The Duke I Tempted Page 3

  He had loved this place.

  Until, of course, he hadn’t.

  He gazed out at the horizon, taking satisfaction at the cozy cottages and neatly tended grazing land. It was still a shock how the mud-thatched, squalid dwellings that had once blighted the landscape, and the reputation of the house of Westmead had been replaced by this scene of agrarian well-being. Equally striking was the elegant manor that now rose up from the hilltop where his crumbling family seat had moldered. The sloping eaves gave no trace of the fire that had once buckled and pockmarked the upper stories.

  He handed the reins to a groom and helped his sister onto the steps, then ceded his hat and gloves to the small militia of footmen whose presence at the door never failed to startle him. In London, he lived simply, without ceremony. Here, one could not so much as scratch one’s chin without six livery-clad servants coming forth to offer up their eager fingers.

  Constance perched on a settee in the center of the grand salon, perfectly backlit by sunshine streaming through a wall of windows.

  “Well?” she said, gesturing at the massive gilt-spangled room that rose up around them. Light danced in air that smelled like roses. “The footmen finished placing the last of the paintings while we were out. Admit it. It’s stunning.”

  He allowed her a forbearing smile. “It is, at the very least, unrecognizable.”

  “That, my dear brother, was the point. Don’t you like it?”

  He took in filigreed gilt work, gray-veined marble, Savonnerie carpets she’d gotten from God knew where, for God knew how many guineas. He did not like it. In point of fact, he found it rather suffocating.

  “You certainly spared no expense,” he said mildly.

  “Indeed I did not. If one must find a wife for a man of your disposition, one needs better tools than homespun and tallow at one’s disposal. You certainly will not be winning any woman’s hand on charm alone.”

  “Your renovations are impressive. Now I must return to my study to invent ways of paying for them.”

  She held up a hand to stop him. “One more thing. I’ve taken the liberty of having reports compiled on the ladies attending the ball. I think you will find them an accomplished lot.”

  He sighed. “Accomplished? Constance—we discussed the kind of women you were to invite, did we not? Eager? Mercenary? Easily had?”

  She wrinkled her nose in distaste. His desire to find a suitable spouse with the utmost efficiency stood in conflict with her view that matrimony should be the stuff of sentiment and poetry. On this he could not be conciliatory; it was his personal edict to avoid sentiment and poetry with the same care one avoided broken bones and plague.

  “Actually,” she mused, rifling through papers on a delicate Sèvres-plaqued bonheur du jour writing desk that would not have been out of place at Versailles, “I wonder if you could look through the candidates now. If any of them are of special interest, I will assign them the best rooms.”

  He sighed. “Fine.” He reached for the tea pot.

  Constance immediately confiscated it from his hands and replaced it with a stack of papers. “First we have the obligatory crop of gently bred ladies. Many with titles, considerable fortune, and faultless manners. I have also included a few more spirited candidates of my own acquaintance. Beauties all, and a few are rather witty.”

  He made a mental note to avoid the women on both these lists. The last thing he wanted was a wife with a fortune. She would need his own too little. Nor was intelligence an attraction. If his bride was clever, he might be tempted to like her. That would merely complicate his purpose.

  What he wanted was a woman who saw him as a title and a bank vault. The kind of wife who would, when afforded certain enviable comforts, bear him an heir and not expect him to take more than a strictly legal interest in the proceedings. The kind of woman who would not require an investment of emotion he was not equipped to give.

  Toward the bottom of the stack, an entry caught his eye. Miss Gillian Bastian, of Philadelphia.

  “From the colonies?”

  “Oh, Miss Bastian? She’s gorgeous but has the conversation of a parakeet. Her parents are so mad for her to find herself a title that I asked her out of charity. I was thinking of her for Lord Apthorp.”

  A man did not come to rule the City of London without knowing an opportunity when he saw one. He closed the book. “There we are. Give Miss Bastian a nice room.”

  Constance snorted. “Miss Bastian? Did you hear a word I said? I doubt you could stand her for an hour.”

  “They all sound qualified. Put them in whatever rooms you like.”

  Constance snatched back the reports. “Qualified. How unromantic, Archer—even for you.”

  “I’m not looking for romance. I’m looking for a wife.”

  She curled her lip. “You are never more His Grace,” she said, referring to their late father, “than when you profess such horrifying statements.”

  Given she had hardly known their father, Archer knew she said this because she had deduced comparisons to the man were the surest way to rile his temper.

  “I am marrying precisely to ensure that our tenants are spared a recurrence of the conditions that plagued them under His Grace’s stewardship,” he said, in his flattest, most arctic tone. “Never mind what should become of you if, God forbid, Wetherby gets his hands on the title.”

  “Please. You are scarcely four and thirty and he must be at least sixty.”

  “Smallpox does not discriminate by age.” It had taken the life of his previous presumptive heir, a distant cousin whose death at the tender age of twenty had put Wetherby in line for the title and necessitated the farce of this quest for a wife in the first place.

  “It’s been a year since Paul died and you’re still with us. Surely, you can afford yourself another month or two to find a wife who actually suits you.”

  “Having no wife suits me, so I’d bid you to content yourself that I’m marrying at all and find me a proper candidate for duchess. The duller and more willing, the better.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get exactly the duchess you deserve with an attitude such as that. And what an awful waste.”

  She left the room with a toss of her blond head.

  He leaned back in his chair, grateful to be left in peace.

  His sister was right. With any luck, he would get the duchess he deserved.

  One who understood that marriage was a cynical pursuit. That he would invest no more in the arrangement than name, coin, and seed. Attachment—love—would not factor.

  He had tried that condition once. The consequences had been such that he’d go to great lengths to never suffer them again.

  He reached beneath his neckcloth and ran his fingers along the leather cord he wore around his neck. The jagged iron key it held was cool against the surface of his skin, a reminder of what hung in the balance. His salvation. His sanity. His secret, private self.

  His wife would be granted more than most women could hope for: her freedom, his title, and his wealth. In return he asked only for a womb and a lack of curiosity.

  For however much he was prepared to sacrifice for duty, this key would not be among his losses. He had responsibilities, after all. He required the strength to meet them.

  No one need know the depths from which he drew it.

  Least of all, his future wife.

  Chapter 4

  Her hem was frayed.

  She’d only noticed now, stepping down from the ducal carriage.

  Bollocks. Poppy rarely went anywhere in her good gowns, but she had considered them rather lovely. In the shadow cast by the imposing house, she suddenly saw her gray muslin for what it was: a tattered imitation of gentility.

  She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath, her neck held high. After holding her own with the duke and Lady Constance, she would rather expire than seem intimidated by the immensity of their house, but it was rather difficult to remain impassive when the doors alone were three times the height of a
well-built man. They swung open, revealing a phalanx of footmen and an inner atrium that would rival the royal palace for the sheer expense of its finery. It made the modest comforts of Bantham Park look like a workhouse.

  “Lady Constance, Miss Cavendish has arrived,” the footman informed her hostess, who was seated at an ornate writing desk, scribbling with an intense degree of focus. Lady Constance turned, revealing that today her blue eyes were framed by a pair of spectacles. She wore a diaphanous summer gown made of a fabric so fine that it floated around her like a corona when she rose to greet Poppy. The delicate fabric was faintly smudged with the same dark ink that covered her fingertips and, here and there, her cheekbones.

  “Miss Cavendish,” she said, filling the room with a smile of genuine warmth, “welcome to Westhaven. I hope you can forgive me for imposing on your time, for I wish for us to be great friends.”

  Poppy curtsied, somewhat taken aback by this speech. “A pleasure, my lady.”

  “Oh, do please call me Constance! We’re really quite informal here.”

  “So it seems,” Poppy said, allowing her gaze to fall from the friezes along the ceiling, to the floor-length gilt-inlaid windows, to the India carpet on the floor, as soft and thick as a mattress.

  “Join me for a cup of tea before we begin.” Constance gestured to a sofa upholstered in silk finer than any dress Poppy had ever owned.

  “I had envisioned the garden beginning here, at the reception, such that the guests must follow the trail of greenery to the ballroom,” she said as she proffered a bowl of delicate porcelain.

  Poppy looked up and felt her stomach drop. The room was the size of a modest cathedral. It would take the contents of six greenhouses to fill it.

  “What an inspired idea,” she said lightly, hoping she might change the young lady’s mind once she had a better understanding of her thinking.

  Constance smiled, and the expression in her eyes was not one that suggested a habit of yielding to compromise. “My ambition, Miss Cavendish, is to leave every guest agog with wonder. I hope you will let your imagination run absolutely rampant. No idea is too grand or too whimsical.”

  Poppy hoped her face did not betray her mounting horror as Lady Constance led her through a colonnaded corridor to a ballroom that could easily accommodate the entire population of Grove Vale. “I do love carnations and tulips, but I hate to be ordinary. Maxwell says you are known for exotics, so I will leave it to you to dazzle us with your most unusual plants from abroad.”

  Maxwell was clearly out to get her. Poppy’s nursery was known for exotics. Namely, trees. She could not very well fill a ballroom with two-year-old saplings.

  “The motif will indeed need to be unusual to match the … singularity of the space,” she said, racing through her modest inventory of flowers. Her hydrangeas and roses were blooming, which was fortunate as they were elegant and durable. With more warning, she could have ordered plants from nurseries elsewhere. But with less than a fortnight, there simply wasn’t time.

  She looked at Constance’s expectant face and envisioned six hundred pounds slipping through her fingers. Her throat began to itch.

  “And what latitude have we to make use of the parklands?” She gestured out the window at the rolling downs and thick forest that made up the better part of Westhaven’s grounds beyond the manicured pleasure gardens.

  Lady Constance laughed. “The parklands, Miss Cavendish? Do you mean to dress my ballroom in gorse and meadowsweet?”

  Poppy tapped her chin, an idea flickering into focus in her mind.

  “I’ve always thought there is nothing more evocative of the countryside than our beautiful native flora. The wildflowers are at their most gorgeous and romantic this time of year, and they would look remarkable in contrast with the grandeur of the ballroom. After all, without a touch of the wild, all we will have are rooms overfull with dull … ordinary flowers. Don’t you agree?”

  She held her breath, hoping she had read the girl correctly.

  Constance clapped her hands. “Why, it’s brilliant, Miss Cavendish! Why stop at a ballroom garden if we can have a ballroom forest?”

  Poppy let out a sigh of relief. There would be plants enough to fill the rooms of Westhaven if she had to forage every last bluebell from the forest floor herself.

  That left her only the next miracle to perform: finishing such a task in the unthinkable span of a fortnight.

  Archer once again checked his watch, unable to concentrate on the pile of letters from London. He had spent the day riding with his land steward, an activity that reminded him why he had not returned here in thirteen years. He’d thought the estate had been stripped of the worst remnants of his father’s madness, but the obscene nymphs his forebear had erected in the grotto beneath the trout pond turned his stomach. If accidents of birth and death meant he must oversee a land he wished only to forget, he preferred to do it by correspondence.

  Unfit to be alone with the kind of thoughts that kept overtaking his reports on coal prices, he went in search of Constance. The sound of laughter drew him to the library, where his sister and Miss Cavendish sat side by side in a shaft of late afternoon sunshine, their heads hunched over a sketchbook.

  It struck him once again how lovely the gardener was. Like a willow tree, with her slender neck and her tumbling mass of plaited hair escaping from its pins.

  “I think a bower of ivy draped over the windows in the colonnade,” she was saying. “Arranged so the leaves trail down over the glass and cast shadows in the candlelight.”

  “I love it,” Constance breathed.

  He leaned over them. “May I see?”

  Both women jumped, too absorbed in their planning to have noticed his entrance. He held up his hands in mute apology. Westhaven made him this way. Awkward. Unable to comport himself properly. It eroded his veneer of control like the sea chipping away at a cliff.

  “Good heavens, Archer, do announce yourself next time,” his sister said. “We ladies are at work.”

  She gave him an ironic smile, anticipating his amusement at the notion of her working.

  Behind her, his father’s ornate pleasure gardens twinkled in the afternoon light, like the old man winking at him from the grave. Unlike the lewd frescoes the duke had painted in the library, the collection of follies were not openly licentious. Nevertheless they had drained the family’s coffers while the estate fell into neglect. He should have had them razed.

  “Your beloved gardens are at their most beautiful this time of year, don’t you think?” Constance chirped sweetly, following his gaze. “We’re going to light them with torches for the ball and build a platform right at the edge of the lake for dancing. Mr. Flannery is coming all the way from London to write it up for the Peculiar.”

  Lord deliver him. It was his sister’s fondest wish to make her mark as a legendary hostess in the Parisian style. He’d been unhappy when she’d befriended the editor of London’s most notorious gazette in the service of her goal, and begun hand-feeding him her finest morsels of intelligence.

  “See, there is no trouble. Now is not the time for scandal.”

  He had spent half a lifetime repairing the name of Westmead from the shame his father had cast upon it. Securing the succession would finish the work. After that, Constance could do as she pleased.

  “I would never dream of making scandal on the eve of your engagement,” she said, the picture of blatant insincerity.

  “Oh dear, it’s growing late,” Miss Cavendish said suddenly, drawing to her feet. “I lost track of the time. I should return home before nightfall.”

  “Oh, do stay for supper, Poppy. Archer is so dull. I am desperate for company.”

  He ignored his sister’s provocation, preoccupied by the sight of Miss Cavendish gravely rolling up a scroll of sketches. So she called herself Poppy. Quite a name for a gardener. Not entirely fitting, given her demeanor. Thorn might be a better name for her. Or Stinging Nettle.

  “You are kind, but I must return hom
e before Mr. Grouse departs. Another time.”

  “I trust Mr. Grouse met with your satisfaction?” Constance inquired. “My brother assures me he is our very best land agent.”

  “He seems capable. I’d like to visit the nursery before dark to inspect the progress his men made today. Perhaps you could call for the carriage?” She glanced worriedly at a clock.

  “It’s much faster in the curricle,” Constance said. “Archer, would you mind driving Miss Cavendish?”

  “If Miss Cavendish does not object.” In truth, he welcomed the distraction. He was curious what exactly the gardener was undertaking to require so many men and such a state of haste.

  “Thank you, Your Grace.”

  “You’ll want this before you leave,” Constance said, drawing a banknote from the drawer of her escritoire. I assume you have some means of drawing from it?”

  “Indeed. My solicitor will see to it,” Miss Cavendish said, tucking it tidily into her ledger. Her manner was utterly imperious, like bills for a small fortune passed through her fingers several times a day.

  Archer waited as Constance embraced Miss Cavendish like an old friend, then led her into the corridor.

  As soon as they were alone, she crooked up a corner of her lovely mouth. “You do the work of the coachman as well as the gardener, Your Grace? The papers are right to call you industrious.”

  Was that a slight twinkle in her eye? Perhaps the six hundred pounds had had an effect on her mood after all.

  She exhibited no particular cheer as they made their way toward Bantham Park, however. She seemed distracted, or perturbed.

  “I hope my sister was not too plaguing in her demands,” Archer said, his fifth attempt at making conversation in as many minutes. “She can be capricious but is susceptible to reason when pressed.”