Wagered to the Duke (BookStrand Publishing Romance) (25 page)

Touché,
thought Nathan.

The dancing master gaped at her as if she’d suddenly sprouted a second head on top of the one she already had. Then he turned to Nathan, as if checking to see if he, too, might have a new head erupting from his scalp. “Your Grace, dare I ask if you and Miss Baxter are betrothed?”

Maybe now she was looking at him to see what he would say! Nathan threw her a glance, but to his chagrin, she’d turned away from him.

“No,” he replied. “Why do you ask?”

“If that were the case, then you would likely be her only dance partner on Friday night. I mean, if you
were
betrothed, then surely you would not wish her to dance with anyone else?”

“I most certainly would not,” Nathan heartily concurred.

“But since you are not betrothed, then you agree she is free to dance with whoever else might ask her?”

“She is indeed,” Nathan affirmed, albeit grudgingly.

“Very well. Miss Baxter? You will not be dancing only with the duke this Friday evening.”

“You’re assuming that other men will ask me.”

“On the contrary, I’m assuming at this point that none of the other men will ask you, once they see you stumbling about with the duke.”

“Then he’ll be the only man I dance with,” she said stubbornly.

“Ah, but if you dance more than one dance with him, people will make assumptions about the two of you,” the dancing master warned.

“Faradiddle. No one there will even know who we are—well, except for Lord and Lady Ellington, of course. Perhaps I shall do as I’ve always done in the past at dances, and simply remain a perpetual wallflower.” With that she flounced out of the room.

“Kate, do come back,” Susannah pleaded, but to no avail.

The dancing master threw up his hands and stormed over to the pianoforte in the corner, to consult or even commiserate with his wife over difficult pupils.

“Allow me to make some attempt to pacify the dancing master before he quits,” Trevor said. “I’m paying him, after all.” He strode over to the corner, leaving his wife to tell Nathan exactly what he knew she was going to say.

“Perhaps you should propose to her, Nathan.”

“Why? Because we stumble so well together on the dance floor? She never even looks at me. I vow she’s trying to convince herself that I’m invisible and nonexistent.”

“She looks at you from afar, while you’re occupied with something else,” Susannah countered. “She’s afraid to look at you up close.”

Annoyance bubbled within him. “Whatever the devil for?”

Susannah shrugged. “She’s afraid you won’t look back.”

Nathan chortled. “Then perhaps she
should
try looking at me when she’s in such close proximity to my intimidating person! I daresay she might be pleasantly surprised.”

“She’s afraid it might rend her heart,” Susannah said with a sigh. “Apparently, she thinks if she ignores you, her feelings for you will eventually ebb. Alas, I do believe they’ve only gotten stronger, and she’s becoming ever more frustrated with herself.”

“And me, I suppose.”

She nodded. “Trust me, Nathan. She sees you not just as a duke or any other man, but a fairy-tale prince who rescued her from captivity and the clutches of an evil stepfather.”

The fairy tale again. And wasn’t that what Nathan wanted, according to Trevor?

“Yet she doesn’t believe she stands a chance of ever living happily ever after with you,” added Susannah.

He furrowed his brow, nonplussed. “Why does she think that?”

“Because she believes she’s far beneath your touch.”

“That’s nonsense,” he scoffed. “Evil her stepfather might be, but he’s still an earl, and she has an uncle who’s a marquess. She may not have a perfect pedigree or a dowry, but she seems well connected enough.”

“Her lack of dowry is one of the reasons she believes she will never marry well,” Susannah said. “I’ve tried telling her that’s not so, for I never had a dowry and I do believe I couldn’t have done better.” She cast an affectionate glance at her husband, who was now occupied with the dancing master and his wife.

“I do not need an heiress,” Nathan declared.

“But she believes you’ll never consider her a suitable prospect because, as a duke, you can have any lady you choose—so why, according to her way of thinking, would you choose her?”

Without giving him a chance to respond—not that he knew how—she whirled around and glided across the room to join her husband.

So Kate talked about him all the time and admired him from afar.

While he thought about her all the time and admired her up close. Yet now that he thought about it, he realized he’d never admired her from afar because, as Susannah had pointed out, he’d always been busy with something else, like riding about the grounds with Trevor while she and Susannah strolled through the garden, or playing chess with Trevor, trying to figure out his next move while Kate and Susannah sat on the other side of the room embroidering or covering screens.

Yet he observed her at mealtimes, where she made conversation with their host and hostess and never ventured so much as a word or glance his way. As opinionated as she was, at least she knew how to make intelligent conversation about something other than the latest fashions or scandal. It amused him to hear her and Susannah take turns reviling their respective stepfathers, as if they were competing with each other to see whose stepfather was the most odious.

After dinner that evening they gathered in the drawing room where Kate and Susannah kept them entertained on the pianoforte. Nathan expressed amazement at Kate’s ability to play many of Bach’s concertos without benefit of sheet music.

She didn’t even glance up from the keys as she blithely replied, “I’ve played them so many times that by now I shouldn’t need sheet music. And what a joy to play an instrument that’s properly tuned. The pianoforte at Bellingham Hall seemed to have a permanent wheeze.”

Occasionally Susannah sang, while Kate accompanied her. When Nathan asked if Kate would sing, she kept her eyes on the keys as she swept a hand across them and stated, just as blithely as before, “You should thank me for not inflicting such excruciating torture upon Your Grace.” Since coming to Ellington Hall, she’d become very formal and proper with him, much to his chagrin. “Haven’t I vexed you enough?”

“More than enough, Miss Baxter.” Though he really wanted to call her Kate, since she vexed him no more—well, maybe she did, but in an oddly positive way.

She glanced at Trevor and Susannah, seated together on the sofa. “I’m sure he gave you his account of how we met, didn’t he, and of all the trouble I’ve caused him?”

“Yes,” said Trevor. “And I understand it’s remarkably similar to your account. Clearly, the two of you have no secrets from each other, like Susannah and I did.”

He was wrong about that, Nathan thought.

“Frankly, I think it’s romantic,” Susannah said. “Rather like how Trevor and I met. He found me hiding in the window draperies.”

Kate clucked her tongue. “He and I do agree it’s scandalous. That is, not finding you wrapped in the draperies, but wagering innocent women at card games.”

“Ah, but I’m not the one who did the wagering, nor were you the one who was wagered,” Nathan reminded her. “I simply won the hand, and I was quite willing to forgive the debt. But you insisted on honoring it on the other lady’s behalf. And you don’t think
that’s
scandalous?”

Kate met his piercing gaze. Oh, what a joy it was to see her looking at him again! “What’s so scandalous about honoring a debt? And even if it was scandalous, it was only the first scandalous thing I’d ever done.” With that, she launched into a lively rendition of Mozart’s
A Little Night Music
.

“I won’t ask what the second was,” he said with a hint of mischief in his voice.

He’d heard
A Little Night Music
enough times in his life to know when a wrong key was hit. Kate struck that wrong key and abruptly stopped, her lips silently mouthing something that might have been a curse.

“Do keep playing,” Susannah urged her.

Kate shook her head. “I know that’s the standard advice in these situations, but for me, once I hit a wrong key, I’m so flummoxed and flustered that all I can do is start over from the very beginning—and with a different piece.” She immediately started pounding out Mozart’s “Turkish March” as if she had to prove something to herself and everyone else here—that she would not allow herself to be mortified by the second scandalous thing she’d done, even if she was flummoxed and flustered by it.

Nor would she allow Nathan to mortify her. He still wondered if she regretted what had happened between them the other night.

He certainly didn’t regret it, and maybe that was why he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

The next afternoon he rode horseback with Trevor, who talked of how when he came to Ellington Hall a year and a half ago, a French-style garden had been planned and then scrapped. He’d spent the past year transforming it into a more natural English style, with meandering paths and randomly placed shrubs and flowerbeds.

Nathan wondered what sort of garden awaited him at Loring Park, and hoped it was the English style. He wondered which sort of garden Kate preferred. She didn’t strike him as the sort who might fancy the geometric French style or boxy knot gardens.

And then he wondered why he even cared about her preference.

“So Miss Baxter has stayed at Ellington Hall before?” he casually inquired as they cantered over the hilly grounds of the estate.

“A little over a year ago,” Trevor replied. “My grandmother had yet to leave for Italy, and she had some acquaintance with them, which I found rather surprising since she’s always been a bit reclusive—or at least she was until she left for Italy. Lord Bellingham apparently knew my wastrel cousin Ambrose from the gaming tables.”

“Such an acquaintance does not surprise me,” Nathan said, thinking of the last time he’d seen Bellingham.

That was almost a fortnight ago—a few days before he met the earl’s stepdaughter and his life was changed forever—more so, it seemed, than when he inherited the dukedom.

“Considering how far below the hatches they both were, ’tis a mystery to me how either of them fared playing against the other,” Trevor remarked.

Nathan chuckled mirthlessly. “You must not game all that much, or you might consider there would be at least one other player who cleaned out both of them.”

“You’re right that I don’t gamble, but you do make an excellent point. Anyway, Bellingham arrived here shortly after Twelfth Night last year with his wife and stepdaughter in tow. They were en route to his ancestral pile in Yorkshire. The weather was so wretched the roads were impassable for days, so they stayed with us for about a week. Miss Baxter got on quite well with Susannah, but it was painfully obvious to both of us that she did not want to go to Yorkshire. You’d think she was being transported to Australia the way she carried on.”

“How did she get along with her stepfather?”

Trevor shook his head. “Not very well at all. The animosity was mutual, and I gather ’twas of long standing. I’m not sure whether she was loath to go to Yorkshire because it’s so remote, or because she simply didn’t want to be with her stepfather.”

Nathan strongly suspected it was the latter—and he thought he knew why. “What about her mother?”

Trevor sighed. “She was the one who insisted her daughter accompany them—and I can’t help thinking that Miss Baxter, for all her reluctance to come along, hoped to protect her mother—from what, I’m not sure. If Bellingham was in the habit of beating his wife or even his stepdaughter, I saw no evidence of it when they were here. At one point Susannah contemplated asking her to remain here as a companion, or even, in time, a governess to our son, but decided against it, since she believed in her heart that Miss Baxter was meant for something greater.”

“Such as?”

Trevor chortled as he pulled on the reins of his mount, and Nathan did the same. “I have no idea what my wife meant, but she is something of a romantic.”

They were now on the broad, almost flat crest of a hill, looking out over the rolling, verdant meadows dotted with sheep and dappled with dark, dense woods, all of which made up the Ellington estate. They were high enough that Nathan could see in the distance, far beyond the manor, the village and the road from York to London as it wound its way around hills to a horizon brilliant with a flood of rare spring sunshine. Closer, almost at the bottom of the hill where they surveyed the sweeping vista, was a large pond reflecting the crystal-blue sky. He could make out a cottage on one side of the pond and what appeared to be a Grecian folly on the other.

“I must agree with your wife,” he finally said. “Miss Baxter strikes me as the sort of person unwilling to settle for a less than favorable situation. She will always try to find something better. She despises injustice and will not brook ill treatment. You might say she’s a bit of a fighter.”

Trevor nodded. “But if she’s meant for something greater, it won’t just happen to her. She’ll make it happen—and when she does, watch out.”

With that, he galloped off. As Nathan set off after his friend, he told himself that what he’d really have to watch out for was his heart.

Who was that woman in the mirror?

It had been so long since Kate had dressed up for a special occasion that she was stunned by the reflection in the full-length pier glass. She didn’t recognize the woman staring back at her.

For the past year she’d worn her hair pulled back into a severe bun. She’d never even bothered to curl it up in rags at night or take a curling iron to it. Her bangs had grown out and were always pulled away from her pallid face, leaving it in a stark relief that included a too high and too broad forehead, a nose so narrow that she swore she could only see it while surveying her profile from the corner of her eye, and a chin that was almost pointed.