“I can,” he replied calmly. “And you will.”
High-handed, arrogant…Bess could’ve told him, that was not the best way to bring Lucy around.
“Help!” Lucy rattled at the door handle. “I’m being kidnapped!”
“Are you always this excitable?” the duke inquired, arching a dark brow. He seemed no more than mildly curious.
“Only when I’m being held against my will!”
Bess restrained an unfortunate urge to laugh. Laughing at Lucy would also not help the situation, but it wasn’t easy.
“Please, Lucy, stop and think a moment. Mending fences with your brother will open doors for you that will make this Season and all its challenges worthwhile. I’m certain your mother will wish to accept.”
“Half-brother,” Lucy muttered mutinously, throwing herself back onto the velvet squabs with a scowl. “A half-brother who has never made a secret of how much he hates us, I might point out. Why are you doing this?”
In answer to her furious question, the duke folded his hands in his lap. “I do not hate you. I don’t think of you enough to hate you. Perhaps that has been a mistake. As it was recently pointed out to me, I have let things go on in this haphazard way long enough. It is time to take you in hand—not a prospect I relish, you may be sure. But I am willing to do whatever is necessary to correct the misapprehension of those like the Duke of Thornecliff who wrongly believe the Ashbourn name is to be sneered at and mocked.”
He looked at Bess, a quick, searing glance that flayed across her nerves like a splash of boiling water, then away again.
“Our father may have enjoyed making a laughingstock of our family name,” Ashbourn said coolly. “But I find I cannot countenance it.”
“Don’t you talk about Father,” Lucy hissed. “He loved us!”
A faint smile touched the corner of the duke’s mirthless mouth. “That must have been pleasant, but it has no bearing at all on the present moment.”
Good grief. There was certainly no love lost between the current duke and the previous, was there?
Bess could feel from the trembling vibrations running through the girl beside her that Lucy was about to blow the lid right off the pot. Normally, Bess would let her explode and be done with it—Bess learned at an early age not to get herself in the middle of messy family disputes, particularly those of the gentry.
But she’d already put herself squarely in the center of the tempest in this particular family teapot, so she put a restraining hand on Lucy’s arm.
“Lucy, I’m certain once you and your mother have spent a few days at Ashbourn House, it will be as if you never left.”
“You keep talking about Mama and me,” Lucy pointed out, narrowing her blue eyes. “What about you, Bess? Where are you in all of this?”
Drat the girl and her ability to ferret out the finer details! This was not the moment Bess would have chosen to impart the news that she wouldn’t be going to Ashbourn House with them.
Swallowing a sigh, Bess smiled sunnily and said, “Me? Why, I’ll be heading back to Little Kissington, of course. No point in my staying in London as your chaperone when the duke will no doubt wish to supply you with a far more suitable companion to help you make sense of the Beau Monde. And it’s glad I’ll be to sleep in my own bed again, I can tell you.”
It was all for the best, probably. If he had extended the invitation to her, she would’ve been constrained by all the same silly rules the gentry shackled themselves with. She’d not be able to go out and about on her own, to explore London as she wished.
She’d be stuck with this chaperone charade, forced to perform propriety under the judgmental eye of the Duke of Ashbourn.
No, better all around that Bess should simply go home.
Not that Lucy agreed. But even as the outraged protest visibly formed on Lucy’s face, that deep voice rolled over Bess from across the carriage.
“I’m afraid sleeping in your own bed is a pleasure you must forgo a while longer,” said the duke.
Bess slowly turned her head to stare at him and was instantly ensnared by his gaze. “I don’t understand,” she said faintly.
His eyes gleamed like the light glinting off the teeth of a poacher’s trap as it sprang shut. “If you think you are going to run along home and leave me to deal with this disaster on my own, you are sadly mistaken, Mrs. Pickford. This invitation is entirely contingent upon you joining us at Ashbourn House.”
Her breath came short, as though she’d climbed a hill carrying two full pails of milk. She might not be quite ready to go back to her quiet life in the country—but absolutely nothing good could come of her staying.
She wouldn’t have the freedom to find the adventure she was looking for. Instead, she’d be faced with daily temptation in the form of the coldest, most controlled, most dangerously seductive man she’d ever met.
“I would really prefer to go home to Wiltshire! Lucy and Henrietta will not need my company,” Bess objected, only to break off as Ashbourn shook his head with slow deliberation. He never took his eyes off her face.
