Kasey Michaels - How to Tempt a Duke

“How very flattering, Captain,” Charlotte said, dropping into a small curtsy. “I can see I must be very careful, or else a silver-tongued rogue like you might just break my maidenly heart.”

Now Rafe gave a shout of laughter, forgetting himself enough to give his friend a hearty slap on the back, which nearly sent Fitz to the floor. “Oops, sorry, Fitz. I shouldn’t want to knock your one good leg out from under you. Especially as Miss Seavers has already done it for me. Miss Charlotte Seavers, allow me to belatedly introduce you to my friend and companion for too many years to contemplate, Captain Swain Fitzgerald. Fitz, make your bow to Charlie.”

“Hello, Fitz,” Charlotte said. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” She shot a quick look at Rafe. “As we’re very informal here in the country, please call me Charlotte.”

“So this is your Charlie, is it? You must have been a very slow youth, Rafe, my friend, not to see what a lovely piece of perfection your Charlie is. How you could have left her, I’ll never know.”

Rafe glanced at Charlotte, who immediately avoided his eyes.

“Ha, now I’ve made him mad, and put you to the blush, haven’t I, Miss Seavers? Charlotte. I beg pardon, and I’m honored to meet you.” Fitz looked toward the doorway. “Ah, and here are my crutches. Pass them over, if you please.”

“Don’t,” Rafe warned the approaching footman. “I wouldn’t want them close enough for my friend here to use to beat me into flinders when I say what must be said. I only sent for your crutches, Fitz, so you’d stop shouting for them to be brought to you. Grayson, see that the crutches are well hidden and Captain Fitzgerald is carried upstairs to one of the bedchambers.”

“Damn and blast you to the far corners of hell, Rafe Daughtry! I won’t be carried!”

“Fine,” Rafe said. “Then you’ll be dragged. But, one way or another, you’re going upstairs.”

“The devil I will! I—Pardon me, Charlotte,” Fitz said, quickly inclining his head in her direction.

“Oh, don’t mind me, Fitz,” Charlotte assured him, smiling with what Rafe believed was unholy glee. “It has been a while since I’ve heard a good argument.”

Rafe hoped his friend would at last listen to reason. “Fitz, you know what the man said. I would have left you in London if you hadn’t sworn on your mother’s head that you’d follow his orders the moment we arrived.”

“Then aren’t you the fool for believing me. I won’t do it, Rafe. Lie mouldering in a bed for two full months? A man could go mad.”

Rafe signaled to the footmen, now numbering four, he noticed. “Take him, please.”

“No! Rafe, I’m warning you! Let me go, you miserable—”

Rafe watched as the servants carried Fitz up the winding staircase, shaking his head as Fitz alternated between cursing him and cursing the footmen…and then going silent as the pain from his injured leg forced him to give in to the inevitable.

“Poor man,” Charlotte said. “What happened to him?”

“I could let Fitz tell you, I suppose. He’s been working on a fine story this past week. I believe the latest version has something to do with how he was injured saving a child—no, two children, and their nurse—from a runaway cart. Quite the hero, our fine captain.”

“But that’s not true?”

Rafe took her arm once more, thinking to return to the main saloon, but then he remembered that his sisters were there and steered her toward the back of the house instead. “He was in such a hurry to step foot on solid ground again after a fairly stormy voyage that he ran down the gangplank and lost his footing on something slick on the dock. Went hell over lampposts into a stack of sea chests.”

“Oh, dear, how ignominious. Well, his secret is safe with me. Um, don’t you want to return to the main saloon?”

“I’d prefer to return to Elba and relative boredom, actually,” Rafe said honestly. “I feel like an interloper here. And my sisters, quite frankly, scare me spitless. I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m rather nervous around females after so many years as distant from polite society as a person can be without traveling to the far side of the moon.”

“Do I make you nervous, Rafe?” Charlotte asked as he pushed open a door and they entered his late uncle’s private study. Now his private study. Although he’d had to fight down the feeling that he should first knock on that door and request entry.

“Do you make me nervous? Truthfully, I think everything and everyone here makes me want nothing more than to go find myself a good war.”

“Sorry, there are no wars here. I’ll give you a few moments to yourself, to look around,” Charlotte said quietly. “Nothing’s really changed very much.”

He followed her with his eyes as she pretended an interest in a row of books on one of the bookshelves, seeing the young girl who had chased after him and George and Harold sometimes, and gone out of her way to ignore them at others. She’d been such a funny creature, he remembered. Tall for a girl, and rack-thin, all arms and long legs and too much hair that he’d more than once had to untangle from a branch when she got caught up chasing after them as they cut through the woods to the village.

A pest. She’d been a pest. Eight years younger than George, half a dozen years younger than Harold, four years Rafe’s junior. And female into the bargain. A child, really; fifteen to his nineteen the day he’d gone off to take up his commission.

He hadn’t recognized her out there on the drive. She was still tall, still thin, he supposed, but also nicely rounded. Her unruly mop of sable-brown hair seemed at least fairly tamed, most of it ruthlessly pulled back from her face to hang in loose curls partway down her back. Her hair looked…touchable.

Her warm brown eyes hadn’t changed, hadn’t aged…unlike his, which sometimes startled him with their haunted intensity when he caught a glimpse of them in his shaving mirror. He liked her nose, straight and yet somehow pert, and her wide mouth was full-lipped, and slightly vulnerable.

It was, in point of fact, only when she opened that mouth that the Charlie he remembered actually appeared. Charlie said what was on her mind, always, and never dressed her comments up in fine linen. He’d liked that about her, he remembered, even when he was thinking up ways to avoid her.

He had no inclination to avoid her now. Quite the opposite.

She’d believed herself in love with him, half a dozen years ago. Did that embarrass her now? She’d joked about it, out there on the drive, but there was no way he could be sure. How did he appear to her now? He wasn’t the raw youth he’d been then, and very much doubted he looked lovable.

What happened to the innocence of young love, and to youthful stupidity, once the persons involved had moved on through the years? Was he really the duke now, with the Rafe he’d been banished to the past? Was she really Charlotte now, all grown up, and Charlie left behind in her childhood?

They were strangers now. Strangers who once believed they knew each other very well…

“Rafe? I asked you a question,” Charlotte said as he stood in the center of the large, darkly paneled room that had been the scene of many a dressing-down from his uncle, who’d worried that Rafe’s character might be tainted by resembling that of his flighty mother.

“I’m sorry, Charlotte,” he said, giving a slight shake of his head as he quickly improvised a reason for his silence. “I was remembering the day I’d knocked George down for calling my mother a well-dressed trollop. Uncle Charlton warned me that I might be taller than George or Harold, stronger—even smarter—but I would never be more than who I was, so I should remember my place. I’m half expecting Uncle Charlton to come blustering in here at any moment, ordering me out of his private sanctuary.”