The Spring Duke (A Duke for All Seasons) Read online

  He doesn’t want to desire her...

  But this duke isn’t going to get what he wants.

  “I think you’re going to taste like an apple. Sweet at first, with a note of tartness that lingers on the tongue.” Desire dilated the duke’s pupils, turning his eyes from blue to black. “I don’t want to kiss you, Miss Dogwood. Give me a reason not to. Tell me to leave your room. Tell me to stop thinking about you every bloody waking moment. Tell me to stop imagining you dressed in nothing but diamonds. Tell me,” he growled, frustration and need flashing across his rigid countenance in equal measure.

  Athena should have.

  If she was in her right mind, she would have.

  “I can’t,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  “Then we’re both damned,” he said hoarsely. And fisting his hands in her hair, he claimed her mouth with his own....

  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.

  © 2019 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.

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  Other Titles by Jillian Eaton

  A Duke for All Seasons

  The Winter Duke

  The Spring Duke

  The Summer Duke – July 2019!

  A Duchess for All Seasons

  The Winter Duchess

  The Spring Duchess

  The Summer Duchess

  The Autumn Duchess

  Bow Street Brides

  A Dangerous Seduction

  A Dangerous Proposal

  A Dangerous Affair

  A Dangerous Passion

  A Dangerous Temptation – June 2019!

  London Ladies

  Runaway Duchess

  Spinster and the Duke

  Forgotten Fiancee

  Lady Harper

  Wedded Women

  A Brooding Beauty

  A Ravishing Redhead

  A Lascivious Lady

  A Gentle Grace

  Swan Sisters

  For the Love of Lynette

  Annabel’s Christmas Rake

  Taming Temperance

  Christmas Novellas

  The Winter Wish

  The Risque Resolution

  A Rake in Winter

  The Christmas Widow

  Description

  An American heiress determined to find love...

  After three broken engagements, Miss Athena Dogwood is ready to give up on finding love. Until a secret letter written by her great-grandmother leads her across the Atlantic and onto the doorstep of the ill-tempered (albeit very handsome) Duke of Blackburn.

  A cold-hearted duke who doesn’t believe in it...

  Ambrose gave up on love a long time ago. A widower with a young daughter to raise, he needs a governess more than he needs a wife. And he certainly doesn’t need an impertinent American heiress. Especially one who speaks like a sailor, looks like an angel, and stirs desires inside of him best left alone.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  But Athena knows beneath Ambrose’s icy exterior is a man who wants to love again, and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to prove it. Even if that means risking everything, including her own heart...

  Get ready for an enthralling battle of wits in this British versus American romance! The Spring Duke is the second novella in the best-selling A Duke for All Seasons quartet.

  Table of Contents

  Other Titles by Jillian Eaton

  Description

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  A Dangerous Seduction

  Exclusive Excerpt

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  “I rather thought it would be... larger.” Stepping out onto the steep wooden gangplank, Miss Athena Dogwood paused, flattened a hand against her pale brow, and turned a critical eye to the London skyline. It stared back down at her, clouds of dark smoke spiraling lazily into a sky neither gray nor blue but a hazy color somewhere in-between.

  Jostled hard from either side as passengers sprinted eagerly for the shore like rats fleeing the proverbial sinking ship, Athena held her ground, gripping the railing for balance as she turned to her maid, a girl seven years her junior whose freckled face and carrot red hair was currently obscured by a towering pile of hat boxes.

  “Most definitely larger,” Athena decided when her maid uttered a very unhelpful ‘hrrmmpphh’. “Why, New York is nearly the same size. Boston is a bit smaller.” She tapped a gloved finger against her chin. “Having never been further south than Maryland – do you remember when Aunt Patty nearly fell into the Chesapeake? – I cannot accurately compare London to New Orleans or Charleston, but just the other day Mr. Herrick was going on and on about how Charleston will soon rival New York in size and population. Wasn’t he, Dana? Dana? Dana!”

  Growing alarmed when the mountain of hats began to lean precariously to the left, Athena jumped forward and caught the top three boxes before they could sail down into the dark, frothy water below.

  “Heavens,” she exclaimed, clutching her rescued bounty close to her chest. “That was close. What would I do without hats to wear, Dana? You know how the ladies of the ton so adore them. Don’t you remember Lady Worthington? I never saw her without that hideously ugly turban. All the rage in London, she said.”

  Dana, cheeks flushed and hair sticking out in frizzled clumps around her head (most likely because she was not wearing a hat) gave a jerky nod. “Aye mum,” she squeaked, her Irish accent slipping through despite having immigrated to America with her parents when she was a young child. “I remember.”

  “You know, she was never very friendly,” Athena mused as they made their way down the gangplank, their heels tapping smartly against the narrow wooden planks. “No doubt due to her turban being wrapped a little too tightly. Lack of blood supply and all that.”

  “No doubt,” Dana agreed.

  A stiff breeze cut through the air, carrying with it the pungent odor of salt and freshly caught fish. Below them the landing swarmed with activity. Surly looking sailors carrying thick ropes coiled around their shoulders hurried past, readying for the next ship’s arrival. A group of young ladies being chaperoned by a harassed looking governess clutching a bright blue parasol marched by in an impressively straight line. Raggedly dressed boys, their bright eyes alight with a mischievous gleam, ran in and out of the restless crowd, giving Athena cause to tighten her grip on her beaded reticule when they reached the end of the dock. Unimpressed by the general sense of bedlam, she squared her shoulders and plowed a path straight through the middle of the melee while poor Dana struggled to keep pace.

  Trying to keep up with Athena was not an endeavor for the faint of heart. Her parents had been trying – with little success – for the past twenty-nine years. Every single nanny they’d hired had failed (miserably).
Even Mr. Murdock, the doctor’s son, had been unable to keep pace with her. And he’d been her fiancé, for heaven’s sake. Well, he’d been one of them.

  Eight weeks shy of thirty and she’d seen no less than thirteen nannies, eleven personal maids, and three fiancé’s come...and go. They did not leave because of any ill-treatment or maliciousness. On the contrary, many of them had only praise to heap upon Athena’s stubborn shoulders (except for Mr. Quarterly, the shortest of her engagements, but then he never had a nice thing to say about anyone). Simply put, they left due to sheer exhaustion.

  Athena was a storm.

  She always had been.

  And she’d yet to meet anyone who could sustain the force of her winds...although Dana was giving it her best effort.

  “Are you still there?” Athena called back over her shoulder as she skirted around the edge of a cart stacked dangerously high with barrels. “I can slow down if you need me to.”

  That was a lie, and they both knew it. Athena could no more slow her frantic pace than she could stop breathing. Her endless energy was as much a part of her as the color of her hair or the shape of her mouth. There was a restlessness inside of her. One that had been much too big for her small, quiet town on the outskirts of Boston to contain. She only hoped London – and the man she’d come all the way across an ocean to meet – was up to the task.

  “Yes, Mum,” Dana replied. “I’m right behind you.”

  Athena nodded in satisfaction. She’d had a feeling when she met the tiny Irish maid there was more to her than met the eye. The victim of an abusive husband, Dana had walked like a puppy anticipating its next kick, her eyes downcast, her movements quick and flighty. But despite the hardships she’d suffered and the bruises that had turned the side of her face into a ghastly sunset of deep purples and ugly blues, Athena had sensed an unyielding source of strength inside of her. Dana may have been as small and slight as a willow, but like a willow when she was pushed to the ground she bent, she did not break, and it was that resolve that had earned her a job on the spot despite the misgivings of Mrs. Dogwood.

  Thankfully, Athena rarely – if ever – listened to her mother, which was one of the reasons she currently found herself in a new country with little more than the clothes on her back and a small tower of hat boxes.

  It shall be a grand adventure, she’d told Dana when she first proposed sailing across the Atlantic. Don’t you want to see the world?

  Thus far the only part of the world poor Dana had seen was the inside of a wooden bucket, but Athena knew their luck would soon change. When she set her mind to a task, she always saw it through – whether it was convincing all of three of her fiancés they didn’t really want to marry her...or sailing halfway across the world to convince a man she’d never met the exact opposite.

  “Let’s stop here a minute,” she instructed when they reached a quiet corner of the dock that was tucked away behind a row of shipping crates. Helping Dana unload the hat boxes onto an empty bench, she pulled a letter from the inside pocket of her pelisse and carefully unfolded it, taking care not to tear the delicate parchment.

  She had already read the letter so many times she had every single word memorized by heart, but she still took comfort in reading it again. After all, this letter was the entire reason she was here.

  It was why she’d left her parents.

  Why she’d spent the past six weeks on a rolling sea.

  Why she’d risked everything she knew for someone she knew nothing about.

  “What about your personal trunk, mum?” Dana asked. While Athena remained on her feet, too anxious to rest, the maid had collapsed beside the hat boxes in a frizzled heap of red hair and exhaustion. “It’s still onboard.”

  “I will have it sent to us,” Athena said absently, her gaze on the letter.

  “Have it sent to us where, exactly?”

  Refolding the letter, she slipped it back into her pocket and regarded the maid with a broad grin that did nothing to convey the flurry of doubt clouding the back of her mind. This will work, she told herself. It has to work. There’s no other option.

  “Wherever we end up. For now we need to go to someplace called Grosvenor Square. It’s on the other side of the city.”

  Dana glanced at the hatboxes. “Will we have to walk?”

  “Walk? No, of course not. We’ll hire a hackney.”

  “But I thought we didn’t have any money left.”

  “We do not,” Athena said cheerfully, “which means the moment the hackney stops we will need to make a run for it.”

  Dana’s brow creased. “But what if-”

  “Tsk, tsk,” she scolded with a shake of her finger. “What did I tell you about the word ‘but’?”

  “Not to use it,” the maid grumbled.

  “Precisely. I got us this far, did I not? I will get us the rest of the way. The only thing you need to concern yourself with is the hats. Heaven help us if we lose those hats, Dana. Let me worry about everything else.” Taking a deep breath, she managed to stretch her mouth into a shape that vaguely resembled a smile.

  Though she might have been a tried and true Bostonian with two generations of American blood running through her veins, Athena strongly believed in the keeping of a stiff upper lip, a trait she’d no doubt inherited from her great-grandmother, a woman renowned for her fortitude ... and a touch of lunacy, although the family preferred to gloss over that part. The daughter of a baron sympathetic to the American cause during the War of Independence, Lady Dorothea had been raised in Boston, attended finishing school in London, and returned to America to marry and raise her family.

  Athena’s memories of her father’s grandmother were vague at best, but she did recall a warm smile and vivid blue eyes that crinkled at the corners. Dorothea had also been partial to cinnamon scones which she had snuck to her three-year-old great-granddaughter in alarming quantities whenever the nanny wasn’t looking.

  It was irony in its worst form that the one person in her family Athena was most like had passed away before her fifth birthday. She certainly did not resemble her parents, neither of whom had ever come close to understanding their only child’s willful spirit. Confounded by Athena’s rebelliousness, they’d attempted to cure her of her independence and stubbornness in all matter of ways, none of which had been successful.

  When she came of age they turned to the help of a suitor, convinced a husband would be able to do what they could not: bring Athena to heel. She had promptly dissuaded them of that notion by sending all three of her fiancé’s running for the hills.

  It wasn’t that Athena did not want to marry. She did. Very much, in fact. She simply wanted to marry someone who would encourage her willfulness, not try to expel it. Someone who saw her intelligence and thirst for knowledge as strengths instead of weaknesses. Someone who accepted her as she was without wanting to change what made her who she was.

  She’d started to fear such a man did not exist.

  She’d started to worry that love did not exist.

  Until she discovered The Letter.

  Tucked away in an old desk that had been slated for removal during one of Mrs. Dogwood’s infamous redecorating sessions, the letter had very nearly escaped her notice. She’d gone looking for a quill, and had found hope instead.

  “Come along, Dana.” Giving the maid an encouraging smile, she picked up half of the hat boxes and balanced them underneath her chin. “It’s time we met my future husband.”

  If Ambrose knew an impudent American heiress was soon to visit with some foolhardy notion of marriage based on an old letter she’d found in a desk, he would have stayed in bed. Better yet, he would have stayed at his club. The more distance between himself and even the remotest chance of matrimony, the better. But because he didn’t know – how could he? – he’d woken at his usual time and set about getting ready in his usual manner, not remotely suspecting that his orderly life was about to be turned on its head.

  Sunlight streamed in through the east-
facing window of his bedchamber, a welcome reprieve from the rain that had dogged the city for the past two weeks. But then, such was England in spring. The streets were filled with mud, the trees with blossoms. The sky a steady, unchanging gray left over from a long, cold winter. But as Ambrose excused his valet and stood up to examine his shave in the mirror, he caught a glimpse of pale blue peering out through the dreary looking clouds. A blue that promised the end of one season and the beginning of another. A blue that signaled warmer weather was soon to come. A blue that his wife would have compared to his eyes.

  If she were still living.

  Ambrose turned sharply away from the window. Eleven years had passed since he’d lost his beloved Sophia and yet his gut still clenched in a painful vise whenever he thought of her. Which was more often than he would have liked, and never as much as he thought he should.

  Death, particularly the death of a loved one, was a heavy burden for the living to bear. While the stabbing pain of losing Sophia had faded within the first few months, a dull ache had settled deep inside of his chest and neither time nor prayer nor drink had managed to lessen the throb of it.

  If a man had a sore tooth he could yank it out. If he had a broken arm he could have it set or, if it was bad enough, hack the bloody thing off at the shoulder. But you couldn’t remove a man’s heart. Not without killing him.

  When he’d laid awake in his bed at night in a room that still smelled of Sophia’s lavender perfume and echoed with the sound of her shy laughter he’d wondered what it would take to end the pain once and for all. He wasn’t proud of his shameful thoughts, and he’d never acted upon them. But they’d still been there, slithering through the darkness, waking him at the devil’s hours to prod and poke and drive him so perilously close to madness he’d tasted ash upon his tongue.

  If not for his daughter he might have done it. She had brought him back from the brink, a tiny mewling babe with Sophia’s soft blonde curls, and he owed her a debt of gratitude he’d never be able to repay.