The Duke of St. Giles Read online

  The DUKE

  of ST. GILES

  {Rookery Rakes, Book One}

  JILLIAN EATON

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  © 2015 by Jillian Eaton

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  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form is forbidden without the written permission of the author.

  SELECTED PRAISE FOR JILLIAN EATON

  “Romance lovers, [The Duke of St. Giles] is a book you’ll definitely want to read.” – Imagine A World

  “Fall in love, embrace the ride, and enjoy the thrill.” – Book Freak

  “[The Runaway Duchess] is fast paced and filled with chemistry. A must read for any historical romance readers who love a good romp through England.” – My Book Addiction and More

  “Enjoyable, sexy novella.” – Rogues Under the Covers

  “Jillian Eaton finds the perfect balance between intense emotions, sizzling chemistry, and light-hearted humor.” – Swept Away by Romance

  “Once I got started I couldn’t put it down.” – Bitten By Romance

  “[The Runaway Duchess] will sweep readers off their feet and into a whirlwind of romance and intrigue.” – Night Owl Review Top Pick

  “A delightful tale in which the jilted bride does not immediately forgive and forget.” – InD’tale Magazine

  For anyone who managed to keep

  a straight face when I said I

  wanted to be a writer.

  This one’s for you.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  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

  CHAPTER NINTEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A DARK AFFAIR ON DOWER STREET

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hyde Park, London

  May 1816

  Being kidnapped was not nearly as fun and exciting as Lady Emily Wilmington thought it would be.

  She’d imagined dashing men in black cloaks and swords being brandished and a wild ride through the streets of London on the back of a noble steed. Unfortunately for Emily (and her active imagination) the reality of the situation was really quite different.

  Instead of a handsome brigand in a black cloak, she’d been accosted by a short, round fellow with yellow teeth and a patch over one eye. There had been no sword brandishing. Her kidnapper had merely taken a knife out of his pocket and waved it in the air a few times. Emily wasn’t terribly impressed, but it was enough to make her companion swoon.

  Dear, sweet-natured Petunia, while the most wonderful companion a young lady could ever hope to ask for, had never been in possession of a strong constitution. A note sung off key was enough to cause her lashes to flutter. Thus it was rather no surprise when her knees buckled and she collapsed gracefully (Petunia was always graceful, no matter the circumstance) to the ground at the sight of the knife. When Emily knelt over her fallen companion to assist her she was grabbed from behind and tossed like a sack of grain through the door of a rickety old hackney coach. Before she had time to catch her breath and utter so much as a single scream the carriage was off, navigating the narrow, crowded streets of the city at a rather alarming rate of speed.

  And thus she found herself kidnapped without a single sword being drawn, not to the mention the lack of a handsome stranger in a dark cape and his noble steed. It was all a bit disappointing, to be honest. Still, she supposed the only thing to do was to make the best of it. Lemonade from lemons, stiff upper lip, and all that.

  Untangling her light blue muslin skirts Emily heaved herself up on the leather seat, only to immediately return to the floor when she almost cracked her head against the window after one precariously sharp left hand turn.

  “Heavens,” she muttered as she wedged herself safely into a corner. The stays of her cloak pulled against her neck and she untied them, letting the constricting garment fall to the floor. Her bonnet quickly followed. If it had been unseasonably warm outside the carriage, it was downright stuffy within. Beneath the bonnet her dark hair, never quite as neat as it should have been, was an absolute mess of curls and frizz and heavens knew what else.

  Humidity, while rare in London, always managed to turn her hair into a fright. Not that it mattered what she looked like. Her lips compressed. After all, she’d been taken against her will and tossed top over teakettle into a strange carriage, not invited out for a cup of tea.

  For a fleeting moment Emily considered flinging herself out the door, but she didn’t fancy another broken bone. A fall out of an apple tree when she was five-years-old had snapped her arm above the wrist and a tumble off a friend’s stallion – one she’d been expressly forbidden from riding, which meant she quite simply had to test him out – at the age of sixteen had resulted in a three bruised ribs and a painfully twisted ankle. In the seven years since she’d managed to avoid any other catastrophic injuries and she intended to keep it that way. Besides, the door was no doubt locked from the outside. At least that is what she would have done if she were the one doing the kidnapping.

  The number of sharp turns began to ease, leaving Emily to assume they’d left the city and were on one of the half dozen roads leading out of it. A poorly maintained one if she had to guess, given the number of potholes they were falling into and bumping over. By the time the carriage rolled to an unceremonious halt Emily’s backside was so abused she did not even attempt to stand up, which turned out to be a good thing as the driver had not stopped to let her out, but rather to allow someone else to get in.

  The afternoon sun shot in through the open door, temporarily blinding her. She brought a hand up to cover her eyes, wincing at the sudden onslaught of light when she’d been sitting for what felt like a small eternity in the shadows.

  The door closed with a quiet click and they were off again, albeit at a more reasonable pace this time.

  “What are you doing on the floor?” It was a man’s voice, deep and resonating and unfamiliar, which meant the man who’d just entered the carriage was not the same one who’d thrown her inside of it.

  Emily peeked between her fingers and found herself face to face with a pair of mud splattered riding boots. She looked higher, letting her gaze wander up across a pair of very muscular thighs enclosed in buckskin breeches. Tucked into the waistband of the breeches was a white linen shirt, the sleeve cuffs rolled up to the elbow. There was no proper waistcoat to accompany the shirt, and the collar was open and unbuttoned at the top to reveal a V of exposed chest at the base of which a few dark hairs curled.

  Emily’s cheeks were well flushed by the time she reached the stranger’s face, and she could not quite contain the tiny gasp of surprise that whistled between her lips for he was,
without a single doubt, the handsomest man she’d ever set her eyes upon.

  There was a shadow of stubble across his strong jaw, the color of it a shade or two lighter than his glossy mane of dark hair. His cheekbones stood out in two slanting angles, making it appear as though he were scowling even though his mouth rested in a flat line. And his eyes… This time Emily managed not to gasp aloud, although she felt a tingle all the way down in her toes. His eyes were warmed caramel flecked with gold. Gypsy eyes, she thought. Wild and untamed, just like the rest of him.

  “Are you mute?” he asked, reminding her he was still waiting for an answer to the question he’d asked upon first entering the carriage.

  Scrambling to her feet, Emily fell as much as sat into her seat (Petunia would have been so ashamed) and braced her hands against the hard leather cushion for balance. “Your coachman drives like a man who desires an early death. It was either sit on the floor or risk knocking myself unconscious.”

  The man stretched one long arm out across the top of his seat and regarded her intently. “You are not crying or otherwise visibly upset.” He sounded vaguely surprised. “I rather thought you would be.”

  Emily’s shoulders jerked in a tiny shrug. “I suppose I am not the crying type.”

  “You must be in shock.”

  “Perhaps,” she allowed, “although I do not believe so.”

  He studied her as she’d studied him, his unusually colored eyes slowly traveling from her disheveled hair down to the tips of her boots peeking out beneath the hem of her dress and back up again. She wondered what he was seeing, but more than that she wondered what he’d expected to see. A weak, simpering miss begging for her life? An elegant, poised lady who looked at him with disdain?

  A frown tugged at his mouth and his brows pinched together over the bridge of a nose that slanted ever so slightly off to the left, as though it’d been broken on more than one occasion. “You are not at all like I thought you would be.”

  As she was neither a simpering miss nor a poised lady, Emily decided to take it as a great compliment. “And you are exactly as I imagined you to be. You do not happen to have a sword, do you?” she asked hopefully.

  Her kidnapper blinked and sat back, kicking out his legs until his boots disappeared beneath her seat. Their calves could have touched if she moved a few inches to the right or he to the left. The coach really was pitifully small, or perhaps the man was simply too large.

  Light from the window danced across his face and with a grunt of annoyance he leaned to the side and flicked the curtain closed, sending little plumes of dust spiraling into the air. Before the interior of the carriage dimmed Emily caught a glimpse of fields and trees and an old fence with black cows grazing behind it, their long ropey tails skimming their flanks as they swatted at flies.

  Her earlier assumption had been correct. They’d left the city far behind, although where they were headed she hadn’t the faintest of clues.

  “You do know you have been kidnapped, don’t you?” the man asked. He spoke slowly, and Emily bristled at the idea he thought her dimwitted.

  “Would it be better if I went into a fit of hysteria?” she queried. “If you would like me to wail and scream I certainly can, but I cannot imagine what purpose such a display would serve. Unless it would make you let me go.”

  “No.” He rubbed his chin, his fingers scratching at the bristle. “I think not.”

  Emily sucked on the inside of her cheek, a habit she’d picked up at the impressionable age of eight and never been able to get rid of, no matter how many times Petunia pinched her arm when she caught her doing it. “Where are you taking me?”

  “I have a residence just outside of Southampton. You will be kept there.”

  If her kidnapper felt any remorse for his actions, it did not show on his face. Quite the contrary, in fact. He seemed almost pleased with himself, not that Emily could blame him. After all he’d managed to accomplish what a half dozen other nefarious criminals had attempted – and failed – to do. Dumb luck or professional skill? Either way, all his efforts would soon prove to be in vain, not that she had any intention of telling him that. He would discover the truth soon enough.

  “How much is the ransom?” she asked, genuinely curious as to the going rate of a duke’s daughter. When Lady Winnifred Coleman was kidnapped the year before it was rumored her father had paid five thousand pounds for her safe release. A small fortune for some, although of course Lord Coleman was only a viscount. What had been a significant sum for him would be viewed as a mere pittance for a duke.

  The man tilted his head to the side. “Ransom?”

  “Please do not be coy.” Her nose wrinkled. “I find it a rather insufferable trait. Unless you picked me out of the park by sheer happenstance, you know who I am, and who my father is.”

  What could have possibly been a grudging smile tugged at one side of his mouth, but it was gone before it had time to take root. “You were not taken by happenstance.”

  Emily nodded. “I rather thought not.”

  “Thirty,” he said after a brief hesitation.

  “Thirty thousand?”

  “Thirty thousand pounds,” he confirmed without batting an eye. “A fair price for the safe return of a loved one, I believe.”

  And a price she knew her father would have willingly paid if he were not up to his eyeballs in debt. It was one of the best-kept secrets in all of England that everything the Duke of Brumleigh owned, from his townhouse in London to his hunting lodge in the wild hills of Scotland, was owed to creditors. Even Emily had not known the extent of their financial ruin until she happened to glance at his desk one day while searching for a missing glove in his study. What she saw – banknotes, letters of foreclosure, thinly veiled threats from debt collectors – was enough to tell her everything she needed to know. Her life of luxury was a carefully constructed lie. Beneath the gloss of expensive carriages and fur lined cloaks and a household filled with servants lay the ugly reality: the Wilmington’s did not have a shilling to their name.

  When – and how – her father had lost everything remained a mystery. Emily could not recall any discernable changes in his behavior, nor in the way the household was run. He remained as stoic as ever and new dresses continued to arrive like clockwork, each one more luxurious than the last. Never one to have her head turned by the pretty and the shiny, Emily would have been quite satisfied with the mundane and the practical, but her father refused to let his beloved daughter be dressed in less than the best money could buy.

  Rather ironic, since it wasn’t his money doing the buying.

  She had started to broach the subject a hundred times in the past five weeks, but she always lost her nerve at the final moment. She did not want to embarrass her father, nor hurt him. With her mother dead eleven years now and no siblings to speak of it was only the two of them left.

  The Duke of Brumleigh may not have been a demonstrative man when it came to emotion, but Emily knew he loved her just as she loved him. They dined together every evening and rode horses in the park before church on Sundays. He often remarked on how much she reminded him of her mother, and she knew that sometimes when he looked at her with a trace of sadness in his intelligent blue eyes he was seeing his beloved wife instead of his daughter.

  The match between Edgar Wilmington and Martha Dresher had been one of duty and obligation, but it had quickly blossomed into love. Emily could not recall an unkind word ever spoken between them, and she knew her father was still devastated over the loss of his wife. On occasion she’d seen other women – some no more than few years older than herself – attempting to curry his attention, but he always dismissed them in favor of a woman who, even eleven years deceased, was still every bit as irreplaceable to him now as when she’d been alive. Emily did not even want to fathom what her disappearance would do to him.

  “And if my father refuses to meet your demands?” she asked her kidnapper, looking down at her lap where her hands were now tightly fisted in
the folds of her skirt.

  “He will.”

  “But if he does not?” she insisted.

  For the first time a note of true malice crept into the stranger’s voice, sending a chill racing down Emily’s spine despite the warmth inside the carriage. “You better hope he does, Princess. Or I am afraid neither of you will like the outcome.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The chit was not at all like West thought she would be.

  He’d entered the carriage expecting to find her pale and trembling in the corner, her face blotchy from crying, so frightened she could hardly speak. Instead he’d found a blue-eyed, brown haired beauty sitting on the floor calm as you please without a single tear in sight. He still could not decide if she was brave, simple, or merely in shock.

  Perhaps a combination of all three he thought as she met his stare unflinchingly. Lesser men had cowered beneath the golden eyes of the Duke of St. Giles, and yet here was some slip of a girl giving as good as she got. He would have believed she didn’t understand the gravity of her situation – God above knew how high the nabobs had their heads in the clouds – but when he delivered his thinly veiled threat her cheeks paled and she wet her bottom lip with the tip of her tongue, a sure sign she understood exactly what he was not saying.

  For some inexplicable reason he wanted to reassure her. To tell her everything would be all right. To let her know that once her father paid the ransom she would be delivered home, completely unharmed. But the concept of offering comfort was foreign to him and the words he wanted to say remain trapped inside his throat until she extended her right hand.

  “I cannot say I am happy about this situation,” she said with a little sigh, “but I suppose that is no excuse to be rude. Lady Emily Wilmington. Pleased to meet you.”