Page 10 of The Duke Decides

“I will give you a way to identify him. He is—” He gave a muffled curse as Katherine, in her guise as St. Helena, swept toward them. “Do not wander far. I will find you again.”

“There you are!” Katherine held out her hands to Louisa. “Grandmama the Empress says you must stop lurking about in corners. She wants you to circulate. Air out her gown, she says. Meet some of the more dashing blades in the room.” She winked.

The Duchess wanted to arrange a meeting with her ally. It was too late. Louisa had already been found out, like a meek little mouse, and pounced on by a greedy cat. She felt the claws sink into her even now.

Refuse to sell, and risk exposure from this man who somehow knew her darkest secret?

Or sell, protect her name and the Hospital’s reputation, and uproot the hundred and more souls who depended on her for their survival?

There was no choice to be made here. If she left them without a protector, the Hospital would be preyed upon and devoured. If she were forced to sell, with her reputation intact, she could plead for funds to build somewhere new.

Either way, the people who depended on her would lose their home. And Louisa would never be safe.

She turned at once, but her tormenter had disappeared, and she would never know him in this crush. Despair bit in as she circulated on Katherine’s arm, jostled by the crowds of people, overwhelmed by the scents and sounds of merriment on the verge of madness. She must wait, like a martyr bound to the stake, for this stranger in the night to find her again and give her a name.

The name that would mean the end of everything she had spent the last fifteen years of her life fighting to protect.

The name that would bring her life down around her ears. Again.

Chapter Four

It was a relief not to be the Duke for a while.

Gabe prowled the ballroom of Rutland House, prickling with the odd sense of being the only one who knew how out of place he was. Put him on a rooftop in Alexandria, Egypt, raising doves for food or scrounging scraps of fabric to sell, and he would make his way. The same was largely true of Wokingham, where Powlett had established the family when they arrived in England. Being poor was much the same the world over.

He supposed the same was true of being very rich, but he hadn’t experienced it long enough to know.

One thing that was the same no matter one’s social class: the way women decorated themselves to be alluring, and the way men prowled about in pursuit of them. There were so many bosoms on display in the room, so much soft, pale feminine flesh, he almost didn’t know where to look.

That was, perhaps, the one solid benefit of being the Duke now. Orde was right about one thing. The women available to him were of much higher quality than anything he’d been able to attract as Gabriel Declan, man about town, supposed bastard of a duke’s second son. Now, as the legitimate Duke in blood and truth, relatively young, and possessing an estate known to be more or less solvent, he couldn’t set a foot outside his house without becoming the target of some ambitious damsel and her aspiring mother.

He wondered how he would fare as simply himself. Without a name, without a past to stumble over, without the shadow of his history or the great glorious burden of his ducal greatness to drag about like golden chains. If he approached a woman here, trying to sate the restlessness that gnawed and scraped at him, what were his chances of success?

He decided to find out. He had to discharge this cursed favor for Rutland, who had also invited Gabe into some secret brotherhood that only English Dukes knew about and were admitted to. Having had a taste of the hazing processes required for admittance to secret societies during his time at Abington School and then Worcester College at Oxford, Gabe wasn’t altogether convinced he wished to be admitted to a society of any sort that was exclusive to the stuffy ranks of English peers. But Rutland hinted that the character of the group would suit Gabe, once he knew the others.

Thwart a blackmailer. He wasn’t sure how to go about such a thing, unless it involved fisticuffs. He was handy in a brawl, and Orde and his mates from school could attest.

Then, find a woman.

He surveyed the opportunities at hand, to take notes for later. There was toga-draped Cleopatra with a black wig, so much black kohl about her eyes that they looked bruised, and a quantity of alabaster bosom on display that would cast the marbles in the British Museum into the shade.

There was a Marie Antoinette in her shepherdess guise with a powdered wig balanced on her head and a sliver of nipple peeking above the décolleté scoop of her bodice. And there was a lady in a sheer muslin gown of decades prior, from the heyday of the Regency, who had damped her skirts so they clung to her legs and outlined her shape from the waist downward, at the risk of catching a fever. All three of them making offers he might take the liberty of inquiring about, once his business of the night was discharged.

Then the woman in the crimson gown stepped out from beside the statue where she’d been concealing herself, and Gabe saw nothing else.

It wasn’t what was on display, but the how. She was the shapeliest creature he’d seen in his life, and the court gown, fashioned for a previous century, made her look regal, dainty, demure, and despotic, all at the same time. She wore her mask and her hoops and her towering pile of curls as if she knew they were designed to devastate a man, and devastate she did.

The swish of her fan above the square shape of her bodice, with breasts pushed high by the stomacher, made him want to take her hands in his and hold them away from her body so he might inspect her properly. The narrow waist set in the swelling curves of her skirt promised womanly curves ready and waiting for the press of a man’s body.

Even the small black silk patch on the side of her face made him want to touch her. Peel it off and see the full shape of her face. Run lips, then teeth, over that delicate, gleaming skin.

She turned her head, responding to something her companion said, and Gabe’s mouth went dry. The arch of her cheekbones and the proud slope of her neck. The way her hair curled at her nape in tiny sprigs, like spring flowers. Her red lips.

The bold jut of her collarbone, inviting the sweep of fingers across satin skin, then drawing the hand lower, lower. That red silk which, in the burn of the oil lamps, burnished her skin like antique gold.

Hell’s boots. He’d never been struck dumb by a woman. He usually held his tongue during intimate exchanges as a matter of preference; those were a transaction, not a social call. Chatter was not a skill he possessed, even when he was fully clothed.

This woman made him feel naked as a babe, as if he were a clothes dummy and a great hook had yanked his suit straight off, leaving him nothing but his raw form.