Always a Gentleman, Never a Duke (Dueling for Dukes Book 3)

Chapter 2

No.

No, this wasn’t happening or no, it couldn’t be him. Either would have applied just then.

For a solitary moment as Lady Heyworth led them over to the gentlemen, her mind had played a devious trick on her, swapping the two so that for one terrible second she thought her midnight gentleman was the duke.

But it wasn’t the duke. She knew that. It was only her fragile mind trying to escape the thing she had resigned herself to, trying one last feeble attempt to latch on to something that would save her.

Tuck.

He was the duke’s cousin. That was what Lady Heyworth was saying. Her sister Annie was curtsying; their mother curtsied. Eloise couldn’t remember how it was done, but her legs were suddenly moving, her head dipping.

The Honorable Mr. Tucker Ryan.

Not a duke at all.

“My cousin has graciously accepted my invitation to join me in London for the season,” Ardley was saying when Eloise’s ears finally stopped ringing.

But although the duke was speaking, her eyes never left Tuck’s. He had asked her to call him Tuck. How was she supposed to address him as Mr. Ryan now? Act as though they’d never met when, in fact, their meeting had been the greatest accident of her life?

“Oh, how lovely,” Eloise’s mother said, leaning forward on the word lovely as if this would help emphasize her meaning. “I do hope you’ll find it to your liking, Mr. Ryan. Have you never been in town for a season before?”

Eloise forced her eyes to blink. She’d been staring for too long. What was wrong with her? The duke was going to think there was something odd about her, and the entire season would be a failure before it had hardly begun.

Not an entire failure. She couldn’t think that because just that morning in a startling turn of events, her oldest sister, Gwendolyn, had left for Yorkshire to marry a sheep farmer. Gwen, the one sister Eloise had counted on to remain on the shelf, the one she was sure would not have a stake in this season’s duel over the dukes.

Gwen had gotten herself a husband.

It wasn’t a love match. It wasn’t close to as much. Gwen hadn’t even met her future husband, and she wouldn’t until she landed on his doorstep in Yorkshire.

Still. It stung.

Gwen had a match. Gwen was finished with all this business of matchmaking. Gwen was going to be a wife.

Something twisted in Eloise’s chest, and she hated herself for her sudden jealousy over her sister’s situation. After all, Gwen could be walking into a nightmare, hitching herself forever to a boar of a man that smelled of moldy cheese and three-day-old ale.

Tuck didn’t smell like moldy cheese. He smelled like the pine of the firs that marked the path in the courtyard upon which she’d discovered him. She had thought him a wood nymph, something sprung from a fairy tale and partly a result of her overactive imagination.

But he wasn’t. He was real, and he was standing in front of her, and they were forced to pretend they had never met before that very minute.

“No,” Tuck said then, answering Eloise’s mother, yet his gaze never left hers. “I’m finding it rather…extraordinary.”

The word zinged through her like a flurry of bubbles traveling through every one of her veins.

Extraordinary.

What a deliberate word. Had he chosen that for her? Was she extraordinary?

Oh God, she couldn’t be. She just couldn’t.

It took an effort she would never have believed she possessed to wrench her gaze from his and fix it on the duke. She was staring at him for a full three seconds when she registered the quizzical look on his face as he returned her gaze.

Oh heavens, what was her face doing? What expression was she giving? She didn’t know. She couldn’t even feel her face any longer.

She forced her shoulders back and raised her chin.

Eloise Cassandra Bounds was trained for precisely this moment, and she would not allow one starry night to sweep her off her feet.

Then why was her attention skittering back to Tuck? Why was she listening so intently while her mother questioned him?

“You come from Derbyshire then?” Eloise’s mother asked.

Tuck nodded. “Originally, yes. Most recently I find myself in Oxford. I have a lecturer position there, and I’ve been conducting research into the aurora borealis.”

The northern lights.

Her attention was fully on him again, but she allowed it this time. She’d read of the aurora borealis in her father’s scientific journals, the ones he procured because it looked good on his part but which he never read. She liked the illustrations, the whimsy and magic of them. To think somewhere in the world such light displays existed naturally.

“What kind of research are you conducting?” The question was out before she knew she would ask it.

This would never do. She couldn’t possibly be seen to exhibit interest in the man. No, she couldn’t. But then she noticed the duke’s expression had turned calculating.

He was watching her, studying her, assessing her.

Come, Eloise, she chided herself, now is the time to act.

And act she did. She tilted her head just so as she had practiced in the mirror to look intrigued but not curious. Curiosity was not a desirable trait in a wife.

“I endeavor to launch an expedition to Spitsbergen, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean where I’ll be able to study the aurora borealis firsthand.”

“Spitsbergen.” She whispered the word while her mind raced through the various illustrations she’d studied of the far-flung locale in her father’s journals. “I’ve heard Spitsbergen is cruelly cold but beautiful.”

Tuck nodded, but his eyes narrowed cautiously. “Beautiful but extreme, I would say. It’s no place for a holiday of leisure. Temperatures can dip dangerously low in the winter, and the archipelago is home to polar bears. One must exercise the utmost caution and wherewithal should one attempt an expedition in the territory.”

“Have you been there then?” she asked, aware her voice had gone breathless again.

The light in his eyes dimmed. “No, I’m afraid I haven’t.”

There was such heartache in his voice that it tugged at her, almost pulling her toward him. She felt herself tipping, yearning to soothe him, wishing to bolster his dreams, support him in any way she could.

But there was no way.

Only if she were his wife could she give him such comfort, but her station as a debutante kept her isolated.

“I know you’ll make it there one day,” she said, forcing cheer into her voice before resolutely turning her gaze to the duke. “It’s so kind of you to host your cousin this season, Your Grace.” The words sounded artificial, and she hoped the gaiety of the room and the ever-flowing champagne made it less obvious.

Ardley smiled, and she realized there was true warmth there. “It is the least I can do for not only my cousin but my one true friend.”

While her own words had lacked authenticity, Ardley was sincere, and it jolted her. The duke was…nice. She wasn’t sure what she had been anticipating, but likely her resistance to this entire endeavor had led her to presume the duke would be another stuffy aristocrat, like all the others she had encountered in her two seasons out.

But with this realization came another. It made it so much worse that she should covet this man’s cousin while actively attempting to win his proposal.

Oh Lord, she was a harlot.

Heat flooded her face, and she only hoped it did not appear in pink blotches on her cheeks. “You are close then?” she asked, and the jab of her mother’s elbow into her side was swift and sharp.

Her mother’s admonishment was justified. The question was terribly personal, but she couldn’t help it. The sudden appearance of her shadowy gentleman had thrown her, and it was all she could do to place words in the correct order to form a sentence.

Ardley threw his arm around Tuck, his smile broadening. “Thick as thieves, as they say.”

Tuck’s smile was sheepish. His gaze fell to the floor as his cousin embraced him, and she wondered if he weren’t used to such affection or was it merely that he was unused to such demonstration in public. Whichever it was, the sight of them tugged at her. This man was nothing if not mercurial. From the excitement he’d exhibited in showing her his modified railroad glasses to the bashful display before her and most intriguing of all, the quiet strength he exuded, the very strength she had felt when he’d pressed himself to her back, the man was as mysterious as his northern lights.

But then he raised his eyes, and unerringly, his gaze found hers, and for one horrible moment, they were locked there, seeing only each other, and in that infinite second, their future rolled out before her.

Eloise and Tuck, husband and wife. She would support him, helping him with his endeavor in any way possible. She would even follow him to Spitsbergen if that was what it took to see his dream of this expedition fulfilled. It was all she had ever wanted, to be a wife, a helpmate, a mother. It sounded terribly old-fashioned, but maybe she was old-fashioned. There was something so peacefully alluring in the idea of creating something, building a family, and watching it grow just like her parents had done.

Perhaps she would even enjoy some adventure in the process. She hadn’t thought of it. It hadn’t been an option before that moment, and she’d never considered it. But to be free of those watercolors and needlepoint? To experience something…more?

Here it was standing before her, all that she had ever dreamed of, but it was too late. It was time for her to set aside her childish dreams of love. Two seasons’ worth of her mother’s admonishments had taught her it was past time for Eloise Bounds to grow up.

So she would.

Once more she wrenched her gaze from Tuck and smiled at the duke. The smile came more easily now, but it came with a price, that of her heart slowly breaking.

“You’re incredibly lucky to have one another then,” she said, and the light in Ardley’s eyes changed, and it felt as though she’d passed some test.

Relief flooded her, swift as lightning, and she drew the first deep breath since coming into conversation with the duke and his cousin. She could do this. If Gwen could travel to Yorkshire to marry a man she’d never met, Eloise could be the debutante she was trained to be for the Duke of Ardley, even if it meant her heart was somewhere else, saving itself for someone else.

She curled her toes in her slippers, grounding herself there in the ballroom of what was going to be the first of many social obligations which she would attend to win the Duke of Ardley’s proposal.

When she was finally feeling steady once more, the duke himself not only pulled the rug out from beneath her, but he rolled it up and tossed it onto a bonfire.

“I’m glad you think so, Lady Eloise, for I think my cousin would very much enjoy a dance with you.”

“What?” The word shot from her lips like a social death sentence.

Her mother’s elbow to her ribs then was more lethal than a dagger, and she thought she might just die and be prevented from having to dance with the man who had stolen her heart under the watchful eye of the moon.

But if she were to expire of social death, Tuck looked as if he had just been told he would eat eel for the remainder of his life. The color drained from his face, and his lips parted wordlessly.

“Yes, a dance is in order, I should think,” Ardley was saying, but it was only noise in her ears as she tried to interpret the expression on Tuck’s face, the rampaging beat of her own heart, and the tingling in her fingertips as if she’d just snuffed a flame with her bare hands.

Her mother was making an agreeable noise—agreeable!—and the duke had turned to whisper something in his cousin’s ear, but it was so quick, she might have misunderstood because then Tuck was nodding, his arm extending, and then?—

She wished for once in her life to be one of those debutantes who was skilled at fainting dead away, but she was not.

So instead she danced with the Honorable Mr. Tucker Ryan.

* * *

He couldn’t tellLiam why this was a very bad idea.

Even with his cousin’s words reverberating in his ear, further evidence of why dancing with Eloise was the worst possible thing he could do in that moment, Tuck still couldn’t admit as to why.

Because if he did, Eloise would be ruined.

A midnight encounter in a secluded courtyard?

She’d be ruined for sure.

Oh God, he must stop thinking of her as Eloise. She was Lady Eloise, daughter of the Earl Stoke Bruerne, someone deserving of his respect. Someone entirely perfect for his cousin, the Duke of Ardley.

He glanced at Liam to find the man smiling idiotically, his head giving the smallest of nods as if to remind Tuck of his assignment.

Did his cousin truly wish for Tuck to assess Lady Eloise and give Liam his opinion on her as a potential wife?

Tuck would rather lose a toe to hypothermia.

Instead he smiled, graciously, and offered his arm to the lady as protocol required. The orchestra played the opening chords to a quadrille, and he thanked whatever deity that might be listening that it wasn’t a waltz. A quadrille was easy. In fact, he’d hardly even be forced to speak to Eloise, let alone touch her.

Oh God. Touch her.

Lady Eloise.

LadyEloise.

Lady. Eloise.

He was doomed.

But then Liam caught his arm, pulled him back just enough to whisper further damning instructions into his ear. “Promenade with her after this dance, won’t you? You’ll hardly have a chance to speak to her otherwise.”

Tuck wanted to run from the room, maybe from London entirely, but instead he gave that same gracious smile and turned them onto the dance floor.

He let go of her as soon as he could, stepping into the line to begin the dance. When he finally allowed himself to look at her face, he found her expression hovering between stark naked fear and resignation. At least they shared similar feelings on the matter.

He had looked away, glancing down the line of assembled dancers before her expression finally registered, and he looked back at her. Only this time she was watching him, and their eyes met, and the rest of the world fell away.

Because when he had seen her terrified expression, he had only registered that her feelings were likely the same as his, but he hadn’t registered what that meant.

That she felt the same way about him as he felt about her.

The ballroom vanished, the chatter and the music dying away, until there was only the thumping of his heart, the soft whooshing of the blood traveling through his veins, and…her.

He could see it now, from the light of a thousand candles above them, the hope and terror and—Oh God, longing—in her eyes as her gaze remained steady on his, unable to look away just as he was unable to do so.

How was it possible? How could he know between the beats of his beleaguered heart that she was everything he had ever wanted?

No. No. No.

This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not like this. She was meant for Liam, not for him. He couldn’t have her. He was only here to find a benefactor, and she was?—

Everything.

She glowed in the candlelight, and it was a moment before he realized he had the luxury of seeing her now, her features and coloring revealed like it hadn’t been in the moonlight. Her dark golden hair was pulled back from a face that seemed to radiate the light of a thousand stars, her eyes reflecting deep brown warmth, and her mouth—well, it was perfect. Perfect for smiling, perfect for laughing, perfect for?—

Someone jostled his shoulder, and he realized the music had started, the dancers were moving, and they had been lost in their own stargazing. His feet remembered the steps even when he did not, and soon they were sweeping across the dance floor, his ears filled with notes he didn’t hear. He tripped more than once when his gaze moved to follow her instead of the twirling dancers, and when the dance brought them back together again, he never wished to let go of her.

But he must as the steps of the dance separated them, and she was once more swept away.

How excruciatingly long was this dance?

It seemed to go on forever, and he was forced to keep his focus on the steps lest he trample an innocent debutante. But more than that, he must keep up appearances. He mustn’t let on what was happening. For anything, even so minor as a glance two seconds too long, would be sniffed out by the first matron, and Eloise’s reputation would be ruined. The scandal would be immense. Tuck was the cousin of the duke pursuing the young lady after all. He could not imagine a juicier morsel for the ton to devour.

The reel swung them about, bringing them together again. He took her hands, the steps dictating he move them in a quick succession of sidesteps. At least the swiftness of this series of steps required him to keep his gaze on their trajectory rather than her face.

Her beautiful, astounding, breathtaking?—

“I think we have a problem, Mr. Ryan.”

Eloise’s voice was little more than a whisper, but it was as though a gong erupted in his ear. His eyes flew to hers, and he nearly toppled them over a baron. He swung them about, completing the same series of steps in the direction from which they had just come.

“I would agree, Lady Eloise,” he whispered back. “But what are we to do of it?”

She shook her head so quickly he wouldn’t have noticed if he weren’t hanging on to her, but then the dance separated them once more. He accepted the hand of another partner, twirling her about in time with the reel until he found himself once more standing beside Eloise, the dance finished.

He couldn’t look at her. He didn’t dare. Everyone would know.

He held out his arm, and she took it, and he couldn’t understand how no one knew right then. Couldn’t they see it? This inferno that had inexplicably ignited between them? An inferno that could have only been started by a lightning strike, unstoppable and unpredictable.

He moved to the side of the dance floor, his pace sedate, their progress slow as they wound their way through the dancers. A few of the debutantes who had been partnered with other gentlemen in the quadrille exchanged pleasantries with Eloise, but their words were foreign sounding in his ears, and they may have well been speaking in gibberish for all he understood.

His heart was going to erupt from his chest, and he would die directly on the dance floor. Something must be done.

Her grip on his arm tightened, and he realized she was pulling him away from the crowd to the periphery of the room where refreshment tables were set up, and matrons and wallflowers lingered. Did she hope to slip amongst them? Get lost in the mundane of it all?

But no, she was pulling him through the matrons and wallflowers, past the refreshment tables, and to the corridor beyond. They were leaving the ballroom.

His feet cemented themselves to the floor without his knowing, and Eloise snapped backward like a plucked string. Her eyes rounded in disbelief and not a little bit of blame. She wasn’t wrong. He was drawing attention to them, attention they didn’t need, but if they left the ballroom, it would be all over. They would be alone again, and this time it would be so much worse because he knew who she was. She was forbidden, and forbidden things were always so much more tempting.

He tried to communicate with his eyes that he couldn’t take another step when she marched directly up to him, her voice strikingly low.

“I must speak to you, Mr. Ryan. We must sort this out. Do you wish to do this here where all of London can see us or would you prefer somewhere more private?”

She had a point. A very good one.

He forced his legs to move, pulling her arm more securely through his as they made their way to the corridor. The silence was jarring as they slipped through the archway into the dim light of the hallway beyond. What little sound carried through from the ballroom was muffled by the carpeted floor and the tapestries hanging thick on the walls. He tried to remember the name of the family whose home this was, but any of his thoughts before finding Eloise again were null, and his brain had simply swept them away. Whoever the family was who owned this house, their wealth was clearly old and stuffy judging by the weight of their furnishings.

Without preamble, Eloise opened one of the doors along the corridor and stuck her head inside. He jumped back as though a cobra would emerge from the crack between the doors. But only Eloise emerged, her face set.

“Come on,” she hissed and stopped, surveying him. “What is it?”

He gestured to the door. “Someone could have been in there.”

Her frown was swift. “And I would have told them I was looking for the retiring room.”

His expression fell. Yet another good point she made.

He gestured to the door, all but shoving her inside the room. He gave one last look along the corridor to ensure they hadn’t been seen before slipping into the room behind her. He wanted to slam the door shut as if they would keep out the threat of discovery, the reality of what he was doing there, the betrayal he was about to commit.

Betrayal.

The word sliced through him, and he bit down on his cheek as he turned about to find Eloise standing just behind him, her hands clenched together in front of her.

“This isn’t as bad as it would seem.”

Oh God, she was even more beautiful in this room. In?—

He swept his gaze quickly around the room, assessing it for hiding spots. He pressed a single finger to his lips as he strode across the room and assaulted the curtains that hung at the windows there. Finding them free of spies who would report him to Liam, he checked the space under the desk next and even the minuscule space below the two sofas. It was all empty. They were alone.

“It isn’t?” he said, standing up from his crouch along the floor and brushing the dust from his hands and the knees of his trousers. “We’re alone in a—” He paused, looked around again. “Is this a drawing room?”

Eloise followed his gaze. “It looks like such. Probably the family drawing room too. Look at those newspapers.”

Her hand gestured to a haphazard stack of newspapers strewn about a low table beside one of the sofas. There was an ashtray on the table by a chair in the corner, a clay pipe forgotten along its brim. Two teacups were discarded on the desk, and there was even a handkerchief slumbering beneath a pile of magazines. If it wasn’t the family’s drawing room, the staff required some remediation on how to properly keep a room.

He turned back to Eloise, but she hadn’t moved from her place by the door, and he was struck again by the absurdity of the situation. His entire life was changing second by second, and he was surrounded by the clutter of a strange family’s everyday life. It just wasn’t possible.

He must focus. “We’re alone again, Eloise.” He stopped himself, pressed his fingers to each temple. “I must stop calling you that. Lady Eloise.”

“Eloise is really fine.”

He looked sharply at her and found her expression had softened. From stark fear it had melted to the wondering disbelief he had seen the night before in the courtyard. It pulled at him, like a magnet finding its match, and it was all he could do to resist it.

But maybe he didn’t resist it because suddenly he was standing in front of her. His hands were lifting, his fingers finding the curve of her cheek, the one he had wanted to trace since laying eyes on her once more.

But he didn’t touch her. He couldn’t.

The inferno raged, and if he touched her, it would set off an explosion from which they could not come back.

“I can’t call you Eloise.” His voice had dropped, but he couldn’t say why. “You’re not mine to call you something so familiar.”

Her tongue darted out, wetting her lower lip. “No, I’m not yours.” Her voice was low too, and he wondered why.

“We haven’t done anything that can’t be undone.” The words sounded strange even to his own ears, as if he were convincing himself of something instead of speaking to her.

She shook her head but only a little. “No, we haven’t.” There was a pause, a pause he felt as if it had stepped directly on his chest. And then— “Not yet.”

The words rang through the air, but only for a second.

Because then he kissed her, and she kissed him, and everything else was forgotten.