The Duke I Tempted Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  Want more?

  Excerpt: The Earl I Ruined

  Acknowledgments

  About Scarlett

  Copyright

  This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.

  This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  * * *

  The Duke I Tempted

  Copyright © 2018 by Scarlett Peckham

  Ebook ISBN: 9781641970327

  * * *

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  * * *

  NYLA Publishing

  121 W 27th St., Suite 1201, New York, NY 10001

  http://www.nyliterary.com

  Dedication

  For my mom, my grandmas, and all the other ladies who left their romance novels lying around where I could steal them.

  * * *

  This is all your fault.

  * * *

  (I’m eternally grateful.)

  Chapter 1

  Threadneedle Street, London

  May 31, 1753

  “Bloody codding hell,” Archer Stonewell, the Duke of Westmead, murmured to the midnight darkness of his deserted counting-house. Beside him a lone wax candle flickered and went out, as if in sympathy. There was no one here to see him slump, a grown man unmoored by a single slip of paper from a girl no more than twenty.

  Your days as a bachelor are numbered, my dear brother, Constance had scrawled in a script so curlicued it gloated. The ball is set for the end of July and it is going to be sensational. No lady who enters Westhaven will wish to leave as anything other than your duchess. Try to enjoy your final month of grim, determined solitude—for I intend to have you married off by autumn. (And do stop glaring, Archer—I can feel it through the page!)

  Rain splashed across his expensive leaded windows, a fitting accompaniment to the dread pooling in his stomach. Normally he took pleasure in the empty counting-house, with its rows of ledgers chronicling the growth of his investments into empires and the maps that slashed the country into markets ripe for exploitation. The building was a temple to the gods of order and control, and there was no match for its soothing effect on his soul.

  Except tonight, it wasn’t working.

  Already, the old fog was descending.

  He was not insensible to his absurdity. It was he, after all, who had gritted his teeth and declared the begetting of an heir a matter of urgent moral imperative. It was he who had hired architects to restore the ravaged halls of Westhaven and proclaimed it time to expunge the decaying pile of its ghosts and find a wife to install in it instead.

  He’d ordered it. He’d paid for it. Never mind that he preferred his life the way it was: deserted. Pristine. Absent of all reminders of the past.

  Never mind that the only thing he wanted less in this world than a wife was a child.

  Enough. He picked up his quill and did what was befitting of his responsibility to his tenants, to his family, and to the Crown. He dashed a word of thanks to Constance for her efforts, scrawled his signature, melted a puddle of vermilion wax across the folded paper, and stamped it with the seal of the title that he’d not for one day wanted, and was duty-bound to protect at all costs: the Duke of Westmead.

  He put on his coat, extinguished the fire, and walked down the dark staircase to Threadneedle Street, where his coachman was waiting.

  “Home, Your Grace?”

  He hesitated.

  He had been so very, very careful for so very, very long.

  “A stop first. Twenty-three Charlotte Street.”

  He closed his eyes and sank back into the rhythm of the carriage as it wound its way west toward Mary-le-Bone. It had been weeks since he’d visited the address. Weeks during which rumors of the establishment’s existence had made sneering speculation about the acts that were administered there—and the kinds of men who craved them—a sport in gentlemen’s clubs and coffeehouses.

  His interests were precarious. Now was not an ideal time to be branded deviant, or worse.

  But some nights, there was a limit to one’s capacity for caution. Some nights, a man needed to be wicked.

  And he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to enjoy it.

  The town house looked the same. Pale bricks, an unobtrusive terrace. The old black door unmarked, discreet as always. The street blessedly deserted.

  At his knock, the maid, a sober girl, took his iron key from the cord he kept around his neck and led him without comment to the proprietress’s parlor. Elena sat by the fire in her customary black weeds. Unlike most women of her profession, her attire was chaste and severe—more like the robes of a papist nun than a courtesan’s plunging silks. Which was appropriate, given that her métier was closer to punishment than pleasure.

  “Mistress Brearley,” the maid announced, “a caller.”

  He said nothing. Elena knew him well enough to surmise that if he was here, he would not be in the mood to exchange pleasantries.

  “Choose your instruments, undress, and wait,” Elena said.

  The maid led him to the spare, windowless room. It was lit by candles and held little beyond a hassock and a rack. The girl left him, and he went through the ritual he had perfected over a decade’s attendance in these chambers. From the shelves along the wall, he scanned Elena’s wares. Leather straps, cat-o’-nine-tails, all manner of restraints. As always, he gathered the crisp rods of birch, kept pliant and green in a shallow tub of water, and an elegant braided whip with golden tails. He laid them neatly on a velvet cloth left for that purpose on a sideboard, and folded his clothes beside them. Nude but for his linen shirt, he knelt, facing the wall, to wait for her.

  She would keep him waiting. Testing one’s endurance for suffering was, after all, her gift.

  He heard her footsteps down the hall before she entered. “Be silent,” she said as she came into the room. “Or I shall gag you.”

  She placed a rough black cloth over his eyes and tied it tightly, so it bit into his hair. The fabric smelled of lye.

  “Did I not instruct you to undress?”

  She had. But defiance made the proceedings far more interesting.

  She jerked his shirt back by the collar and he felt a prick of metal at his nape—the cold blade of a pair of sewing shears. He heard a snip, and the
n the ripping of fine fabric. His shirt fell from his shoulders to pool around his thighs. And with it went the rod of tension that he carried in his neck.

  He could feel her skirts brush against his skin as she tied a fist of birches into a sturdy switch. He braced, listening for the high-pitched whir as she tested it against the air.

  The first stroke shocked him, though he had expected it, invited its bite. He sank his palms into the floor and arched back against the next lacerating hit.

  His mind emptied.

  For the first time in days, he smiled.

  He closed his eyes at the relief and felt himself, at last, begin to stir.

  Chapter 2

  Grove Vale, Wiltshire

  July 14, 1753

  Opening shipping crates was not a ladylike activity. But Poppy Cavendish had precious little faith in the advantages of being mistaken for a lady.

  She thrust her hammer claw around the final nail and bore down with all the considerable force her wiry body could muster. She had waited months for this particular box, stamped with its labels from Mr. Alva Carpenter across the Atlantic. She had no intention of waiting any longer.

  The nail gave way with a satisfying pop. The smell of dried leaves and sphagnum moss wafted out around her. She closed her eyes and breathed it in—it smelled like musk, and earth, and opportunity.

  Inside the box the trays of roots and bulbs had been packed gingerly, each item tagged with numbers corresponding to a sheet of sketches of the mature plants they would become. She willed her hands to unwrap them steadily, careful not to damage the dry, fragile cuttings that had traveled so long and so far. She held her breath as she reached the bottom of the crate.

  Her hands found what they were seeking. Magnolia virginiana. At last.

  The cuttings had survived the moisture and jostling of the journey across the sea and up the Thames and down the bumped and winding country roads to Wiltshire. There were eight of them here, thick, sturdy branches, their waxen leaves gone dry and dull but still intact.

  She only hoped they hadn’t arrived too late.

  A month ago she would have wasted no time removing the lower leaves from the branches and transplanting them to pots in the greenhouse to take root. Now that work would have to wait. She wrapped the cuttings in damp cloth and placed them in a shaft of sunlight for safekeeping. She had more pressing matters to attend to.

  A life needed saving. Her own.

  She returned her attention to her desk, where her fat, soil-stained ledger noted in row after odious row the impossible sums she needed to save her nursery and the improbable amount of time she had to find them.

  Two weeks: the span of time her fate had been reduced to. All her dreams shrunk down into what she could cart three miles down a country road between now and the first of August.

  She rubbed her eyes. No matter how she rearranged the numbers, they didn’t add up. The task before her required at least one of two things: labor or capital. But even if she somehow found the latter, the inquiries she’d made to hire temporary laborers had all come back with the same maddening answer: unavailable, due to the renovations at Westhaven. Every able-bodied soul in Grove Vale, if not the entirety of Wiltshire, had been hired away by the Duke of Westmead.

  If extra men could not be hired, the nursery could not be moved, and her entire future would be at the mercy of—Stop, she commanded herself. If she let her thoughts wander in that direction, her mind would crater down a whirlpool of increasingly disastrous scenarios. She needed to focus on the tasks at hand. Her only possible salvation was in working quickly.

  “Poppy.”

  She whirled around. A broad-shouldered man was leaning against her workshop door, lounging against the frame with such a sense of ownership you’d have thought he had built the place himself.

  “Tom!” she yelped, clutching her heart like the old crone she was no doubt fated to become. Tom Raridan’s ability to come and go undetected was his greatest talent. That he had been pulling this trick since they were children did little to lessen its ability to startle her.

  “Poppy,” he said, running his eyes over her in that way that made her feel too visible for comfort. Never a diminutive man, he had grown broader in the two years he’d spent in town. Away from the summer sun of Wiltshire, his hair was darker—less the flaming shade of carrot from his boyhood, tending now toward auburn. But his smile was the same as it had been when she’d last seen him. A touch too familiar.

  “I came as soon as I heard about your uncle,” he said. “You should have written to me. To think I had to hear it in the post from Mother.”

  Damnation. He was right. She’d been so plunged into panic by her uncle’s sudden passing, and the chaos it had made of her life, that she’d given inadequate due to the niceties of mourning. Letters had not been sent. Customs had not been properly observed. Her uncle had been fond of Tom, and the kindly old man deserved better.

  “I’m sorry, Tom. I’m afraid I’ve been preoccupied. Uncle Charles’s heir is arriving in a fortnight to take possession of Bantham Park. I’ve been in a rush to … arrange my effects.”

  “A fortnight?” He whistled at the shelves of plants and cuttings all around them, the walls lined from floor to ceiling with tools and pots and sacks of seed and moss. “What are you going to do with all this?”

  “My uncle left me the cottage at Greenwoods—the only part of his holdings that wasn’t entailed. I intend to move the nursery there.”

  “Move an entire nursery? How do you expect to do that?”

  She sighed. “With a great deal of effort.”

  Tom shook his head. “You always did love an impossible task. Never the easy way for our Poppy.”

  She sighed again. He was not wrong, but she had grown weary of his proclivity for commenting on matters that were none of his affair.

  Not that it was only Tom who commented. She had made quite a reputation out of being impossible, though not because she enjoyed it. It was only that the so-called easy way rarely coincided with her getting what she wanted. The world was not built to suit ambitious spinsters. One had to be a rather demanding and unpopular character if one wanted a chance of success.

  But even she would not have taken on such a degree of madness by choice. For years, her uncle had made it clear that he would leave her his private fortune. Only at the reading of the will had it been revealed that for over a decade Bantham Park had been unproductive.

  There was no private fortune. The fate of her dreams and her livelihood would fall upon the whims of a distant cousin she’d never met. And her uncle, the dear old man she had loved and trusted beyond anyone, had somehow not found within himself the will to tell her.

  “It’s too lovely a day to be in this musty old shed fretting over plants,” Tom declared, flicking her ledger distastefully. “Take a turn in the garden with me.”

  She looked down at her ledger and hesitated. She had no time for leisurely strolls. But Tom could be difficult. It was easier to accede to his will and wait for him to grow bored and leave than to provoke his temper with a fuss.

  “Very well. But just to the greenhouse. I must finish pruning while there’s still light.”

  The path from the workshop traversed her small empire, dazzling in the summer sun. The nursery and walled gardens were bright with the blooming vegetation of July. In the field beyond, groves of fruit trees and her prized exotic saplings grew, along with row after row of English trees. Sunbeams danced from the roof of the small greenhouse, where her forced flowers basked in the afternoon light. She could scarcely believe that in two weeks’ time all this would be lost to her.

  “What have I missed in Grove Vale these past months?” Tom asked, moving closer so that his arm brushed hers.

  She edged away. “The renovations at Westhaven are nearly done. You should ride out to see the house. They’ve made a palace out of it. I’ve even sold them a few trees.”

  He looked at her with interest. “I don’t suppose you’ve had any
dealings with the duke? I have a venture that might be of interest to his investment concern. I’d give my right hand for an introduction.” He winked.

  “I’m afraid my dealings were with no one loftier than the head gardener. He is quite an imperious fellow in his own right. I shudder to think what the duke must be like if his gardener has such airs.”

  She glanced up at the sky. It was growing late. She needed to return to her work. “It was kind of you to come, Tom,” she said, hoping he would take the hint. “Unnecessary, but kind.”

  “Poppy. For you, nothing is unnecessary.”

  She chose to ignore the catch in his voice and walked more briskly toward the greenhouse, but he stopped her beneath a mature apple tree. Boldly, he took her hand and clapped it in his own.

  “Allow me this liberty,” he whispered. He placed a kiss at her wrist.

  Horror curdled in her gut. Of course. This was why he had taken the time to come all the way from London when a letter of condolence would have suited.

  Now that she was alone, he thought he had his chance.

  “Tom, please,” she objected, twisting her hand away. He moved closer anyway.

  “You know why I’ve come here, don’t you? I’ve made no secret of my fondness for you. My position in London is secure—I have enough to make a life for us in town.”