Dukes By the Dozen

Every bit of exhilaration that had been coursing through her body turned sharp and stinging, driving fear through her instead. She tried to pull away from her knight but he refused, using his body to shield her from her sire.

He gentled their embrace, however, and tried to soothe her with long strokes down her back and arms. She looked up at him then, her heart rabbiting in her chest, but his hazel eyes remained steady on her—as if trying to convey that everything would be all right.

He was wrong, of course. Her father would kill him! Might even get away with it, given his power and influence. What a fool she’d been to come here, to think she could have this moment out of time for herself before she was married off.

But she would not allow her knight to pay for her sins.

Emmaline ducked out of his arms and neatly side-stepped him, putting herself firmly between the two men as she faced her father squarely.

Her throat went dry.

It wasn’t rage she saw on her father’s face, but cold fury, the awful tic in his jaw a dead giveaway to his thoughts.

He was definitely plotting her knight’s demise.

“Father,” she began. She had to defuse the situation before it got out of hand. She willed her knight to stay out of it, to let her handle this.

But he turned to face her father as well.

“Montgomery,” he said.

Emmaline started, certain she’d misheard. How did he—?

But her father’s widening eyes confirmed that the two men knew each other already.

“Granville?”

Granville. Granville. Where had she heard that name?

A snippet of gossip flitted through her memory. “Granville, I think. Some distant second cousin or some such. Imagine, one of the oldest dukedoms in England going to a country barrister.”

Which meant—

Emmaline’s skin turned to ice.

Her knight was also her father’s duke?

The maybe-duke.

Your duke, he’d said.

Oh, my Lord! Had he known all along who she was?

She flushed hot with humiliation, remembering all the things she’d said. With shame, as well, for making assumptions about him. But drat it all, he shouldn’t have let her labor under such misapprehensions! She turned to demand answers from him, but he appeared as shocked to see her father as the other man was to see him.

Emmaline shifted her gaze between the two of them, reeling. For a long moment, silence reigned. It seemed they were all trying to find their equilibrium.

Her father recovered first, his brows dipping as his lips turned up in a satisfied grimace, which was as close as her father came to a smile.

“So it is Granville you’ve been meeting all these mornings,” he said. “Not quite how I intended for you to bring the man up to scratch, but I applaud your ingenuity, daughter. Well done.”

She went cold once again. Ignoring her father, she whirled to face her—Granville. Surely he wouldn’t believe she’d be so dishonorable.

But his face had turned inscrutable, a marble bust once again—cold, beautiful, unapproachable.

“I would never,” she whispered, but he gave no indication he’d heard.

“I expect you will do the honorable thing,” her father demanded.

Granville didn’t look at her, only dipped his chin in a sharp nod. “Of course.”

“I shall expect you in my study at one of the clock, then.”

“Just so,” Granville agreed.

And he turned and walked away.

Half past four

Montgomery House, Mayfair

THEY’D BEEN CLOSETED in her father’s study for an age.

Emmaline had been pacing outside for just as long.

“You’ll make yourself ill,” her sister warned.

No more than she already was. She stopped in front of the door once more and plastered her ear against the wood, even as she knew the futility of it. That door was a least an inch and a half of solid English oak, as she could attest. When she’d been a young girl, she’d nearly lost her pinky finger when the heavy door closed on it during a game of hide-and-seek with Amelia. The bone hadn’t healed properly, and it still ached sometimes.

As was her habit when she was nervous, she ran her thumb up and down the inside of that finger, caressing the misshapen knuckle. A small, barely noticeable imperfection, but her mother had acted like it was the end of the world. “Who will marry a girl with a mangled hand?” she’d cried dramatically, and poor Amelia had been punished for allowing it to happen.

Joke’s on you, Mother, Emmaline thought. Apparently, a duke would be marrying her, mangled hand and all. Perhaps against his will.

Lord, she still couldn’t get her mind around it all. Her knight was the duke’s heir presumptive.

And he may very well believe that she’d set out to trap him from the first.

“Come, sit with me,” Amelia cajoled, patting the blue-and-cream-striped settee next to her. “That door is not going to open any sooner, no matter how many times you try to eavesdrop or how many holes you wear in the rug.”