When You Wish Upon a Duke (3 page)

March grunted, wordless discontent. The Countess of Danbury was Lady Hervey’s fearsome aunt and Carter’s secret weapon. Once she had heard (by means of an exquisitely worded inquiry from Carter) of Lady Hervey’s procrastination, the countess had wasted no time appointing herself to bring her niece and grandnieces back into society—whether they wished it or not. It certainly wasn’t the way that March had wanted matters to fall.

“You already know my thoughts on Lady Danbury, Carter,” he said. “How you can consider letting those poor ladies be blasted by the flames of that old dragon as ‘guidance’ is beyond me.”

“I would, sir,” Carter said defensively, “so long as her flames will serve your purpose. Pray consider her ladyship as an ally in your purpose rather than a, ah, a dragon.”

March sighed. Lady Danbury would always be a dragon to him, and now, unhappily, a dragon who would be bound to him by marriage. “I pray that Lady Charlotte will not prove to be a dragon in training.”

“Oh, no, sir, not at all!” Carter exclaimed. “She is a young lady of the greatest beauty.”

March didn’t reply. He had steadfastly maintained that it was far more important that his duchess possess the character of an old and noble family than mere shallow beauty, and Lady Charlotte Wylder’s bloodlines were impeccable. This had been the main reason that his father had long ago agreed to this match, to “improve” their own family’s dubious heritage—that, and because his father and Lady Charlotte’s had been boyhood friends.

But while March would never be so dishonorable as to say it aloud, deep down he did wonder if her face was fair or plain, if her form would be pleasingly curved and her skin soft to his touch. He wouldn’t have been male if he hadn’t. The fact that no one in London had seen Lady Charlotte since she’d been a young girl—apparently she hadn’t even sat for a portrait—made her a complete mystery, and March was uneasy.

“Truly, sir, you need have no concerns,” Carter said earnestly, correctly reading March’s silence—though what else could he say of the future Duchess of Marchbourne? “Lady Charlotte is quite beautiful, as are the dowager countess and the younger ladies as well. To be sure, she has been raised in the country—”

“That is to the good, Carter,” March said. “I admire the simplicity of the country.”

“Oh, Lady Charlotte does have that,” Carter agreed, with a little too much enthusiasm. “She is no lady of fashion. She is completely untainted by London’s false airs, with no—”

“That’s enough, Carter,” March said sharply. “We will not speak of her ladyship further.”

Carter looked away, and bowed his head with contrition. “Forgive me, sir.”

“Damnation, man, I didn’t intend a reprimand,” March
said, more annoyed with himself than with Carter. The solicitor had only been answering the question, and besides, it was hardly Carter’s fault that he’d met Lady Charlotte Wylder before March himself had. If he bumbled so badly with old Carter, how the devil could he be expected to do before Lady Charlotte?

With a muttered oath, March wrapped the reins more tightly around his gloved hand and dug his heels into his horse’s sides. Beneath him the horse lunged forward, and March bent low, giving himself over to the animal’s speed, carrying him to his fate. Lady Charlotte could be directly over that next hill, and they’d meet at last, and all the dreaming and dreading would finally be done. Dutifully Carter and the two grooms followed, but their horses were not equal to March’s, and he was soon ahead of them. He raced up the last hill, knowing that on the other side lay the road to London, and upon it, if the saints did smile upon him, would be his bride.

He reached the crest and paused, drawing the horse’s head to one side.

And swore again. Softly, under his breath, as befit a duke, but swearing nonetheless, for the scene that lay before him made less sense than a Covent Garden comedy.

An enormous, old-fashioned traveling coach had drawn to a halt near a copse of spreading trees, not far from the road. The coach was a distinctive shade of mulberry, like a giant glistening beetle, and even without being able to read the crest on the door, March knew it belonged to the countess. Though stopped, the coach did not seem to be in any distress; the driver had climbed down from the box, and the footmen who rode behind the coach were helping him loosen the team so they might graze. The baggage cart had also halted and the outriders had dismounted as well, standing in the
shade of the trees. All this masculine activity seemed uneventful enough, but the ladies—the ladies had all, it seemed, lost their wits entirely.

A beautiful gold-haired woman in a feathered hat stood beneath the broadest of the trees, staring upward into the branches. On either side of her were two younger girls that must be her daughters, both dressed in matching white gowns with pink sashes. The girls also stared up into the tree, wailing and sobbing as if their very hearts were breaking, and though their mother tried to comfort them by holding them close, they remained inconsolable, wringing and thrashing their hands about like bedlamites. Two small white fluffs of dogs on long leashes raced around and around these three, wrapping the leashes around their legs like a maypole ribbon, and barking, too, as if they hoped to outdo the girls’ wailing.

The final touch of madness came from the countess herself. An angular woman laced too tightly, she tottered on high, unsteady heels through the waving grasses, leaning on the arm of a footman while she waved her ruffled parasol like a general’s baton. She, too, stared upward, and because she shouted the loudest of all, March could hear her from the hill.

“Come down here at once!” she ordered. “No lowly mongrel beast is worth this sort of performance, and I will not have it. Come down, I say, come down directly! Directly!”

At once March urged his horse down the hill to join them. So long as they were on his land, they were his responsibility, and he would do what he must to calm them and bring order. It was only when he was twenty paces away that he realized Lady Charlotte
—his
Lady Charlotte—seemed not to be of the party.

“Good day, Lady Sanborn,” he said, drawing up before the countess. “Might I be of service to you? If there is some distress, some—”

“Distress, Duke!” She managed the slightest possible curtsey to him before she popped up again, her quivering cheeks pink with indignation. “That is, good day, good day. Pray forgive me, Duke, but my greatest distress must come from your very presence here. You must be gone directly. You cannot stay another moment in this place.”

“But this is my place, Lady Sanborn,” March said, thinking again of dragons. He wished she’d stop brandishing her parasol at him, too. All those shaking ruffles were upsetting his horse. “You are at present on my land and are therefore my guest. It’s my pleasure and my duty to put you at your ease.”

“This is not about my ease, Duke,” she declared vehemently. “You know that as well as I. It is about you attempting to glimpse your bride before the time we agreed, and I will not permit it.”

“It is your welfare that concerns me most at present, Lady Sanborn,” he declared, sidestepping her accusation, which was, of course, exactly what he had been planning. “And how could I hope to glimpse Lady Charlotte Wylder when she is clearly not of your party today?”

“But Charlotte
is
here.” The younger of the girls with the pink sashes darted toward March, her earlier tears forgotten. “She’s the entire reason we must go to London.”

At once Lady Sanborn swung her parasol down before the girl like a tollman’s bar, blocking her path.

“You forget yourself, Lady Diana,” she warned ominously as the gold-haired lady rushed forward, settling her hands on the girl’s shoulders.

“Oh, Diana, this is a grievous mistake,” the lady said hurriedly, mortified for her daughter’s sake, “and I know I’ve explained this to you before, over and over. You are never to address anyone of His Grace’s rank. You must wait until His Grace has first honored you with his notice.”

“But he’s noticed me now, Mama,” the girl said, cheerfully undaunted as she gazed up at March on the horse. “He’ll notice Charlotte, too. She’s up there, sir, over your head.”

The girl pointed upward. With a certain amount of reluctance—or was it dread?—March slowly looked up into the tree.

There sat his bride, perched like some silk-clad nymph on a wide branch, with one arm loosely around the trunk for balance. At least she’d looped and tied her skirts to one side of her legs for decency’s sake, but as he gazed up from the back of his horse March still had a provocative view of frothy lace around bright green stockings on delicate, perfectly shaped ankles. The gauzy linen kerchief around her shoulders had slipped to one side, and the plump curves of her breasts rose above the neckline of her gown, all the more obvious above the boned bodice. Her skin was creamy and fair, her cheeks prettily flushed, her dark hair tousled beneath a small lace cap.

His first coherent thought was that Carter had been absolutely right: Lady Charlotte was a beauty, the kind of beauty destined to turn heads in every ballroom in London.

His second was pure amazement that such a lady was intended for him.

But his third and most urgent thought was why in blazes the soon-to-be third Duchess of Marchbourne—
his
duchess—was stranded in the lofty branches of a tree.

“Good day, Lady Charlotte,” he said briskly, already determining a plan for rescuing her. “We shall make our formal acquaintance soon enough, I am sure, but more pressing now is that I save you.”

“
Save
me?” she repeated, her eyes widening with charming astonishment. “But I do not require saving, Your Grace, not at all.”

As if to prove it, she swung toward him with only the single arm around the tree’s trunk for security, then swayed back again, almost as if she were dancing. It was gracefully done, to be sure, but it worried him to see her be so cavalier with her safety.

“No more of that,” he ordered, swiftly guiding his horse to stand beside the base of the tree. “If you fall, I’ll never forgive myself.”

To his amazement, she laughed, a merry, rippling laugh. “But I won’t fall, sir. Ask my sisters if you doubt me. I’ve been climbing in and out of trees for as long as I can remember, and this one is no challenge at all.”

She balanced on one foot, raising and pointing the other elegantly before her.

The baser, male part of March’s brain marveled at how fine her ankles appeared in those bright green stockings and how pretty her feet were in pink flower-patterned shoes with silver buckles, and wondered if she tied her garters below her knees or above them.

Fortunately, the more responsible part of that same brain stepped forward and reminded March of his duty.

“Take care, Lady Charlotte, take care,” he cautioned, striving to concentrate on her safety rather than her knees. “Nothing will be gained, and everything may be lost.”

He handed his reins to one of the waiting grooms, swiftly unbuttoned his coat, and tossed it along with his hat to another of the servants. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d climbed a tree, but then he’d never had such a good reason for doing so. He swung his leg over the saddle and pulled himself up into the deep crook of the tree.

Behind him, he heard Lady Sanborn gasp again, though likely more with outrage than indignation.

“Please, Duke, do not put yourself at risk like this,”
she called. “Send a servant up after her if you must, but pray do not exert yourself like this. While Lady Charlotte is fool enough to believe herself a wild squirrel, there is no need for you to do so as well.”

“Yes, sir, you must take care,” Carter said, his voice adding another note of horrified concern.

March did not reply. Instead he looked across to Lady Charlotte, who still stood on her branch about ten paces beyond him, and another twelve feet or so above the ground.

“Be easy, Lady Charlotte,” he said, wishing to reassure her. “Don’t fear. I am coming to your aid.”

But Lady Charlotte appeared neither uneasy nor fearful. She looked bemused.

“You don’t have to do this, sir,” she said wryly. “Truly. Not for me. I vow it’s vastly heroic of you to make the attempt, but your riding boots will be too slippery on the bark.”

“No, they won’t.” To demonstrate, he climbed up from one branch to the next, closer to her. She was right, of course: because his servants kept the soles of his boots as brightly polished as the shafts, he might as well have been navigating the smooth bark with sheets of glass beneath feet. But he’d never confess it to Lady Charlotte, not after she’d called him heroic.

She frowned, watching his well-polished feet sliding over the branch. “Take care, sir. Mind you keep one hand for yourself and one for the ship.”

He climbed closer. “Are you a sailor, then, Lady Charlotte?”

“One need not be a sailor to see the wisdom in nautical maxims,” she said. “I expect clambering through the rigging and mastheads is much the same as elms and oaks. Truly, sir, I can climb down perfectly well myself.”

“She can, Your Grace,” piped up her younger sister
Lady Diana, standing below them. “First Charlotte must save Fig, and then she’ll come down on her own. She’s done it hundreds of times.”

March sighed with exasperation. He was accustomed to seeing a task to be done and doing it, and having his betrothed refuse his assistance like this was perplexing. Who would have guessed that life in the country would produce such independence in a young lady?

With fresh determination, he climbed up another branch. “Tell me,” he said, “is Fig another sister?”

“My sister?” Lady Charlotte tipped back her head and laughed again, displaying a small freckle directly on the underside of her jaw that was unexpectedly enchanting.

If only she’d call him heroic once more.

“Fig is Diana’s cat, sir,” she explained, “and a wicked, ill-behaved little cat at that. She’s watching us right now, you know, right up there, deciding when she’ll let me catch her.”

Dutifully March glanced upward, and for the first time he noticed the small piebald cat nestled in the leaves overhead. The cat looked content, her tail curled around her feet, and disinclined toward being caught.