How to Tempt a Duke

“The devil you say.” Rafe and Charlotte both then looked over their shoulders at Grayson, the man a good twenty feet from them. A man whose rather large ears had turned a most alarming shade of puce.

“Carry on, Grayson, carry on,” Rafe called brightly to the majordomo, and then, his hand tightening slightly on Charlotte’s forearm, he hastened her the rest of the way as Billy scampered ahead to fling open the double doors. “I’m not making the best of starts, am I?” he whispered.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Charlotte said as she looked ahead into the enormous main saloon, anxious to locate Nicole and Lydia. “I thought falling at my feet a nice touch. Ah, there they are, your dear, sweet sisters, eager to welcome you home.”

Charlotte watched as Nicole leaped to her feet and then signaled with an impatient twist of her hand that Lydia also should rise.

The two of them stood in front of one of the satin settees, not moving, as if the backs of their knees had somehow become glued to that piece of furniture.

The twins were sixteen now, hardly the awkward near-nursery infants Rafe had last seen before he departed for the war. Charlotte wondered if he even recognized them, or they him.

The pair was as alike in their looks as chalk and cheese. In fact, all three Daughtry children bore little resemblance to each other.

Nicole did share Rafe’s near-black hair, but her eyes were far from sherry brown. They were violet, a shade Charlotte had never seen in any other eyes, and Nicole’s dramatically arched brows and long black lashes only made that violet more startling, almost mesmerizing. Witchlike, Charlotte’s father had once commented, not completely in jest, warning that in an earlier century the girl would have doubtless ended burning at the stake.

Nicole had lovely pale skin, but because she refused to wear her bonnet and loved to run free, there was always a beguiling sprinkle of freckles across her nose and cheeks and a glow to her skin that, although most unladylike, was perfect for Nicole.

In short, Nicole looked as she was—fresh, unbridled, a child of nature and full of mischief.

The complete opposite of Lydia.

Nicole’s twin, who favored their mother, had hair the color of corn silk and eyes as blue as a summer sky. Her skin was unmarked by freckles because she was always careful to wear a bonnet—not because she feared freckles, but because she’d been told to always wear her bonnet. Shy, quiet, studious, Lydia was rather like a just-budding blossom, her head dipped to avoid attention lest she be picked from her comfortable spot in the garden before she was ready to bloom.

Right now Lydia’s chin was bent so near her chest that almost all Charlotte could see of her were those huge blue eyes swimming with guilt.

Nicole’s small, pointed chin, however, was fully raised, almost defiant.

If a portrait artist could capture the twins as they posed now, no volume of ten thousand words could do more to make clear the character of the two sisters.

Or who was in charge.

“Girls, how wonderful,” Charlotte said after only a heartbeat in time—one that had felt longer than an age. “Your brother is returned to you. I’ve already explained that your Aunt Emmaline has placed me in the role of chaperone while she is traveling, and what a lovely time we’ve all had with me residing here with you until her return. Now don’t just stand there like sticks, come welcome your brother home.”

Lydia looked up, goggling in confusion at this full budget of lies Charlotte had just loosed on them. But Nicole, her mind always alert for mischief, never so much as blinked as she said, “And quite the dragon of a chaperone she is, so that we’d never dare to be on anything save our very best behavior, as suits the sisters of a duke. A duke, Rafe! Isn’t it above all things wonderful?”

As she spoke, she advanced across the seeming mile of carpets, her arms outstretched, so that by the time she finished speaking she was close enough to launch herself into her brother’s arms.

Rafe glanced at Charlotte as he slowly put his arms around his sister, a look very much akin to panic in his eyes.

“You…you’ve grown,” he said at last, when Nicole finally stepped back, grinning up in his face. “I…I didn’t realize…” He coughed into his fist. “Which, er, which one are you?”

“I’m Nicole, of course. You called me Nicky, which I hated, but now I think it a lovely name. Lydia, don’t just stand there like a lump, come say hello to Rafe.” She turned back to her brother. “You call her Lydia,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Really, there’s precious little else you could call her, not with a starchy name like that.”

Charlotte wanted to poke Rafe with her elbow, nudge him into some sort of speech. He needed to say something, he needed to put Nicole in her place immediately or else risk never having control of the reins. But he said nothing. Nicole had flummoxed him completely, her own brother. This did not bode well for the day the girl was set loose in London!

“Welcome home, Your Grace,” Lydia said in her quiet, reserved voice as she curtsied and then held out her hand to him, quickly drawing it back when, Charlotte supposed, she realized her brother might feel the need to kiss it.

“Thank you…Lydia,” Rafe said, and then watched as she returned to the settee and sat down, settling her skirts around her. “Lyddie?” he asked Nicole quietly. “I didn’t even call her Lyddie?”

Nicole bit her bottom lip as she shook her head. “You wouldn’t have dared. Mama says thank God we’re not of the Roman persuasion or else Lydia would have crawled into one of their nunneries years ago. But she’s all right. It’s all in knowing how to handle her.”

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Which you do, correct, and always to your advantage?”

“She’s my twin. I protect her,” Nicole stated, her violet eyes dancing in her head. “Would you like me to pour you a glass of wine, Your Grace? When we were informed that you were seen on the drive, I just had time to order Grayson to fetch one of Uncle Charlton’s best from the cellars. I’ll pour a glass for everyone. We should make a toast and celebrate your return.”

Rafe turned a questioning eye on Charlotte. “You allow them wine?”

“I most certainly do not,” Charlotte told him, glaring at Nicole. “You’ll have lemonade, my girl, and like it.”

Nicole’s full bottom lip came out in a pretty pout, but then she smiled. “See, Rafe? Charlotte is a veritable dragon of propriety. Aren’t you, Charlotte? Why, I don’t know what we should have done without her these weeks, with Aunt Emmaline gone.”

Rafe was beginning to look like a man outnumbered by hostiles, and without a weapon to protect himself. “Weeks? Emmaline’s been gone for weeks? She said nothing about that in any of her letters.”

“Duly chastised by my dragon chaperone, I’ll just go ring for Grayson to pour you that wine, Rafe,” Nicole said, and hurried away, sparing only a moment to shoot a desperate glance toward Charlotte, one that warned we’ll be fine, as long as you don’t muck it up now.

Charlotte swallowed hard and turned to Rafe. He looked much too inquisitive. So she went on the attack. “Is that your way of saying that you don’t believe I make a suitable chaperone for your sisters?”

“I…No, no, of course not. Please forgive me. Clearly, if Emmaline considered you competent to be in charge of the twins, who am I to question her judgment? But they’re…they’re not little girls anymore, Charlie, are they?”

“Charlotte,” she said without much hope of him heeding her. “And, no, they’re not. Nor are they young women, much as Nicole would like to believe otherwise. Last week I caught her in Emmaline’s chamber, attempting to put up her hair and wearing a rather garish pair of gold and ruby earrings Emmaline must have regretted the moment she purchased them.”

Rafe shot a glance toward the settee, where the girls were holding hands and whispering to each other. “I begin to miss the war,” he said dully. “Too old for the nursery, too young for a Season. What in God’s name am I supposed to do with them?”

“What else?” Charlotte said. “You leave them here in the country while you go cut a dash in London. You conveniently forget about them until it’s time to dress them up like Christmas puddings and send them out to the marriage mart, praying nineteen to the dozen that at the end of the Season you don’t have to haul either of them back to the country again. What else do families do with daughters?”

Rafe grinned. “Do I detect a hint of censure in your voice, Charlie? Were you one of those hauled back to the country? Well, of course you were. Are all the men in London blind? Or were you really waiting for me to return home?”

Charlotte felt a rush of color invade her cheeks at his words, even if she probably shouldn’t take any of them seriously. “I only said that because you’d made me angry,” she lied, and then nearly cheered as Grayson approached them to inform His Grace that his friend Captain Fitzgerald had arrived.

“A most…singular gentleman, Your Grace,” Grayson said, his tone making it clear that he had not just complimented the captain. “He desires your presence at once, sir.”

“He does, does he? I’d rather think my good friend Captain Fitzgerald demands my presence.”

“Yes, Your Grace. I knew him for your friend the moment he opened his mouth.”

“An insult wrapped in velvet. Very good, Grayson.” Rafe took Charlotte’s hand and turned her back toward the entrance hall. “Come on, Charlie. I want you to meet a fellow reprobate.”

“I wouldn’t wish to intrude—”

“Nonsense.With Emmaline doing her flit, I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to face those sisters of mine without you. I want my friend to meet my friend.”

Charlotte smiled weakly. How wonderful. Just perfectly marvelous. Rafe considered her his friend. His childhood friend. Charlie. Feeling a bit apprehensive about his new station in life and all the attendant responsibilities, his aunt Emmaline not here, not even recognizing his sisters, he probably felt about Charlotte as he did his most comfortable old pair of socks.

While she—well, what did she feel about him, for him? She didn’t know. She’d loved the Rafe he’d been; the child she’d been had loved the youth he’d been. What would she discover about the Rafe he was now?

He looked on her as his friend, held her hand as a friend. Would he ever want more? And what would she do if he did? Would she tell him the truth? How would he look at her with those dangerous eyes of his if she did?

Suppressing a shiver, she followed him into the entrance hall.

Chapter Two

RAFE TUGGED CHARLOTTE along with him as he returned to the entrance hall to see Captain Swain Fitzgerald being supported between two footmen, his splinted leg looking awkward as he kept his foot from touching the marble floor.

“There you are,” Fitz bellowed when he caught sight of Rafe. “Do none of these idiots bloody understand the King’s English? I want my crutches. Nobody will fetch me my damned crutches. They keep telling me that His bloody Grace insists they carry me. Damn it, Rafe, I’ll not be hauled about like some bleeding baby.”

“Grayson, see to it, please,” Rafe said, letting go of Charlotte’s hand and going over to lend his support to his friend. “Act like a baby, be treated like a baby. Why does it bother you so much to be helped? Or do you plan to crawl upstairs to your bed?”

“Bed? Oh, no, Rafe Daughtry, I’m not going to be carted off to any sickbed, no matter what that fancy London surgeon of yours said. I’m fine, better than fine, and perfectly capable of doing for myself. Just get me my damned—Well, hullo, young lady.”

Rafe grinned at the sudden change in his friend’s tone. “Yes, Fitz, a lady, as opposed to your usual sort of female. Behave yourself, and I’ll introduce you, you great hairy Irish ape.”

“Pretty little thing. One of those twin sisters of yours?” Fitz whispered close to Rafe’s ear. “Or can I take a run at her?”

“That depends. Are your intentions honorable?”

“Six and twenty years on this earth and they haven’t been honorable yet,” Fitz said, still whispering.

“I can hear you, you know,” Charlotte said from where she stood just in the doorway between the main saloon and the entrance hall. “Both of you.”

Fitz looked at Rafe in panic. “She can’t hear me. Tell me she can’t hear me.”

“I’m sorry, Fitz but, yes, she can,” Rafe said, laughing at his friend’s expression. He was only amazed that she would say so. Then again, he’d been fairly amazed by everything about Charlotte since he first set eyes on her. Her stunning good looks, her pert tongue, her refusal to be overly impressed by his title even as she paid mocking deference to it. She intrigued him mightily.

Charlotte walked forward, stopping only a few feet away from the grinning Fitz. She looked him up and down as if assessing his injury, and then smiled into his face. “I don’t think you’ll be taking a run anywhere for quite some time, Captain.”

“Fitz, ma’am, if you please, and I most truly beg your pardon. It’s just that it has been many a long year since I’ve been blessed to be in the company of a real lady, and never since I’ve been in the presence of any woman as lovely as you.”

“How very flattering, Captain,” Charlotte said, dropping into a small curtsy. “I can see I must be very careful, or else a silver-tongued rogue like you might just break my maidenly heart.”

Now Rafe gave a shout of laughter, forgetting himself enough to give his friend a hearty slap on the back, which nearly sent Fitz to the floor. “Oops, sorry, Fitz. I shouldn’t want to knock your one good leg out from under you. Especially as Miss Seavers has already done it for me. Miss Charlotte Seavers, allow me to belatedly introduce you to my friend and companion for too many years to contemplate, Captain Swain Fitzgerald. Fitz, make your bow to Charlie.”

“Hello, Fitz,” Charlotte said. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” She shot a quick look at Rafe. “As we’re very informal here in the country, please call me Charlotte.”

“So this is your Charlie, is it? You must have been a very slow youth, Rafe, my friend, not to see what a lovely piece of perfection your Charlie is. How you could have left her, I’ll never know.”

Rafe glanced at Charlotte, who immediately avoided his eyes.

“Ha, now I’ve made him mad, and put you to the blush, haven’t I, Miss Seavers? Charlotte. I beg pardon, and I’m honored to meet you.” Fitz looked toward the doorway. “Ah, and here are my crutches. Pass them over, if you please.”

“Don’t,” Rafe warned the approaching footman. “I wouldn’t want them close enough for my friend here to use to beat me into flinders when I say what must be said. I only sent for your crutches, Fitz, so you’d stop shouting for them to be brought to you. Grayson, see that the crutches are well hidden and Captain Fitzgerald is carried upstairs to one of the bedchambers.”

“Damn and blast you to the far corners of hell, Rafe Daughtry! I won’t be carried!”

“Fine,” Rafe said. “Then you’ll be dragged. But, one way or another, you’re going upstairs.”

“The devil I will! I—Pardon me, Charlotte,” Fitz said, quickly inclining his head in her direction.

“Oh, don’t mind me, Fitz,” Charlotte assured him, smiling with what Rafe believed was unholy glee. “It has been a while since I’ve heard a good argument.”

Rafe hoped his friend would at last listen to reason. “Fitz, you know what the man said. I would have left you in London if you hadn’t sworn on your mother’s head that you’d follow his orders the moment we arrived.”

“Then aren’t you the fool for believing me. I won’t do it, Rafe. Lie mouldering in a bed for two full months? A man could go mad.”

Rafe signaled to the footmen, now numbering four, he noticed. “Take him, please.”

“No! Rafe, I’m warning you! Let me go, you miserable—”

Rafe watched as the servants carried Fitz up the winding staircase, shaking his head as Fitz alternated between cursing him and cursing the footmen…and then going silent as the pain from his injured leg forced him to give in to the inevitable.

“Poor man,” Charlotte said. “What happened to him?”

“I could let Fitz tell you, I suppose. He’s been working on a fine story this past week. I believe the latest version has something to do with how he was injured saving a child—no, two children, and their nurse—from a runaway cart. Quite the hero, our fine captain.”

“But that’s not true?”

Rafe took her arm once more, thinking to return to the main saloon, but then he remembered that his sisters were there and steered her toward the back of the house instead. “He was in such a hurry to step foot on solid ground again after a fairly stormy voyage that he ran down the gangplank and lost his footing on something slick on the dock. Went hell over lampposts into a stack of sea chests.”

“Oh, dear, how ignominious. Well, his secret is safe with me. Um, don’t you want to return to the main saloon?”

“I’d prefer to return to Elba and relative boredom, actually,” Rafe said honestly. “I feel like an interloper here. And my sisters, quite frankly, scare me spitless. I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m rather nervous around females after so many years as distant from polite society as a person can be without traveling to the far side of the moon.”

“Do I make you nervous, Rafe?” Charlotte asked as he pushed open a door and they entered his late uncle’s private study. Now his private study. Although he’d had to fight down the feeling that he should first knock on that door and request entry.

“Do you make me nervous? Truthfully, I think everything and everyone here makes me want nothing more than to go find myself a good war.”

“Sorry, there are no wars here. I’ll give you a few moments to yourself, to look around,” Charlotte said quietly. “Nothing’s really changed very much.”

He followed her with his eyes as she pretended an interest in a row of books on one of the bookshelves, seeing the young girl who had chased after him and George and Harold sometimes, and gone out of her way to ignore them at others. She’d been such a funny creature, he remembered. Tall for a girl, and rack-thin, all arms and long legs and too much hair that he’d more than once had to untangle from a branch when she got caught up chasing after them as they cut through the woods to the village.

A pest. She’d been a pest. Eight years younger than George, half a dozen years younger than Harold, four years Rafe’s junior. And female into the bargain. A child, really; fifteen to his nineteen the day he’d gone off to take up his commission.

He hadn’t recognized her out there on the drive. She was still tall, still thin, he supposed, but also nicely rounded. Her unruly mop of sable-brown hair seemed at least fairly tamed, most of it ruthlessly pulled back from her face to hang in loose curls partway down her back. Her hair looked…touchable.

Her warm brown eyes hadn’t changed, hadn’t aged…unlike his, which sometimes startled him with their haunted intensity when he caught a glimpse of them in his shaving mirror. He liked her nose, straight and yet somehow pert, and her wide mouth was full-lipped, and slightly vulnerable.

It was, in point of fact, only when she opened that mouth that the Charlie he remembered actually appeared. Charlie said what was on her mind, always, and never dressed her comments up in fine linen. He’d liked that about her, he remembered, even when he was thinking up ways to avoid her.

He had no inclination to avoid her now. Quite the opposite.

She’d believed herself in love with him, half a dozen years ago. Did that embarrass her now? She’d joked about it, out there on the drive, but there was no way he could be sure. How did he appear to her now? He wasn’t the raw youth he’d been then, and very much doubted he looked lovable.

What happened to the innocence of young love, and to youthful stupidity, once the persons involved had moved on through the years? Was he really the duke now, with the Rafe he’d been banished to the past? Was she really Charlotte now, all grown up, and Charlie left behind in her childhood?

They were strangers now. Strangers who once believed they knew each other very well…

“Rafe? I asked you a question,” Charlotte said as he stood in the center of the large, darkly paneled room that had been the scene of many a dressing-down from his uncle, who’d worried that Rafe’s character might be tainted by resembling that of his flighty mother.

“I’m sorry, Charlotte,” he said, giving a slight shake of his head as he quickly improvised a reason for his silence. “I was remembering the day I’d knocked George down for calling my mother a well-dressed trollop. Uncle Charlton warned me that I might be taller than George or Harold, stronger—even smarter—but I would never be more than who I was, so I should remember my place. I’m half expecting Uncle Charlton to come blustering in here at any moment, ordering me out of his private sanctuary.”

Charlotte settled herself into one of the large leather chairs flanking the fireplace. “But he’s gone, Rafe, they’re all gone, the three of them, and you’re exactly where no one ever thought you would be. Do you feel vindicated at all, Rafe, or overwhelmed?”

Yes, that was his Charlie. No one else would dare to ask him that question, ask the fourteenth Duke of Ashurst if his title sat uncomfortably on his shoulders. Even Grayson, whose opinion of Rafe had never been one of unmitigated admiration, wouldn’t have dared to broach such a question.

Rafe approached his uncle’s desk and perched himself on one of its corners as he smiled at Charlotte. “How do I look to you, Charlie? Do I look at all ducal?”

She shook her head. “I can’t tell. Sit in his chair behind the desk, Rafe. Sit in your chair. It is yours, you know. Yours, and someday your son’s, and then his son’s. You are the Duke of Ashurst.”

“Uncle Charlton must have thought much the same thing about his sons,” Rafe said as he circled the large desk and gingerly sat himself in the great leather chair. “George and Harold never went to war, never risked life and limb for our King. And yet I’m here, and they’re gone. Is it fate, do you think, Charlie? Or am I simply the accidental duke?”

Charlotte leaned forward in her chair, clasping her hands together on her knees. “May I tell you something?” she asked quietly.

“Please,” he said, daring to lean back in the chair, happy to believe he was not sharing it with his uncle’s ghost.

“You’re an ass, Rafe,” Charlotte said, sitting back once more.

Rafe laughed in spite of himself. “Such language! I beg your pardon.”

“And so you should. You’re the duke. The title is yours, all the titles are yours. You’ve had several long months to become used to that unalterable fact. This room is yours, this great hulking house is yours, the lands and farms and forestry and mills and all the rest of it are yours. George’s yacht would have been yours, as well, except it sank. Oh, and the wealth is yours. Considerable wealth, more than considerable wealth. So don’t you think it’s more than time you stopped playing at grateful pensioner or undeserving interloper—and began behaving as the duke?”

“Well, I—”

“You don’t tease with Grayson, or else risk giving him the upper hand,” she went on as if he hadn’t tried to speak. “I know your arrival was unexpected, but you’ve been home above an hour now, and still Grayson has not assembled the staff in the entrance hall to welcome you.”

“I don’t need—”

“Yes, you do! The staff has been answering to Grayson for eight long months, and Grayson has been answering to no one. Begin as you plan to go on, Rafe. Take charge. You were a captain in the King’s army, surely you know how to order men about, make them do your bidding. You sent them into battle, by God, to fight and perhaps die for you.”