The Duke Who Lied Read online

  Hugh pushed back from his desk, his chair making a screech on the wooden floor that caused his butler to turn his face in displeasure. “Kendall?” he repeated. “Where is it?”

  He grabbed for the tray and began to sort through the letters there, shoving aside the ones from his friends in the search.

  “Here, Your Grace,” Murphy said, his tone suddenly hushed, concerned as he dug into his inside pocket and drew out a folded piece of vellum, sealed with red wax. “I-I held it aside for you.”

  Hugh snatched it and turned it over. His name was spelled incorrectly. But he hadn’t hired the man for his letter writing skills. “That will be all,” he said, his voice shaking as he turned it back and grabbed for his letter opener to break the seal.

  “Your Grace, there is one other thing—”

  “No!” Hugh waved him off impatiently. “It can wait. Thank you, Murphy.”

  The butler nodded and saw himself out, shutting the door firmly behind him. Once he had gone, Hugh rushed to the fire and took a seat there. It was a short message, thank God, for Kendall truly was a terrible writer. His handwriting was barely legible and his poor spelling made Hugh have to reread each sentence to pick out its meaning.

  But there it was, in the end, in black and white. The nightmare Hugh had been waiting for the moment he hired Kendall over a year ago.

  Aaron Walters found nother. He askt a lady to mary im. It aint publick yet. See Vycunt Quinton. His doter. —Kendall

  His hands shook as he set the letter in his lap and reached up to cover his eyes. “Fuck,” he muttered to no one in particular.

  “Can’t help you there, mate.”

  He jerked his head up to watch as one of those very dukes he had been musing over earlier, Lucas Vincent, Duke of Willowby, entered his study with Murphy at his heels.

  “I’m sorry, Your Grace, I did try to tell you that His Grace was here to see you,” Murphy sputtered.

  Hugh nodded. “It—it’s fine, Murphy. Thank you, that will be all.”

  As the servant departed, Hugh shoved the letter into his pocket and got to his feet. “Lucas,” he said, coming forward with his hand outstretched.

  Lucas rolled his eyes and tugged him in for a brief hug. As he pounded Hugh on the back, he said, “Don’t pretend I’m not your best friend.”

  “How could you not be?” Hugh said, finding some way to fall back into old habits as he crossed to pour them each a scotch from the sideboard. “The youngest member of the club and the youngest man to become duke. We were bound to be best friends, even if you didn’t write to me all those years you were running around as a spy.”

  Lucas smiled slightly. “Holding that against me even still, I see. You know you would have guessed what I was doing. I feared you would figure out why.”

  Hugh bent his head. Lucas had been gone from their circles for many years, with no word, no news. He’d worried about his friend very much. Since Lucas’s return a year before, the two men had renewed their friendship. And Lucas’s secrets, the ones that had caused him to run from his life, had come out. They had changed nothing, of course, except that Hugh wished he’d been able to help his friend in his pain.

  “Why are you here?” Hugh asked as he handed over the drink.

  Lucas sprawled himself into one of Hugh’s chairs and stared at him far too intently. “I knew you were returning today and I wanted to see you.”

  “Oh yes?” Hugh said as he took a place beside his friend. “Why is that?”

  “Because you haven’t been yourself in a long time. Everyone says it over and over again. They whisper about it at the duke meetings, you know.”

  “We don’t have duke meetings,” Hugh said with a dry smile.

  Lucas shrugged. “Perhaps you aren’t invited.”

  “It would be awkward if you are, indeed, talking about me.” He shook his head.

  Lucas’s smiled faded. “I’m tired of the subterfuge and the avoidance. I came here because I think it’s time we addressed this directly.”

  Hugh wrinkled his brow. Lucas was not the first to approach him on this subject. He was usually able to put off the others. But Lucas looked determined.

  “That isn’t very spy-like,” Hugh tried as a means of distraction. “To just come out and confront me.”

  “I’m not a spy anymore,” Lucas said softly.

  Hugh nodded. That was true. His friend had been badly injured eighteen months before, had nearly died and had been brought back to life by his now-wife, Diana. He did not work for the War Department any longer, at least not in any official capacity, though Hugh did suspect he and Diana occasionally provided some kind of consultation in that world.

  “Aren’t you?” he asked.

  Lucas’s lips pressed together, and he leaned back in his chair. “Very well, if you want to play it that way, I will behave in a way more befitting whatever you think my position is. An interrogation is really more about observation, so let me share mine with you.”

  “This is an interrogation now?” Hugh said with a rusty laugh.

  Lucas did not join in on it. “You would not allow a friendly conversation and I will not leave here without the truth, so this is what it is.” He ticked off one finger. “First, I know you were recently in Brighthollow with your sister. You adore her, you are more her father than a brother, in truth. And yet there are shadows beneath your eyes, which means you did not sleep well over the last fortnight.”

  Hugh blinked those same bleary eyes his friend had just observed and said, “Perhaps I was enjoying myself in the country.”

  “No, you weren’t,” Lucas said, and this time he did laugh. “There is a difference between the expression of a man tired because he’s been indulging himself in pleasure and a man who cannot sleep for the demons that plague him. If you’d like to observe that difference, look yourself in the mirror for the latter and look at any of your married friends for the former.”

  “Not all of us can walk away from our dukedoms as you did,” Hugh snapped, regretting the words the moment he said them, for they were harsh and ignored the pain his friend had endured in the not-so-distant past.

  But Lucas looked anything but offended. “No, I suppose not. And yet it isn’t your duties that trouble you, either. You have never shied away in discussing your problems with your estate and title with the others, even with me. But you refuse, which means you have problems of a more personal nature.”

  Hugh pushed to his feet and heard the letter in his pocket crinkle. He set his hand on the outline of it as he muttered, “You are being ridiculous.”

  “Am I?” Lucas ticked off a second finger. “My next observation is that Lizzie is now seventeen, is she not?”

  “Yes,” Hugh managed through gritted teeth. “Seventeen this February last.”

  “That means she is of an age where you might present her to court, bring her into Society here in London, even if you had no desire to drive her into a match at such a young age. And yet she is not here. She’s hidden away in Brighthollow. My sources say she has not come to Town at all, not for any reason, in over a year.”

  Hugh stiffened. Lucas was too close to the truth now. And his own pain was rising with every word he spoke. “Don’t you have something better to do, Willowby?” he snapped. “A wife to spend time with, for example?”

  Lucas smiled. “If you think Diana wasn’t the one who helped me prepare this interrogation, you do not understand my wife.”

  Hugh pivoted on him. “So you’ve corrupted that lovely woman entirely.”

  Lucas’s grin grew. “Entirely,” he said with another laugh. “And I shall not be distracted, so stop trying.”

  “Lizzie will come out next year,” Hugh grunted, folding his arms as he did so.

  “You don’t sound certain.”

  Hugh threw up his hands and paced away. Of course he was not certain. Lizzie was entirely against coming out. She refused to even discuss it now. And while no one would talk
if she made her debut at eighteen versus seventeen, if the time stretched to nineteen, to twenty and beyond? The talk she was so terrified of creating would begin without her.

  Already, it seemed it had, at least amongst his friends.

  Lucas moved toward him, and now his expression was gentler. Like he was beginning to understand just the kind of pain Hugh was struggling with. “I shall move on to my third observation,” he said softly.

  “Do. I am on the edge of my seat.”

  “I watched you shove a letter into your pocket the moment I arrived here, and since you keep touching that same pocket every time I mention Lizzie, I have to assume that you have received some kind of news since your arrival. Would you like to read it?”

  “I already have.”

  “But you want to again.” Lucas said it as fact, not a guess. And of course, the bastard was right. Hugh desperately wanted to read the letter again. To start making plans on how to deal with what was within those few lines.

  “I can wait,” he ground out through clenched teeth.

  Lucas folded his arms. “So can I.”

  They held gazes, and for a moment Hugh was transported back to so many years ago. When he had run through fields with this man and all the others, when he had believed anything was possible. When they had cried together and laughed together and he’d known he could depend on them for anything. Especially Lucas.

  He found his hand moving to his pocket and withdrew the now-crumpled letter. He stared at it a moment. He wanted the help his friend offered. Not just the emotional kind, but Lucas’s connections could perhaps do even more for him. Could find out more about Walters. About this woman he had apparently pursued and won, very likely under false pretenses.

  “Hugh, you are my best friend,” Lucas whispered. “You were thrust into responsibility at far too young an age. And unlike me, you didn’t run. A year or so ago, you talked to Baldwin, at least, about trouble with Lizzie, and you have never been the same since. I look at you and I see you buckling under the weight of whatever this secret is. Let me take some of it from your shoulders.”

  With a shuddering sigh, he handed over the note to his friend and watched as he read it. Lucas’s face was impassive as he looked over the lines a few times, then handed it back.

  “It’s meaningless to me. Written in a hand of someone who obviously isn’t of your rank, referring to names of people I do not have a relationship to, though I think I met this…I assume he means viscount…at some party I was dragged to. But it clearly means a great deal to you. So explain it. And let me help you.”

  Hugh stared at him, and it felt like a lifetime passed before he could find his voice. “If I tell one of you, I know it is telling all. This is too…sensitive to do that.”

  Lucas’s brow wrinkled. “I will not breathe a word to anyone. Diana, I suppose, but it will go no further than the two of us. I have an enormous capacity to keep secrets—it used to keep me alive, remember?”

  Hugh bent his head. The weight Lucas had observed upon his shoulders felt so devilishly heavy in that moment. The lifeline his dearest friend offered was tempting beyond measure.

  “More than a year ago, right before Baldwin met Helena, Lizzie was…seduced.” He said that word and his stomach turned. “She was seduced by a man.”

  Lucas’s eyes went wide. “No.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I was…distracted. I saw the signs that there was some trouble in her world, but I did not act swiftly enough. He convinced her to run away to Scotland to marry. When I found out, I raced after them. He was a fortune hunter, a rogue of the worst description. But I was too…I was too—”

  Lucas caught his arm and squeezed. “I understand. She did not marry him, did she?”

  “No. That, at least, I thwarted,” Hugh said with a shuddering sigh. “Not that it mattered. Her reputation would be in tatters if the story came out. They’d been alone more than one night while on the road. I paid that bastard to keep his mouth shut in the hopes I could still provide her with a future.”

  Lucas straightened. “Is he blackmailing you?”

  “No.” Hugh snorted out a humorless laugh. “I gave him so much money, he would not have to come after me again for a very long time. I did so in the hopes that Lizzie would find her happiness in the interim and then whatever he said would matter little. It isn’t blackmail that has troubled me.”

  Lucas frowned and glanced at the letter in his hand. “This man, it’s the Walters this person refers to, isn’t it?”

  Hugh nodded, and he was certain his misery was plain on his face. “Yes. And as you can see, he has found another lady to pursue. This time I assume he has been more conventional in his engagement plans, but I have no doubt he has used the money he wrung from me in desperation to convince this woman he is not a fortune hunter. And yet he is.”

  “You didn’t stop him in order to protect your sister from a reckless act,” Lucas breathed. “And so you have lived the last year regretting that you did not thwart him as he deserved.”

  “And fearing he would do exactly what it appears he’s done and find another victim,” Hugh finished. “My source says their engagement is not public yet, but how long before they begin the announcements? A week or two to arrange some kind of sparkling ball? And then it will be too late to escape him without damaging this new woman’s reputation just as he would have destroyed Lizzie.”

  “I’m certain that is his intent. To be sure that if his true motives are discovered, it will be too late to get out of the arrangement,” Lucas muttered as he paced away. “And if he was willing to take advantage of Lizzie’s sweet nature, I cannot give him the benefit of the doubt that he would have changed since then or truly loved this new woman.”

  Hugh barely maintained control over the anger that still burned inside his chest. “He mocked my sister after he ripped her world to pieces. There is nothing decent or good in his heart.”

  Lucas looked at him. “How is she?”

  Hugh stared out the window in the distance. “Brokenhearted still. At first it was because she had truly cared for the man and she mourned whatever future she had hoped to have. But as time has passed, I’ve watched her turn her loathing away from him and toward herself. No matter what I say, she sees herself as a fool with no ability to know what is true and what is not. She only wants to stay in the country, locked away from everyone. She barely receives visitors, and only at my insistence. He broke her spirit. I wish I had killed him when I had the chance.”

  “Doing so only would have hurt her more,” Lucas reminded him. “Which you know, or else I assume you would have done just that.”

  Hugh jerked out a nod. “Yes. And here we are. This new woman is just as endangered by Walters as Lizzie was. I doubt she or her family have any idea the snake they are letting into their home.”

  Lucas tilted his head. “That is not your responsibility, Hugh.”

  “Isn’t it?” Hugh let out his breath slowly. “I have power and I could have destroyed him. It was my pride that kept me from it.”

  “Perhaps your pride had some part, but it was the love you feel for your sister that kept you from publicly flaying him. Her well-being and reputation were your main concerns.”

  He shrugged. “Either way, I have a responsibility to ensure this man never repeats his actions. So I must do something to stop him now.”

  Lucas took a long step closer. “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Hugh breathed. “But I will find a way. I will stop him, by any means necessary.”

  Chapter Two

  Miss Amelia Quinton watched in the mirror’s reflection as her maid, Theresa, swept her dark hair up in a pretty style. She smiled at her face, seeing all her happiness reflected there, then reached up to pinch her cheeks and make them even more pink.

  “What are you on about, miss?” Theresa asked with a laugh as she continued at her work. “Staring at yourself like you’ve never seen a mirror before.”

&n
bsp; “I’m just trying to see if I look different now that I am an engaged lady,” Amelia said.

  Theresa’s smile was kind even as she shook her head. “You are lovely, just as you have always been lovely. No man or future could ever change that.”

  Amelia rolled her eyes at her maid.

  “But Aaron has changed my future, and so very romantically,” she argued.

  “So you’ve said.” Theresa’s tone was dry as she slipped a few pins between her lips and mumbled, “I assume you’d very much like to tell the story again.”

  Amelia tried to keep from bouncing, but it was nearly impossible. “I know it bores you right to tears, but you must understand how difficult it is not to be able to share with my friends. Papa is very firm that we keep the news private until we make the formal announcements next week.”

  “Go ahead then,” Theresa said with a wave of her hand. “I will pretend to listen.”

  Amelia laughed at her teasing and then shut her eyes so she might relive every moment of the story she would tell in her mind. “We were out for a walk in the garden,” she said. “The weather had been positively putrid for days, but that morning bright, happy sunshine had pushed through the clouds and was shining so warmly on us.”

  “Practically providence,” Theresa said, and gently slipped a pin into Amelia’s locks.

  Amelia opened one eye and shot her a look. “It could have been. I was pondering the daisies when I turned to say something and there he was, on bended knee just like the paintings of knights of old.” She clasped her hands together. “He asked for my hand after reciting a…frankly very long piece of poetry, and of course I said yes.”

  Theresa nodded. “He knows your sense of romance, that much is clear. I assume your marriage will be only sunshine, flowers and butterflies for the rest of your days.”

  Amelia smiled at the apt description of how she pictured a romantic marriage to a man who seemed to understand her very soul. He liked all the same things she did, he shared almost all her opinions—in every way he had fashioned himself to be the man she had dreamed of since she was a little girl.