The Dissolute Duke

‘I will take you home.’

She did not repair the damage to her dress as she watched him so that one breast stood out naked from the loosened fabric, a pink-rosebud nipple beckoning against scarlet silk. With her glassy eyes and stillness she was like a sensual and pliant Madonna fallen from heaven to land at the feet of the devil. Indecision welled, but he had no shield against such goodness, no way to safeguard his yearning against her righteousness.

Stepping forwards, he readjusted her gown, retying the laces on the flimsy bodice so that some measure of decency was reinstated. He could do nothing to repair the ruined seam and his eyes were drawn to the show of flesh that curved outwards beneath it, calling for his attentions. Swearing, he took a blanket from his bed and laid it around her, the wool almost the same shade as her hair. Then he collected his clothes, pulling on his breeches and placing a jacket over the shirt. He did not stop for a cravat. His boots were shoved on stockingless feet at the door as he retrieved the key and unlocked it.

‘Come, sweetheart,’ he murmured and found her hand, liking the way her slender fingers curled around his own.

Trust.

Another barrier breached. He yearned for others.

Outside it was quiet and, as the stables materialised before them, a lad came to his side.

‘Ye’d be wanting the carriage at this time of the night, your Grace?’ Disbelief was evident in the query. Normally conveyances were not sent for until well into the noon hours of the next day. Or the one after that.

‘Indeed. Find Stephens and have it readied. I need to go to London.’

When the boy left them Lucinda Wellingham began to speak, her voice low and uncertain. ‘My cloak is still in the house and my hat and reticule. Should I not get them?’

‘No.’ Tay wanted only to be gone. He had no idea who would talk about her appearance at one of the most infamous and least salubrious parties of the Season, but if he had her home at the Wellingham town house before the morning surely her brothers would be able to fashion a story which would dispel all rumour.

‘My friend Posy Tompkins might wonder what has happened to me. I hope that she is safe.’ She did not meet his eyes at all, a contrite Venus who had tripped into the underworld unbidden and now only wanted to be released from it.

‘Safe?’ He could not help laughing, though the sound was anything but humorous. ‘No one at my parties is safe. It is generally their singular intention not to be.’

‘Enjoying herself, then?’ she countered without missing a beat, the damn dimples in her cheeks another timely reminder of her innate goodness.

‘Oh, I can almost swear that she will be that. The thrall of a good orgasm is highly conducive to contentment.’

Silence reigned, but he had to let her know. Who he was. What he was. Her muteness heartened him.

‘I am not safe, Lady Lucinda, and neither am I repentant. When you came to Alderworth dressed in the sort of gown that raises dark fantasies in the minds of any red-blooded man, surely you understood at least that?’

Tears glittered and Tay swore, causing more again to pool beneath the light of the lamp.

‘Lord knows, you are far too sweet for a sinner like me and tomorrow you will realise exactly just how close to ruin you were and be thankful that I took you home, no matter the loss of a few possessions.’

Asher, Taris and Cristo would not have called her sweet. Not in a million years. She was a failure and a liability to the Wellingham name and she always had been. That was the trouble. She was ‘intrinsically flawed’. The gypsy who had read her palm in a stall outside the Leadenhall Market had looked directly into her eyes and told her so.

Intrinsically flawed.

And she was. Tonight was living proof of the ridiculous things she did, without thought for responsibility or consequence. With a little less luck she could have been in the Duke of Alderworth’s bed right now, knees up around his bare and muscled thighs and knowing what a great many of the less principled women of English society already did. It was only his good sense that had stopped her, for she had been far beyond putting a halt to anything. With just a little persuasion she would have followed him to his bed in the candlelight. Shame coated her, the thick ignominy making her feel ill. Such a narrow escape.

An older man came towards them, carrying a light, and behind him again a whole plethora of busy servants. Lucinda did not meet their eyes as they observed her, plastering a look on her face that might pass for indifference. Goodness, how she hoped that there was none amongst these servants of Alderworth who might have a channel of communication into the empire of the Wellinghams.

At her side Alderworth made her feel both excited and nervous, his heat calling her to him in a way that scorched sense. When his arm came against her own she did not pull away, the feel of him exciting and forbidden before he moved back. She took in one deep breath and then let it out slowly, trying to find logic and reason and failing.

His gaze swept across her with all the intensity of a ranging and predatory tiger.

Within moments the conveyance was ready to leave, the lamps lit and the driver in place. Without touching her Taylen Ellesmere indicated that she climb up and when she sat on a plush leather seat, he chose the opposite side to rest on, his green eyes brittle.

‘It will take us four hours to reach Mayfair. If you are still cold …?’

‘No, I am fine.’ She pulled the blanket further about her, liking the shelter.

‘Good.’ Short and harsh.

Glancing out of the window, she saw in the faded reflection her stricken and uncertain face.

What did the Duke of Alderworth make of her? Was he as irritated by her uncertainty as he was with her intemperance? She could sense he wanted her gone just as soon as he could get her there, a woman who had strayed unbidden into a place she had no reason to be in; a woman who did not play the games that he was so infamous for.

Why he should hoist himself into the carriage in the first place was a mystery. He looked like a man who would wish to be anywhere but opposite her in a small moving space.

It was the kiss, probably, and the fact that she did not know quite how to kiss a man back. Her denial of anything more between them would have also rankled, an innocent who had played with fire and had burnt them both because of it. Granted, two or three forward beaux had planted their lips on her mouth across the years, but the offerings had always been chaste and tepid and nothing like …

No, she would not think about that. Taylen Ellesmere was a fast-living and dissolute rake who would be far from attracted to the daughter of one of London’s most respectable families. He had all the women he wanted, after all, loose women, beautiful women, and she had heard it said time after time that he did not wish to be shackled by the permanency of marriage.

She shook her head hard and listened to what he was saying now.

‘I shall deny that you were at Alderworth tonight should I be questioned about it. Instruct your brothers to do the same.’

‘They might not need to know anything if I am lucky …’

‘It is my experience that scandal does not exist in the same breath as luck, Lucinda.’

A strange warmth infused her as he said her name. She had never really liked ‘Lucinda’ much, but when he pronounced it he made it sound … sensual. The timbre of some other promise lay on the edge of his words.

‘Believe me, with good management any damage can be minimised.’

Damage. Reality flared. She was only a situation to be managed. The night crawled in about them, small shafts of moonlight illuminating the interior of the coach. Outside the rain had begun to fall heavily, a sudden shower in a windless night.

Taylen Ellesmere was exactly like her brothers, a man who liked control and power over everything about him. No surprises or unwanted quandaries. The thought made her frown.

‘I do not envisage problems,’ he said. ‘If you play your part well, there should not be—’

A shout split the air, and then the carriage simply rolled to one side further and further, the wild scrunch of metal upon wood and a jerking lurch.

Leaping over beside her, the Duke braced her in his arms, protecting her from the splintering glass as it shattered inwards, a cushion against the rocking chaos and the rush of cold air. He held her so tightly she felt the punching hardness of metal on his body, drawing blood and making him grimace.

Then there was only darkness.

Lucinda was in her own room at Falder House in Mayfair, the curtains billowing in a quiet afternoon breeze, the sounds of the wind in the trees and further off in the park the voices of children calling.

Everything exactly normal save for her three sisters-in-law dressed in sombre shades and sitting in a row of chairs watching her.

‘You are awake?’

Beatrice-Maude came forwards and lifted Lucinda’s head carefully before offering a sip of cold lemonade that sat in a glass on the bedside table. ‘The doctor said he thought you would return to us today and he was right.’ She smiled as she carefully blotted any trace of moisture from Lucinda’s lips. ‘How do you feel?’

‘How should I feel?’

Something was not right. Some quiet and creeping thing was being hidden from her, crouched in the shadows of truth.

‘Why am I here? What happened?’

‘You don’t remember?’ Emerald now joined Beatrice-Maude and her face was solemn. ‘You don’t remember an accident, Lucy?’

‘Where?’ Panic had begun to consume her and she tried to sit up, but nothing seemed to work, her arms, her legs, her back. All numb and useless. The feel of her heart pumping in her chest was the only thing that still functioned and she felt light headed at the fear of paralysis.

‘I cannot move.’

‘Doctor Cameron said that was a normal thing. He said many people regain the use of their bodies after the swelling has subsided.’

‘Swelling?’

‘You suffered a blow to the neck and a nasty bang on the head. It was lucky that the coach to Leicester was passing by the other way, because otherwise …’

‘You could have been there all night and Doctor Cameron said you may not have lived.’ Eleanor, her youngest brother’s wife, had joined in now, but unlike the others her voice shook and her face was blotchy. She had been crying. A lot.

This realisation frightened Lucinda more than anything else had.

‘How did it happen?’

‘Your carriage overturned. There was a corner, it seems, and the vehicle was moving too fast. It plummeted down a hill a good many yards and came to rest at the bottom of the incline.’

Agitation made her shake as more and more words tumbled into the chasm of blankness her brain had become.

Beatrice took over, holding her hand tightly, and managing a forced smile. ‘It is over now, sweetheart. You are home and you are safe and that is all that is important.’

‘How did I get here?’

‘Asher brought you back three days ago.’ Lucinda swallowed. Three days. Her mind tried its hardest to find any recollection of the passage of time and failed.

And now she was cast upon this bed as a figure of stone, her head and heart the only parts of her body that she could still feel. A tear leaked its way from her left eye and fell warm down her cheek into the line of her hair. Swallowing, her throat thick and raw, she had the taste of blood on her tongue.

Screaming. A flash of sound came back through the ether. Screaming and screaming. Her voice and another calming her. Quiet and sad, warm hands holding her neck so that she did not move, the night air cold and wet and the rain joining blood.

‘Doctor Cameron said it was a miracle you did not move another inch as you would have been dead. He says it was fortunate that when they found you, your head had been stabilised between two heavy planks of wood to restrain any motion.’

‘Lucky,’ she countered, the sentiment falling into question.

They were not telling her the whole of it. She could see it in the shared looks and feel it in the hushed unspoken reticence. She wondered why her brothers were not here in the room and knew the answer to the question as soon as she thought it.

They would not be able to hide things from her as easily as her sisters-in-law, although Cristo was still most efficient at keeping his own council.

‘Was anyone else hurt?’

The hesitation told her there had been.

‘There was a man in the carriage with you, Lucy.’ Emerald now took her other hand, rubbing at it in a way that was supposed to be comforting, she supposed, though it felt vaguely annoying because her skin was so numb.

‘I was alone with him?’ Nothing made sense. What could she have been doing on the open road at night and in the company of a stranger? It was all too odd. ‘Who was he?’

‘The sixth Duke of Alderworth.’ Beatrice took up the story now.

‘Alderworth?’ Lucinda knew the name despite not remembering anything at all about the accident.

My God. The Dissolute Duke was infamous across London and it seemed he kept to the company of whores and harpies almost exclusively. Why would she have been there alone with him and so far from home?

‘Does Asher know he was there?’ She looked up at Emerald.

‘Unfortunately he does.’

‘Do other people also know?

‘Unfortunately they do.’

‘How many know?’

‘All of London would not be putting too fine a point on it, I think.’

‘I see. It is a scandal then and I am ruined?’

‘No.’ Beatrice-Maude’s voice was strong. ‘Your brothers would never allow that to happen and neither will we.’

Lucinda swallowed, the whole conundrum more than she could deal with. Eleanor and Emerald watched her with a certain worry in their eyes and even Beatrice, who was seldom flustered, seemed out of sorts.

Intrinsically flawed. The words came from nowhere as she closed her eyes and slept.

Chapter Three

Tay Ellesmere sat in the library of the Carisbrook family town house in Mayfair and looked at the three Wellingham brothers opposite him.

His head ached, his right leg was swollen above the knee and the top of his left arm was encased in a heavy white bandage, as were his ribs, strapped tightly so that breathing was not quite so agonising. Besides this he had myriad other cuts and grazes from the glass and wood splintering as the carriage had overturned.

But these injuries were the very least of his worries. A far more pressing matter lingered in the air between him and his hosts.

‘You were dressed most inappropriately and Lucinda was barely dressed at all, for God’s sake. The scandal is the talk of the town and has been for the past week.’

Asher Wellingham, Duke of Carisbrook, seldom minced words and Tay did not dissemble, either.

‘Our lack of clothing was the result of being thrown over and over down a hill in a somersaulting carriage. One does not generally emerge from such a mishap faultlessly attired,’ he drawled the reply, knowing that it would annoy them, but short of verifying their sister’s presence at his party he could do little else but blame the accident.

‘We thought Lucinda had gone with Lady Posy Tompkins to her aunt’s country home for the weekend. I cannot for the life of me imagine how instead she ended up alone in the middle of the night with the most dissolute Duke in all of London town and dressed as a harpy.’

‘Did you ask her?’

‘She can remember nothing.’ Taris Wellingham broke in now, his stillness as menacing as his older brother’s fury.

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing before the accident, nothing during the accident and nothing just after the accident.’

Hope flared. Perhaps it might give him an escape after all. If the lady was not baying for his blood, then her brothers might also give up the chase should he play his cards well.

‘Your sister informed me that she was trying to reach the Wellingham town house after being separated somehow from her friend. She merely asked me to give her a lift home and I immediately assented.’

‘Her reticule, hat and cloak were returned to us from your country seat. A coincidence, would you not say, to be left at the very place you swear she was not.’

Cristo Wellingham’s voice sounded as flat as his brothers’.

‘Richard Allenby, the Earl of Halsey, has also told half of London that she was a guest at your weekend soirée. Others verify his story.’

‘He lies. I was the host and your sister was not there.’

‘The problem is, Duke, Lucinda is facing certain ruin and you do not seem to be taking your part in her downfall seriously.’

Taylen had had enough.

‘Ruin is a strong word, Lord Taris.’

‘As strong as retribution.’

Asher Wellingham’s hand hit the table and Tay stood. Even with his arm in a bandage he could give the three of them a good run for their money. The art of gentlemanly fighting had been a lesson missing from his life, the tough school of displacement and abuse honing the rudiments of the craft instead. Hell, he had been beaten enough himself to understand exactly the best places to hit back.

‘We will kill you for this, Alderworth, I swear that we will.’ Cristo spoke now, the sound of each word carefully enunciated.

‘And in doing so you may well crucify your sister. Better to let the matter rest, laugh it off and kick any suggestions of misbehaviour back in the face of those who swear them true.’

‘As you are apt to do?’

‘English society still holds to ridiculously strict rules of conduct, though free speech is finding its way into the minds of men who would do better to believe in it.’

‘Men like you?’ Taris stood. His reported lack of sight was not apparent as he stepped towards the window, though Tay saw the oldest brother watch him carefully.

Care.

The word reverberated inside him. This was what this was all about, after all: care of each other, care of a family name, care in protecting their only sister’s reputation from the ignominy of being linked with his.

Protection was something he himself had never had. Not from his parents. Not from his grandmother. And particularly not from his uncle. It had always been him against a world that hadn’t taken the time to make sure that a small child was cherished. The man he had become was the result of such negligence, though here in the salon of a family that watched each other’s backs the thought was disheartening.

He made his way around a generous sofa. ‘I have an errand to attend to, gentlemen, and I find I have the need of some fresh air. If you will excuse me.’

‘What do you make of him?’

Asher asked the question a few moments later as Cristo crossed to the cabinet to pull out a bottle of fine French brandy.

‘He’s hiding something.’ Taris accepted a drink from his brother. ‘For some reason he is trying to make us believe there was only necessity in our sister’s foolish midnight tryst in the carriage with him and that she was never at Alderworth.’

Cristo swore. ‘But why would he do that?’

‘Even a reprobate must have his limits of depravity, I suppose. Lucinda’s innocence may well be his.’ Taris drank deeply of the brandy before continuing. ‘He studies the philosophy of the new consciousness, which is interesting, the tenets of free speech being mooted in the Americas. Unusual reading for a man who purports to be interested in nothing more than sexual mayhem and societal anarchy.’

‘I don’t trust him.’ Asher upended his glass.

‘Well, we can’t hit a man wrapped in bandages.’ Cristo smiled.

‘Then we wait until they are removed.’ There was no humour at all in the voice of Asher Wellingham, Duke of Carisbrook.

Lucinda wheeled herself to the breakfast table, her muscles straining against the task and her heart pounding with the effort. It had been almost two weeks since the accident and the feeling that the doctor had sworn she would recover was finally coming back, though she had been left with a weakness that felt exhausting and a strange and haunting melancholy. Now she could walk for short distances without falling over, the shaking she had been plagued by diminishing as she grew steadily in strength. The wheelchair was, however, still her main mode of getting about.

Posy had spent much of the past week at the town house, her horror at all that had happened to Lucy threading every sentence.

‘I should never have taken you to Alderworth, Luce. It is all my fault this happened to you and now … now I don’t know how to make it better.’ Large tears had fallen down her cheeks before tracing wet runnels on the pink silk of her bodice.

‘You did not force me to go, Posy. I remember that much.’

‘But while I was safely locked away in our bedroom, you were …’

‘Let’s not allocate any more blame. What is done is done and at least I am regaining movement and energy.’

It had taken Lucinda a good few days to convince her friend that she held no malice or blame, Posy’s numerous tears a wearying and frustrating constant.

Asher was sitting in the dining room, reading The Times just as he usually did each morning, and he folded the paper in half and looked closer as something caught his interest.

‘It says here that the Earl of Halsey has suffered a broken nose, a black eye and twenty stitches in his cheek. The assault happened in broad daylight four days ago in an altercation outside the livery stables in Davies Mews right here in Mayfair. There were no witnesses.’

His glance strayed to Lucinda’s to see how she might react. The whole family had tiptoed around her since the unfortunate happening as though she might break into pieces at any unwanted reminder of scandal and she was tired of it. Consequently she did nothing more than smile back at her oldest brother and shrug her shoulders.

‘Footpads are becoming increasingly confident, then.’ Emerald took up the conversation as she buttered her bread. ‘Though perhaps they do us a favour, for isn’t he the man who has constantly insisted Lucinda was underdressed at the Alderworth fiasco? Without his voice, all of this could have been so much easier to deal with.’

Lucinda knew Richard Allenby, of course. He had always been well mannered and rather sweet, truth be told, so she had no idea why he should be maligning her now and in such a fashion. Yet a shadow lingered there in the very back of her mind, some nebulous and half-formed thing trying to escape from the darkness. Wiping her mouth with the napkin, she sat back, the food suddenly dry in her mouth and difficult to swallow.

‘You look like you have seen a ghost, Lucy.’

‘What exactly was it that the Earl of Halsey said of me?’

‘He has been spreading the rumour that you may have been intimate with Alderworth at his home. He says he saw you in the corridors on the first floor of the place, searching for the host’s bedchamber.’

Her brother’s tone had that streak of exasperation she so often heard when speaking of her escapades, though in this case Lucinda could well understand it.

‘Intimate?’ The shock of such a blatant falsehood was horrifying. ‘Why would he tell such a lie? Surely people could not believe him?’ Wriggling her foot against the metal bar of the wheelchair, she checked for any further movement. Over the past few days the tingling had gone from her knees to her feet as the numbness receded.

‘Unfortunately they are beginning to.’ Asher’s voice no longer held any measure of care.

‘What does Alderworth say?’

‘Nothing and that is the great problem. If he denied everything categorically and strode into society the same way he strode into Wellingham House, people might cease to believe Richard Allenby. But instead the man has disappeared to the country, leaving chaos behind him.’