wait—” But Becca had already dashed out the door before Christine could glean more information about the other fossils.

  Bloody hell.

  She stepped into the corridor in time to glimpse a flash of pink vanish in the servants’ staircase down the back of the hall. She turned at the sound of voices near the foyer. Apparently, Erik was searching the front rooms for her.

  She stepped back into the parlor, out of sight. Her heart pounded as she juggled the idea of returning tomorrow when he did not have guests, but a glance around the parlor revealed no sign of a doorway that opened to the garden. Drawing in a deep breath, she smoothed her skirts and shut her eyes.

  This is business, she thought. Convince him you are the best contender for the job. We’re adults.

  With that mantra in her thoughts, she took one more fortifying breath, turned and nearly screamed.

  Erik leaned against the door, his arms crossed over his chest. Her fist flew to her breast. “You scared the life out of me, Erik.”

  His gaze traveled from the top of her square-shaped hat, down the tiny rows of buttons on her bodice to the damp hem of her skirt before he returned his attention to her face. His mouth turned up at the corner. A little thrill shot through her stomach. “Christine.”

  He was dressed impeccably in formal black, his white shirt a stark counterpoint to the image of brute strength he so casu
ally conveyed in his easy stance. “It seems my sister put you in a wing that has no escape door.”

  Christine’s brows snapped together. “Your butler informed on her?”

  “That she left me at the mercy of our guests on the pretense of suffering a headache?” He smiled. “No, he did not have to. I know my sister.”

  Evidently, his grace knew something about Christine as well, to recognize that she would have escaped had there been a door. “I came to talk about your visit to Sommershorn Abbey. I know you said to go through your man of affairs to make an appointment. I will return tomorrow if that is your want.”

  “Did you give the tooth back to my sister?”

  “No.” She smoothed her gloved hand over her reticule. “My reasons for coming here tonight were spontaneous. I didn’t think to pack up everything. I…I normally plan such things with more attention to detail.” Nor did she normally blather about like a flitting butterfly. “Your sister said that you had more specimens where that tooth came from.”

  He didn’t reply, which doused her hope that he had brought the entire cumbersome collection to London. “If fossils have been washing up on one of your riverbanks, the source has to be from somewhere near where the tooth was discovered. I want to examine all your bones.”

  He suddenly pinched the bridge of his nose and quietly laughed. Her gaze of its accord moved to his lips. And a random memory besieged her.

  No one kissed like Erik. Not in her entire life had any man touched all five of her senses with only a taste of his mouth. He could make her hot and buttery and certain of her desires. He could make her want more than she knew she should have. His eyes returned to hers, amusement in their depths.

  The long-ago memory vanished, but not the heat it left behind. “What is so humorous?” she asked.

  A strange, tender light came into his eyes. “All of this we could have discussed in the morning, Christine.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  Christine didn’t understand why this conversation couldn’t have waited until tomorrow but something inside was pushing her forward, an ember of passion she had not felt in so long. Passion that was suddenly flowing through her veins and pumping her heart faster.

  Her future was in Scotland. She knew it in her heart and her gut and she only had to convince him. “Have you ever believed in something that no one else did?” she quietly asked. “Ever wanted something so much, then suddenly find that by whatever fate it has dropped into your lap and your whole world changes?”

  His silence seemed to tell her he was listening.

  “I want to go to Scotland and find the beast,” she said. “I am asking you to hire me. You cannot find anyone better qualified than I am for the job.”

  She withdrew a packet of folded papers from the pocket lining her cloak, outlining all of her qualifications and years of experience. Laying out in detail the last ten years of her life. All she had done since…since she and her father had boarded a ship to South America. Since she had walked away from him…

  “I know what your qualifications are, Christine.”

  Christine felt a rush of heat to her face. But to her relief he held out his hand and took the slim packet. “I assume Darlington has yet to return?”

  She had the sense to recognize that his hesitation might have something to do with her obviously stepping over Joseph, and how unfeeling it might appear. But in her mind, her case for doing so was strong. Joseph had Perth.

  “Mr. Darlington is on his honeymoon. I can be ready to leave before he is,” she went on in a rush afraid he would say no, unsure what she would do if he did. “That tooth your sister found might very will be the link for which Papa spent years searching. You must have known it or you wouldn’t have come to me. At the very least you must have known what that find would mean to me.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  She took a hidden steadying breath. “Your beast of Sedgwick is going to help me prove that dragons may have once inhabited this world.”

  Silence followed.

  Christine fought a frightening urge to laugh. “Not in the way that fables and mythology have painted them. But as you must know since you read his book, my father believed there were creatures as big as a house that once roamed the earth, a place far different from what we know today, the same creatures that eventually evolved into what we see today as birds.”

  Erik’s brows lifted in a clear attempt to tell her he must have missed that chapter in the book. “You want to take Becca’s find and announce to the world that dragons or something that might have passed for such once existed and are still here today having evolved into what…? Chickens, or the red-breasted robin we see picking worms out of the earth?”

  The theory had once sounded ridiculous to her as well. “If anything, whatever that tooth came from is huge. Bigger than anything ever found. In my world, it is more important being first at discovering a thing than in being right in explaining how it came about.”

  “Is it not pure hyperbole to make such a deduction from a single tooth?”

  “My father believed in something that he could never prove.” Moving nearer, she willed him to feel her passion. Her raison d’être. “He died a laughingstock to his peers. Disgraced for what he tried to teach. Have you any idea what it is like not to have anyone believe in you?”

  Folding his arms, he looked away.

  “You owe me this chance, your grace!” She blurted the words, then stepped back, horrified by what had come over her.

  “I owe you?” he asked in a clipped voice. “How did you manage to come up with that conclusion?”

  He did owe her, a part of her shouted at her to say the words again.

  He owed her for breaking her heart, for marrying her cousin, for daring to think he could come back to London, taunt her with that fossil, and then tell her he wanted Darlington. He owed her for making her come here tonight and plead her case like a vassal bowing before her lord…

  “Your grace.” The butler suddenly stood in the corridor.

  Erik straightened. “What is it, Boris?”

  “Dessert is being served—”

  Without taking his eyes from Christine, he said, “Tell them I have been called away. Bring my cloak. Have my carriage sent around,” he said. “I will be escorting Miss Sommers home.”

  Boris stole a glance at Christine’s pale face. “Yes, your grace.”

  After Boris retreated, Christine sidestepped Erik. “I can take myself home.”

  He caught her arm. “It is a moot point. Your hackney driver has been paid and already sent away. I’ll not be missed here.”

  She doubted that. His absence would be like a large black chasm. She did not want him accompanying her. “You needn’t go to the trouble.”

  “I do not trouble myself over anything I do not wish to do, Christine.” He smiled his humorless smile. “I thought you would remember that about me.”

  Christine pulled her arm from his hand. She had no choice but to accept. Where would she find another hack in Mayfair this time of night?

  Then they were outside scurrying through the drizzle and he was handing her up into the cab of a luxurious brougham, horsed by two magnificent blacks. Once inside, she attempted to relax against the velvet squabs, watching as Erik gave orders to his driver. The coach lamps hanging from the driver’s seat cast a warm glow over his stark features, made all the brighter by the surrounding night. And as a gust of wind buffeted the coach, she felt the strange stir of something powerful.

  For all of her fearlessness when it came to exploring dark, cold, and confining places where most people, especially women, would never go, all in the pursuit of her passions, her discomfiture around storms had always been something of a joke among those who knew her. But tonight she felt no fear.

  Instead, she found the storm’s energy seductive. It intensified her senses, as if something inside her had awakened. Something deep and dormant within her she was not sure that she welcomed.

  A moment
later, Erik climbed into the carriage and sat opposite her, filling the air around her with his heat and scent. He dimmed the single light in the carriage, causing the upper portion of his face to be darkened by shadow. The coach jerked forward and for lack of a place to set her gaze, she watched his house fade in the gaslight mists. The horse’s clip-clop on wet cobbles pulled at the edge of her mind and she folded her hands in her lap, too conscious of him as a man.

  She stole a glance at him and found herself looking directly at him. Tonight was a perfect example of how he treated people, she thought, the way he had abandoned his guests at his own dinner table.

  “Do not worry about Lord and Lady Willows,” he said, reading her thoughts. “I have given them the perfect excuse to discontinue our association without paying me insult. I find it disconcerting to be in the company of his wife, who thinks I am some monster ready to devour her precious daughter. Honestly?” He raised a brow. “It is a relief to carry on a conversation with someone who is not afraid of me.”

  He didn’t seem relieved. He sounded cross.

  She had never been afraid of him, despite what other people thought of him. She respected a man who could go against the grain of society and accomplish what he had done, caring not a fig that in the process he had greatly angered the mainstream. In many ways, he reminded her of Aunt Sophie.

  But respect did not always equate to admiration and she would be a fool not to be cautious where he was concerned. After all, because of him, she had left England a long time ago.

  “You have not given me your answer,” she said.

  “Why don’t we continue to talk about your qualifications instead?” His smile was not kind, yet neither was it cruel. Only curious. “How close were you and Darlington? Were you too disappointed that he wed that pretty blond assistant of yours?”

  “Of course not. I hope they are happy.”

  “You are good friends then.”