He leaned forward as well, resting his forearms on his spread knees in a way that he knew made his hulking size appear even more monstrous. He let the mask of the duke slip, only a little, just enough to let The Berserker glower out at her through his eyes. His lip curled, too, but into a snarl rather than a smile.
“I would sooner burn the place to the ground.”
Chapter Four
Bess stared across the carriage at Ashbourn and wondered what the penalty was for strangling a duke. Probably hanging or something equally terrible.
Though surely no one who’d met this particular duke would blame her.
Anyone who’d faced that particular look on this particular duke’s face and survived it would think her the bravest soul who ever lived. Bess swallowed hard against an instinctive urge to back down.
He was just so…physically present, in a way she had not expected of a peer. From what she’d heard of him from his half-sisters, she would’ve expected him to be priggish and stuffy, overly concerned with his own importance in Society. Soft.
Not this duke.
This duke was hard, in every sense of the word. He was soberly, if impeccably, dressed, in a well-fitted dark blue coat over dun-colored trousers, with a snowy white linen shirt and a cravat of blue gray tied in a simple yet elegant style.
And, most unfortunately, he did not seem to be a fool.
Fools were easy to manage. This man was not. Especially not when Bess could hardly find her balance in the conversation, so aware was she of the cold marble planes of his face; the taut, muscular bulk of his shoulders; the tight taper of his waist; and the length and strength of his legs.
The Duke of Ashbourn loomed, even when sitting perfectly upright with correct posture. When he let his thick, muscular thighs widen and hunched over them, he seemed to take up all the available air in the carriage’s interior.
She would have gasped when he growled about burning his own house down, but there wasn’t enough breath in her lungs.
So instead, she pulled herself together and said, “That is ridiculous. I have known mules less stubborn. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You are a man who is used to the entire world revolving around you.”
His sharp laugh startled her. She sat up a bit, disconcerted to realize how close their faces had been.
“I assure you,” he said drily, “I have never known the world to care overmuch for my wishes. Which is not a complaint—I have learned to make the world do as I wish, which is certainly a more useful skill than simply waiting for things to work themselves out.”
Frustration coiled in Bess’s chest and curled her hands into fists. “Then why can’t you see that you ought to be reconciling with your sisters and helping them in society!”
“Lady Gemma is now a duchess.” His jaw set, a muscle ticking at the back of it. “She informed me herself that she needs no assistance from me.”
“Well, Lucy does need your help,” Bess argued. “The kind of help she can only get from a wealthy, titled relative willing to sponsor her debut by introducing her to the right people and garnering her invites to the right parties. Gemma might be a duchess now, but she is not in a position to spend weeks in London away from her new husband and the life they’re building together, nor does she have the connections you have amongst the Ton.”
The help Ashbourn could offer would make the difference between Lucy having no choice but to skulk home to Five Mile House with her tail between her legs, or…the choice of a very different future. A future she, in all her nineteen-year-old wisdom, didn’t currently think she wanted.
But in Bess’s view, there was nothing quite so precious in this world as having a choice. She thought it might be worth putting up with a little stubbornness to give Lucy a chance to say yea or nay later on down the road.
Bess glanced out the window of the carriage at the closed door of the doctor’s surgery. Only a few more minutes, surely, before Lucy reappeared and this chance to sway the Duke of Ashbourn to the correct course would be lost.
Attempting to moderate the impatience she felt, Bess finished, “And surely it is in your best interest, as well as hers, to give that help.”
“I don’t see how.” His voice was chillier than the frost that rimed the edges of Bucklebury Pond each winter. “The connection between us is of the most tenuous kind—a state of affairs that I imagine suits us both very well, given her reaction to my interference moments ago on the riverbank.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I take it back; I don’t understand you at all. Now you are pretending not to grasp the most basic concepts of family connection? You, the same man who came all the way out to Wiltshire to tell Gemma to pack it in and leave Five Mile House because it was beneath the family dignity to work in a pub! Oh yes, I know you are a man who is keenly aware of the way your sisters’ doings reflect on you and your family name.”
That muscle in his jaw jumped once more, stark against the clean, cold lines of his haughty face. “But as you point out, that is nothing new. Lucy and her mother and sister have been making spectacles of themselves for years. Why should I take notice now?”
“Because now you are the head of the family.”
Bess was breathing hard, she noticed distantly, her ire raised in a way she had seldom allowed herself to experience. There was something terribly invigorating about it. “When a cad like the Duke of Thornecliff thinks he can say what he likes, do what he likes, with Lady Lucy Lively—that is what reflects badly on you. Not Lucy’s natural, vivacious, unspoiled behavior.”
If Bess had not been watching his face so closely, avidly tracking his extraordinary eyes for any flicker of expression, she would have missed it. But there, deep in the colorless depths of his gaze—that was a spark of anger when she reminded him of Thorne’s unacceptable conduct.
Running hot with some combination of righteous indignation and the undeniable thrill of speaking her mind to a duke, Bess was emboldened to poke a gloved finger into his chest.
