“The less you know, the better.”
Her eyebrows drew together in consternation, and her mouth opened to surely protest his high-handedness.
“Wait here while I set matters in order,” he said, cutting off her protest before it could gain momentum.
He pushed the carriage door open and landed on the crushed shell drive. The next moment, he was pressing payment into the driver’s hand, giving him the exact agreed-upon amount and not a farthing more, even as the man left his palm open. Percy snorted. Gardencourt had a famously extensive stable. He didn’t need this hackney to return to London.
A loud wail emerged from inside the carriage. “Oh!” exclaimed the girl who had ridden up top. “The little master will be wantin’ his breakfast.” On a nimble hop, she descended and disappeared inside, shutting the door behind her.
It was a woman’s world inside that carriage, said the driver’s expression. Percy tacitly agreed. “I expect you to wait here until they’ve finished whatever it is they’re doing in there.”
An avaricious smile curled about the driver’s mouth as he waggled greedy fingers. Grudgingly, Percy dropped more coin onto the man’s expectant palm. On a lilting whistle, the driver meandered toward his horses.
Percy took Gardencourt’s wide and imposing flight of front steps two at time as his mind worked out the fiction that would explain to the year-round skeleton staff the continued presence of four women and a baby while he returned to London. It was the perfect out-of-the-way place to stash them until he found out what game Montfort was playing.
On a whim, he tested the door handle. Solid oak gave and swung open on silent hinges. Unexpected.
Caution in his step, Percy advanced into the receiving hall. The scents of his childhood hit him first. An ever-present underlying mustiness that came with age, humidity, and country air. A sweetness from the breads baked in the kitchen. The expensive perfumes of duchesses past and present. The faint earthiness of the famous conservatory. Scents that could carry him to a past that didn’t yet have a care in the world, if he allowed them to sweep him up in their spell. He’d always been rather susceptible to magic.
Percy opened his eyes, not having realized he’d closed them, and took in his surroundings. Just as Gardencourt’s scents hadn’t changed, neither had its substance. Same coat of armor tucked beneath the grand staircase ahead. Same row of stately marble busts depicting the philosophers of ancient Greece. Same Persian carpets, their intricate designs rendered in ripe crimson, indigo, and saffron, leading awed footsteps through to the center of the house where one would await the pleasure of the lord. It was a house that could easily feel forbidding, but it didn’t. Wood paneling of English oak and exotic mahogany provided a welcoming warmth that invited one inside on the promise of safety and comfort.
The deeper into the interior he walked, the less care he had for the rag-tag lot of trouble he’d left outside. Still, he hoped they hadn’t bolted down the drive. He wasn’t too keen on running them to the ground. It had been a long day, and the comfort of home—his true home—beckoned.
“So, you decided to join our little country house party, after all?”
A half-inhaled breath froze in Percy’s lungs.No, no, no, it can’t be.He squinted down a darkened corridor as a tall figure emerged, the man’s signature shock of white hair catching the light.It can, and it is.
Father stopped before Percy, a welcoming smile on his lips. First thing every morning, he made his way to the butler’s pantry to retrieve his morning paper, rather than having it delivered to him as surely every other duke in England did.
Last night’s strange luck seemed to have followed Percy into the day. Only now did the Duke’s question catch up to him. “Country house party?”
“Lucy will be glad you came. She was convinced you wouldn’t.”
“Lucy’s here?”
There it was, the thing inside Percy that broke whenever he heard his daughter’s name. He doubted she would be glad to see him. They’d arrived at a détente where she accepted his presence on prescribed days, but that was the extent of their relationship.
A terrible possibility now occurred to him. “Olivia isn’t here, is she?”
Although the relationship he’d forged with Olivia upon his return to England was an amicable one, to see her now, with a host of rouged-up, disheveled women in tow, would be too much.
The Duke shook his head and harrumphed discreetly. “Lucy begged to come here with Miss Radclyffe for the summer solstice. A bunch of chatter about druids and such. And since Parliament won’t reconvene until next month, why not? Never could refuse the chit anything.” The Duke’s piercing blue gaze shifted to a point beyond Percy’s shoulder. “And, who, may I inquire, have you brought with you?”
Ice shot through Percy’s veins. Given the softening of the Duke’s tone, it was a woman. One of the women he’d brought here. Pray God, let it not be Tilly.
He pivoted and saw Izzy, moving forward on slow footsteps. Reality fell on Percy like a two-ton rhinoceros.
How utterly and completely he’d fallen into his old life without a thought for its impact on his family.Again.
It was simply that when he was in the thick of the life that strayed wide of narrow aristocratic bounds of propriety, when its dangerous vibrancy was charging through his veins, he never gave a thought to the life he should be living, the one whose concerns revolved around the quality of his fare and clubs.
However, when confronted with a moment like this, well, that other life came into clear focus: sordid, all-consuming,wrong. Yet . . .
How it made him feel . . . Well, it made himfeel, and he couldn’t resist its siren song.
None of this could he say to his father.
“She’s my, uh”—think. Mistress?No—“uh”—he looked into her curious green eyes and uttered the only word that could make her presence in this house acceptable—“bride.”
