They’d seen their fair share of uninvited guests since Ambrose’s passing, but none so brazen as the Duke of Grantham. Ambrose’s creditors had been nasty enough, but they had at least contented themselves with pounding on the door and shouting curses at the windows, their hands fisted and threats on their lips. None of them had dared to attack her door, and then stroll into her kitchen as cool as you please, as if they had every right to be here.
Only a duke would be so shameless as that, so certain he wouldn’t be held to account for his behavior. It was a wonder he hadn’t plopped down at her kitchen table with a plate of biscuits and a cup of tea.
She eyed him. He’d risen to his feet despite her warning to remain seated and was lounging against the kitchen table as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Dear God, the gall of the man! He was practically daring her to shoot him. Her wrists ached from the weight of the pistol, but she held it steady in clenched fingers, the grip tucked tightly against her palm.
She’d known he’d come, sooner or later, but she thought she’d have more time.
Ambrose was hardly cold in his grave, yet here was the duke, tall and broad and expensive, his shoulders nearly as wide as the doorway behind him, his head a mere foot from the heavy beams in the ceilings.
How could she not have known at once who he was? Ambrose’s creditors were plain men with aprons under their serviceable coats, not sleek, elegant creatures like the one before her, with his gleaming dark hair, maddeningly perfect aristocratic nose, and gold watch chain dangling from the pocket of his richly embroidered silk waistcoat.
“Ah,” he murmured. “I see Ambrosedidmention me. You’ve gone quite pale.” He pulled a chair away from the table. “Perhaps you’d better sit down. May I help you to a chair?”
She resisted the urge to back away from him, to throw the pistol at him, to turn and flee. Instead, she raised her chin, even as a tremor drifted down her spine at that cold, gray gaze. “Tell me, Your Grace. Is it now considered acceptable for a duke to enter a private home without so much as a by-your-leave? Have the laws of England changed without my knowing of it?”
One dark eyebrow rose. “Not that I’m aware, no.”
“Then you do not, in fact, have any right to be here at all.” Her voice was shaking, but only a little. “As that is the case, I must insist once again that you take your leave.”
“We’re back to this, are we?” His mouth curved in an amiable smile. “Come now, madam. You’re not going to shoot a duke. I believe the Crown frowns upon that sort of thing.”
“I believe the Crown also frowns upon strange men accosting defenseless young ladies in their homes.” Especially men the size of the Duke of Grantham, whose sheer magnitude made her perfectly serviceable kitchen feel as if it belonged in a doll’s house.
Why, the man’s legs alone seemed to stretch for miles.
His gaze moved from the muzzle of the pistol to her face. “You’re hardly defenseless. Still, if you did intend to shoot me, you’d have done so by now. Come now, madam. I mean you no harm. May we not sit down, and have a cup of tea?”
So polite, so charming. Ambrose had told her he would be.
Ambrose’s voice had warmed with affection when he spoke of the Tenth Duke of Grantham, but he’d also taken care to caution her about the man. He’d told her the duke would present himself as an old friend of his, and thus as a friend of hers, and while that wasn’t a lie, precisely—not quite—neither could she entirely trust him. He’d told her over and over again to be extremely cautious when it came to the Duke of Grantham.
What hehadn’tsaid was that he’d summoned the duke here himself.
That letter the duke had produced—or the scrawled note, more accurately—she’d never laid eyes on it before, but there was no mistaking Ambrose’s messy, slanting scrawl. He’d written it. He’d summoned Grantham to Fairford with a cryptic invitation to “seize his treasure.”
What could he have meant? There was, alas, a shocking lack of treasure to seize at Hammond Court, unless one considered a mountain of debt a treasure.
The only thing of any value was the property itself, but surely Ambrose couldn’t have meant for the Duke of Grantham to have Hammond Court. Why, the duke’s country seat was a mere five or six miles from here, and a grander, more ducal residence she couldn’t imagine.
What did the duke want with Hammond Court, when he had Grantham Lodge?
But why, then, would Ambrose lure the Duke of Grantham from London to Fairford with false promises of treasure? She couldn’t begin to imagine, but Ambrose did have his secrets, and while she’d never known a kinder, more generous man than he, there was no denying this was just the sort of mystery he would have delighted in.
Whatever the reason, the duke was here, rather like a plague of locusts, and for all that she’d just as soon send him to the devil with a pistol ball to the head, the cursed man was right about one thing.
Ambrose had brought him here, and he must have had a reason to do so.
“I don’t believe you’ve told me your name, madam. Now that you know mine, it seems only fair I should know yours in return.”
“I think not, Your Grace. You won’t be here long enough to use it, in any case.” She had no intention of telling him her name, no matter how sneakily he tried to squeeze the information out of her.
“In what capacity did you serve Ambrose? You don’t look much like a maidservant to me.” He cocked his head, studying her with cool silver eyes. “Were you his paramour?”
Paramour! Before she could stop it, an incredulous laugh burst from her lips. For pity’s sake, Ambrose was—had been—three decades her senior! But then that sort of thing happened all the time within the aristocracy, with fathers sacrificing daughters scarcely out of pinafores on the altar of their ambitions.
But she wasn’t about to explain herself to the Duke of Grantham. The less he knew about her, the better. “I’m afraid I must insist you be on your way, Your Grace.” She gestured toward the kitchen door with her chin. “Now.”
She waited, the only sound the drip of water falling into the pail she’d set under a leak in the adjacent stillroom, yet the odious man didn’t move. Dear God, was she really going to have to shoot him? She didn’t fancy it at all, but perhaps a graze to his leg might convince him to—
