Not That Duke, page 1
Dedication
For all the befreckled, bespectacled women in the world
and the men who love glasses and freckles,
especially Alessandro.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Note
Part One Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Two Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Epilogue
A Note about Steam Engines, Spectacles, and Red-Haired Girls
About the Author
Also by Eloisa James
Copyright
About the Publisher
Note
A note to readers of the Would-Be Wallflowers series:
There’s no need to have read The Reluctant Countess, but if you have, you’ll notice that Part 1 of Not That Duke takes place in the same time frame.
Part One
Prologue
February 20, 1816
12, Mayfair Place
The Duke of Huntington’s townhouse
“I’ve found your duchess.” Determination was stamped all over the dowager duchess’s face. “Lady Stella Corsham is perfect for you: the granddaughter of a marquess, with a sizable dowry. Able-bodied, well-bred, and original.”
In an act of profound self-control, Silvester Parnell, Duke of Huntington, did not roll his eyes.
Or otherwise indicate that in demanding her son marry a version of herself—a short, opinionated woman, albeit with spectacles rather than a monocle—his mother had lost her mind.
“‘Original’ is not a characteristic that interests me,” he said instead.
His mother’s eyes sharpened. “I suppose you are looking for a girlish nitwit who will entertain ladies for tea and never embarrass her children.”
He pretended to think about it. “Does she have to be a nitwit?”
“Yes,” the dowager snapped, adding: “Because you want her to swill tea all day long.”
When his parents first married, rather than redecorate the ducal country house as did most new duchesses, Her Grace had redesigned the chimney on her husband’s first experimental steam engine. In the years since, she had delighted in flouting society with everything from her clothing (unconventional) to her entertainments (Julius Caesar performed by trained rats was a notable example).
Silvester and his sisters had grown up with the full knowledge that “polite” society considered his mother—and by extension, her family—to be eccentric, if not mad. Once sent to Eton, where he routinely engaged in fisticuffs in his parents’ defense, Silvester came to the conclusion that although he adored his mother, a less divisive duchess would be preferable.
“Do you think I am unaware of how much you and your sisters wish that I would blend into the wallpaper like most of the noodling nobility?” she demanded now.
“I am proud of your chimney,” Silvester said, meaning it. His mother’s clack box feed pipe for locomotives had survived four iterations of ducal steam engines and was still in use around the country.
“Lady Stella—”
Silvester interrupted. “Which doesn’t mean I want to marry Lady Stella.”
To be clear, he didn’t mind Stella’s lack of height or her spectacles. Certainly he appreciated her rather glorious bosom.
The eccentricity? That he minded.
Rumor had it that she’d read the entire encyclopedia, which explained the fact that their conversations were often startling. And interesting.
He liked arguing with Stella; he just didn’t want to marry her.
“Want to? Want to?” The dowager pounced like a robin on a worm. “What does want have to do with it? You need a duchess. Lady Stella is suitable.”
“My fiancée will be of my choosing, Mother. I would like to be in love with my wife.”
She snorted inelegantly. “Romance is a fool’s game, nothing to do with marriage. You’re making a laughingstock of yourself mooning about after Yasmin Régnier.”
Fool he may be, but Silvester intended to marry Yasmin. She had charm, hair the color of old ducats, a naughty giggle . . . More than that, he and Yasmin were friends, never mind the fact that he’d love to bed her.
He felt the pull of her in his bones, deep in his gut.
Perhaps even in his heart.
“Moonblind.” The dowager waved her monocle at him. “Lady Yasmin is not for you.” His mother was small in stature, but she made up for it with gargantuan willpower.
“I intend to ask Yasmin to marry me,” Silvester told her.
His mother replaced her monocle and eyed him. “You’d better open the Dower House. Lady Yasmin won’t want to live with me.”
A full renovation of the master bedchamber and Dower House at the ducal estate, Huntington Grange, was already in progress. “You will come to love Yasmin,” he said, not at all sure, but it was worth a try.
Her Grace snorted again. “Every Season, one woman attracts all the men like seagulls on a gutted fish.”
“A lovely metaphor,” Silvester commented.
“A lady who tolerates fools will make a dreadful wife.”
“Why?” Silvester inquired, though he didn’t really care.
“Because she tolerates fools,” his mother repeated. “She has no bollocks!”
“No woman has bollocks, as they are male appendages,” Silvester said. “May I point out that Stella has as many suitors as Yasmin?”
“Fortune hunters and third sons,” the dowager said contemptuously. “You’d be the only duke. My point is that Lady Stella braves ballrooms in spectacles, although society dictates that ladies should blunder blindly around the dance floor.”
“An idiotic rule,” Silvester agreed.
“Don’t you see?” his mother demanded. “You need to find a woman who has backbone, not just a woman at the center of a crowd.”
His mother was a brilliant tactician. She delivered that line with just the right amount of scorn. If women were allowed to debate in the House of Lords, the opposition would wither.
Luckily, he had a lifetime’s worth of experience thwarting her demands.
“No,” Silvester stated.
From the moment he entered Eton at the age of eight, he had carefully shaped a reputation for easy charm to counter his family’s reputation for eccentricity.
That didn’t mean he hadn’t inherited his mother’s steely core. Or his father’s entitled ferocity.
“I will never marry Lady Stella.”
The best debaters know when to retreat. His mother bounded to her feet and headed for the drawing room door. “You won’t marry Lady Yasmin, either,” she said over her shoulder.
He opened his mouth to retort—
But she was gone.
Chapter One
March 24, 1816 (just over a month later)
The Duke and Duchess of Trent’s annual ball
Bearing the weight of a man sounded interesting . . . until it happened.
Mind you, Lord Belper was a particularly healthy specimen. Stella found herself pinned to the floor, gasping for air.
She had made an error while dancing a quadrille and bumped her partner, who collided with her bosom and toppled like an elm tree struck by lightning.
“Lord Belper,” she rasped, pushing ineffectively at his shoulders. From above came a swell of alarmed voices, along with more than a few giggles.
“Wha’ happened?” he asked groggily. Perhaps his head hit the floor when he fell. Hers certainly had.
“I can’t breathe,” she gasped.
“I can,” he informed her.
His weight suddenly disappeared as someone hauled him upright. “Belper, you dunderhead,” a deep voice said. “Are you in the whiskey again?”
Stella took a desperate gulp of air and realized that her vision was blurry. “Does anyone see my spectacles?” She should sit up and look for them, but her head was spinning.
“Drink had nothing to do with it,” Lord Belper said, sounding sulky. “She tripped me!”
“Lady Stella, are you injured?” She knew that voice, she thought fuzzily. Deep, low, confident . . . Without her spectacles all she could see was a circle of blurry heads standing out against a bright haze of chandeliers.
“Can’t see where she goes . . .”
“Blind,” someone else remarked.
And then, worst of all: “Bounced on her like a featherbed.” With a laugh.
Just
Stella squeaked and slapped a hand over her bosom just as a man bent closer. She instantly realized who had spoken earlier. This particular duke smelled like late autumn: apples, spice, a touch of starch, a hint of snow in the air.
Altogether delectable.
Her head cleared abruptly. She was lying on the floor, and her rumpled gown was pulled above her ankles. Her aunt would have hysterics.
“My spectacles?” she asked again, rolling to the side and yanking down her skirts before she came to her knees, peering between the feet that surrounded her.
The Duke of Huntington crouched down beside her. “I have them, Lady Stella. They are undamaged.”
His Grace had astonishingly beautiful eyes: as gray as a winter day to go along with that . . . that autumnal odor of his. Stella blinked up at him before she snatched her spectacles and put them back on her nose, threading the sides around her ears.
He put a strong hand under her elbow. “Are you uninjured?” Silvester asked, once she was on her feet. She thought of him as Silvester because the name suited him. It was a fancy, elegant name for a fancy, elegant man.
“I’m fine,” she mumbled.
Stella thought of her body as capable of walking and dancing, most of the time. Luckily she was sturdily constructed, since her bones never broke, no matter how often she tumbled to the ground.
But around Silvester? With his broad shoulders, the handsome curve of his jaw, the easy swing of his muscled body, his gray eyes, even his commanding nose . . .
His smile.
Around him, her body became her enemy, serving up shaking knees and quickened breath. Desire that flared straight down her back after a glance at his lower lip. Or the touch of his hand on her arm.
He went to Stella’s head like potent wine.
The very sad, very secret, truth was that she was captivated by a frivolous aristocrat.
“Stella!” Her aunt pushed through the crowd. “What happened?” Her eyes were wide with alarm.
Mrs. Thyme’s eyes were often wide with alarm, since Stella didn’t seem to be able to maintain the refined tone on which her aunt depended. On which civilization depended, if Mrs. Thyme was to be believed.
Stella often said the wrong thing. She argued with gentlemen. She regularly dropped things to the floor, including, at times, herself.
She was unrefined, to say the least.
“We fell,” Lord Belper said, displaying a remarkable ability to synthesize facts.
Silvester nodded at Stella and melted into the crowd.
“I’m glad neither of you were injured,” said a cheerful voice as an arm wound around Stella’s waist. “By next Season, we’ll all be far more proficient at the quadrille. For now, we shall retire, dear.”
Their hostess, the Duchess of Trent, was one of the few women in London whom Stella thought of as a friend. Perhaps because Merry was an American, she was happy to talk about subjects considered inappropriate for a lady.
“There’s no need—” Stella began.
“Your gown is creased,” Merry said firmly.
“Given that you insist on wearing those spectacles, I just don’t understand how you fell!” Stella’s aunt cried after they were ushered into the duchess’s own bedchamber.
“I was confused by the quadrille,” Stella explained.
Lady Jersey had recently introduced the dance, and it had taken off like wildfire. But prancing back and forth in little quadrangles while circling at precisely the right moment wasn’t easy.
“I expect it was Lord Belper’s fault,” Merry said. “He drinks to excess. He walked into a lamppost at Vauxhall a few weeks ago.”
“No, it was my fault,” Stella confessed. “I misjudged the distance between us and turned too early.”
“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Thyme wailed. “You’ve had the best of dance masters. Your uncle and I have shirked no expense. And yet social indiscretions follow you everywhere.”
“Me too,” Merry said kindly, if ungrammatically.
Mrs. Thyme waved her fan in the air as if she were conducting an orchestra. “Last week, Stella knocked over a glass of red wine that poured into Lord Pettigrew’s lap. He was wearing pale yellow breeches. I was hopeful he’d come up to scratch with a proposal, but now he’s dancing attendance on Lady Lydia. Moreover, my butler tells me that the table linen, woven in Venice, will never be the same. Never!”
“Here’s a robe, Stella,” Merry said. “Lucy will sponge and press your gown, and you’ll be back downstairs in no time.”
While Mrs. Thyme amused herself by recounting all of Stella’s mishaps since the Season began, the duchess’s maid eased Stella’s gown up and over her head.
“Please send up a tray of champagne and some canapés, Lucy,” Merry said.
“Lord Belper was stretched on top of her,” Mrs. Thyme moaned, returning to her previous lament. “Everyone will think the worst!”
Merry shrugged. “The worst being that Belper took some pleasure in the act? I doubt it.”
“He took advantage!”
Her Grace winked at Stella. “Dear Mrs. Thyme, may I suggest that you return to the ball and make certain that no one has vulgarly suggested Belper chose to leap atop Stella in the middle of my annual ball? I will keep your niece company, as I would welcome a chance to rest my feet.”
Stella sighed after the door closed. “My aunt is convinced that every man who dances with me is a wolf. As well as those who don’t dance with me.”
Merry grinned at that. “I encountered a wolf or two in my first Season in London. My husband among them.” Responding to a quiet knock, she rose and went to the door.
Stella would not have called Merry’s husband wolfish. The Duke of Trent was dignified and handsome in a distant sort of way.
Yet her aunt was convinced that all men were lustful marauders. Hounds straining at the leash, eager to destroy a lady’s reputation for sexual or financial gain. Her greatest fear was that a man would climb into Stella’s bedchamber from the conservatory roof, but since Mr. Thyme religiously nurtured seedlings over the winter, he flatly refused to tear down the greenhouse.
Practically from the moment Mrs. Thyme took on the unexpected burden of raising her orphaned niece, she had made a point of informing Stella that men want more than a kiss.
Worse than a kiss.
But lo these many years later . . .
To Stella’s mind, the evidence just wasn’t there.
Lord Belper had taken no pleasure in bouncing on her like a featherbed. She had never experienced the press of a male thigh or even the brush of a knee during a waltz. No one offered her illicit kisses in the shrubbery.
Stella’s conclusion?
Male lust was wildly overestimated.
Chapter Two
Merry carried a silver tray across the room and set it down. “One of the irritating things about being a duchess is that the title supposedly renders one incapable of labor. I had to wrestle this out of my butler’s hands.”
Stella leaned forward and tapped one of the champagne glasses before wrapping her hand around it. Even wearing her spectacles, she had trouble judging how far away an object was.
“Bottoms up!” Merry said cheerily. “That’s an American toast, by the way. I heard it on my last visit to Boston.”
Stella took a gulp of champagne before returning to the subject they had been discussing. “I haven’t seen much evidence of gentlemen who scheme to damage a lady’s virtue. I haven’t experienced it, I mean.”
Merry opened her mouth, but Stella added hastily, “It could be, of course, that my red hair and freckles, not to mention the spectacles, are enough to curb their lust.”
“Pooh!” Merry retorted. “Your hair is beautiful. One of my dearest friends, Mrs. Cleopatra Addison, has fiery red hair, and I assure you that she had most of the male population at her feet when she debuted. What’s more, to be frank, your bosom is a thing of beauty.”
Stella generally thought of her breasts as annoyingly large compared to the rest of her but she smiled a thank-you. “My aunt has warned me many times that unmarried men will attempt to kiss me. They haven’t.”
