Duke of Sloth (Sinful Dukes #7)

Chapter 1

“Are you leaving so soon, Your Grace?” Lady Lucinda Mountingdon asked, lounging on the velvet chaise-longue in a most scandalous state of deshabille, her long blonde tresses tumbling over her naked breasts and skirts still around her stocking tops.

The tall, dark man she spoke to barely glanced at her and did not pause as he fixed his clothes.

“Yes,” Nathaniel Winslow, the Duke of Greyhaven, returned. “You ought to dress too, Lady Mountingdon. The door is locked, but it is best that no one notices our absence from the performance.”

The woman who had ridden him with passionate abandon only a few minutes ago made a sound of disappointment and pulled a face.

“Oh, do not be such a spoilsport. I can still hear the music playing, and there is no need to rush away. Anyway, even if the interval starts, my greedy pig of a husband will go straight to the buffet and start stuffing his face rather than looking for me.”

“I thought I remembered you telling me that we had to be quick,” Nathaniel reminded her. “You told me it was now or never when you dragged me in here.”

“Oh, that was only part of the game. It was fun, wasn’t it? Let’s have another round while we are in here already. We might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, don’t you think?”

Nathaniel blinked at this logic, taking a further metaphorical step back from the situation. This brief encounter with the buxom and voracious Lady Mountingdon had indeed been fun, but that did not mean he was willing to risk the trouble of a scandal or row with a jealous husband to repeat it.

“I expected more discretion from a married woman,” he remarked as he buttoned his jacket.

“I have already told you that my husband does not care where I go or what I do,” Lady Mountingdon insisted, rising from the chaise and attempting to embrace him again.

“I have no wish to test that theory,” Nathaniel said shortly, detaching himself and combing his hair back into place in front of a looking glass that hung on the wall.

“Then when can I see you again?” Lady Mountingdon asked, resigned now to her lover leaving, and looking instead to the future, entirely unaware that her question might have the opposite effect to that intended.

“Need we think of that now?” Nathaniel answered. “We both enjoyed today’s little tryst, but I told you when we first met that I do not like to entangle myself in relationships. I thought you felt the same.”

Briefly, Lady Mountingdon looked hurt and then angry, before schooling her features, adjusting her neckline, and covering herself.

“You are telling me you felt nothing between us this afternoon, Your Grace?”

Nathaniel shrugged, very much averse to conversations of any kind about feelings. Most often, he felt nothing when others seemed to have a thousand feelings at any given moment. It was worse when they expected him to match them.

“I enjoyed you; you enjoyed me. What else is there to say?” he replied.

As he approached the door, Lady Mountingdon fell back onto the chaise longue.

“I feel quite faint,” she moaned. “You have been so very cruel, Your Grace.”

Nathaniel was not fazed by her little show and only just stopped himself from laughing. Even by amateur standards, this was bad acting. It was tempting to reply in kind, with the same level of absurd melodrama:

Yes, I was too cruel to make you climax twice. But alas…

But that would only extend this conversation further, and he was determined to leave. He quickly opened to the door and then turned back to her with a formal bow, as if they had just danced together.

“Goodbye, Lady Mountingdon. Do enjoy the rest of the performance.”

“Oh, to hell with you then, Greyhaven!” she snapped, then turned to the looking glass to fix her hair. “I do not give a fig for you anyway.”

Indifferent, Nathaniel stepped out of the room into the corridor and closed the door behind him, glancing around in case there were any observers. Seeing none, he strolled back to the large reception room where the orchestra was still playing.

“How long until the first part ends?” he asked a footman by the doors, after listening for a moment and consulting the program. “This is the final piece, is it not?”

“Yes, Your Grace. I do not think it will be more than five minutes now,” the man replied. “Shall I open the door for you?”

“No, I will not go back inside.”

Nathaniel decided it was better to linger in the anterooms rather than draw attention to himself by rejoining the last five minutes of the recital.

Taking a glass of refreshing lemonade from a table, he wondered whether he should actually leave. He was, after all, entirely uninterested in music these days, although he had vague memories of singing and playing instruments as a child.

He had come only at the request of the host, Leo Payne, the Duke of Mildenhall, who apparently wished to consult him on some business matter.

He ought to have declined the invitation, he reflected gloomily. He had the strong suspicion that Leo was trying to be his friend and wasn’t sure he liked it. There were enough damned friends to keep up with as it was.

In addition, Leo’s persistent amicable overtures were an odd reminder that Nathaniel himself might have easily and indifferently married Primrose, Leo’s wife, if Leo and Primrose had not fallen in love.

It would have been convenient to install a duchess to oversee the domestic concerns of the duchy that he didn’t wish to bother with. Primrose’s lack of interest in Nathaniel would have made her an ideal wife in some respects, motivated solely by a wish to save her family.

Ah, well, no point in thinking about that now. The past and the future were both distant countries, and visiting them took far too much energy. Nathaniel preferred to live in the present, or at least exist there.

“There you are, Nathaniel!” said a familiar man’s voice at his shoulder.

Nathaniel suppressed a sigh of dismay. “Leo, I thought you would still be listening to the orchestra in there.”

“I came to find you when you stepped out of the recital, but you’ve been missing for a full half hour,” Leo told him. “And I noticed the Countess of Mountingdon leaving the room a few minutes before you…”

Nathaniel shrugged his shoulders, unwilling to confirm or deny Leo’s suspicions.

“I cannot keep track of your other guests,” he said in a neutral tone.

“People will talk,” Leo warned him. “Lady Mountingdon already has a reputation, and it is only a matter of time before her husband is pushed to his limit. You could have ignored her.”

“As long as the lady was willing, that’s no one else’s business,” Nathaniel declared, unwilling to have his conduct questioned. “Anyway, you found me alone, so you cannot accuse me of anything.”

Leo laughed, knowing him well enough by now not to be offended by his turn of speech, but he did not back down.

“This is my house, Nathaniel. I only ask you to try to be a civilized human being while you’re in it. I know you can when you try.”

“You’re the one who invited me here, and you still haven’t told me why,” Nathaniel pointed out with dry humor. “I have the invitation to prove it, too. Look, there is even a personal note from you on the back.”

“Primrose insisted that I invite you,” Leo answered, equally amused. “My Duchess wants us to be friends, or at least to be civil with each other after all that… misunderstanding. For some reason, she considers you highly worth the trouble of knowing.”

Nathaniel had to smile at this explanation, knowing that his conduct and lifestyle could appear odd and off-putting to many, as he intended it to be.

“For the Duchess’s kindness, I can only be grateful,” he acknowledged with a bow of his head. “I shall be sure to give her my thanks after the performance.”

“She will be pleased, I am sure. But tell me, how is Lilian? Primrose thinks…”

Lilian. His daughter.

The simple question lanced sharply through Nathaniel. Would he have to admit to Leo that he had no idea how his own child was? He supposed she was well since no one had told him otherwise.

Thankfully, before he could answer, applause erupted in the recital room, and Leo glanced at his watch.

“Right on time,” he commented. “We’ll let everyone get a drink first and then open the buffet room. Now, before the masses descend…”

Before he could finish, however, the doors were flung open, and scores of guests flooded out into the anteroom, drowning out the rest of his words with their chatter.

“Magnificent, Mildenhall! Some of the best Mozart I’ve heard played in London…”

“Your Grace, what a fine orchestra you have assembled for us tonight!”

“Did you choose the program yourself, Your Grace?”

The words washed over Nathaniel as he swirled his drink and stifled a yawn, wondering what to do with himself until the buffet was opened.

He was not left to wonder for long.

“Good evening, Your Grace,” trilled a tall matron in puce, her eyes glinting as she ushered forward her flock of three white-clad and blankly coy daughters. “Charlotte, Jane, Millicent, you remember the Duke of Greyhaven, don’t you? We met him last December.”

“How lovely to see you again, Your Grace. I played the harp at Lady Johnson’s musical evening before Christmas.”

“And I played the pianoforte.”

“I sang. We were all sorry that you did not sing along with us.”

“I’m sure you have a fine voice.”

Nathaniel could hardly remember the mother’s name—Lady Bradburn? Braeburn? Balburne?—and he could not keep track of which vapid remark came from which young lady, let alone respond to them.

Yet, regardless of his stony face and lack of engagement, their banal conversation and light flirtation continued until he was almost bored to tears. Managing to escape, he ran straight into another mother-and-daughter pair, then another.

His mind flitted back to the brief time during which he had courted Primrose, now the Duchess of Mildenhall. A marriage would not only have provided him with a duchess to handle domestic concerns and a mother for Lilian, but it would also have meant escape from these tireless husband-hunters.

It was a shame that marriage could not be handed to him on a platter without this awful rigmarole.

When his original pursuers, Lady B. and her three daughters, recaptured him in a corner, he let his eyes glaze over, knowing that it was only a matter of time before supper was announced. If they tried to get him to escort them to the buffet, he would make his excuses and leave Mildenhall House.

Suddenly, he caught sight of his brother.

“Nathaniel, I must talk to you at once. It is most urgent,” Patrick said.

He spoke with real agitation and desperation in his eyes, but then he was always overly dramatic about life.

Nathaniel guessed that his brother had come here hoping to catch a pretty girl and now found her absent or on the arm of another man. Well, at least Patrick was less boring than his current companions.

“Do excuse me, ladies. My brother requires my urgent attention,” he told the ladies around him without meeting their eyes, and then let himself be drawn away and out of the room.

“She isn’t here, damn it,” Patrick blurted out. “I don’t understand it. Last week, she promised she would be here with her sister and their grandmother, but I spent the whole performance looking around the room, and she’s not here.”

So, Nathaniel’s suspicions about Patrick’s motivations were right. It was always about some pretty girl, and it was always complicated.

Why couldn’t his brother just pursue someone easy, marry her, and move on? Why all the emotional highs and lows, the frantic worry, and the desperate declarations of love? Nathaniel thought it must be exhausting for him.

“Who isn’t here?” he inquired mildly. “Lady Clara Beaumont? The woman with the green eyes and black hair?”

“No, don’t be ridiculous,” Patrick scoffed. “I can barely remember Lady Clara, and I haven’t seen her in months.”

“It seems like only yesterday that you were mooning about Greyhaven Park, lamenting the fact that she preferred someone else,” Nathaniel drawled.

“The only woman I love is Mary Holt. Her hair is like burnished gold, and her eyes are more hazel than green. Whenever she smiles at me, I am bewitched.”

“Just like all the others,” Nathaniel muttered. “Is that the door to the buffet room? Leo said it would be open in a few minutes, but I dare say we could go in now.”

A footman approached them as they stood outside the buffet room. Nathaniel wondered if he would try to prevent them from attacking the food early and whether it would be more entertaining or annoying if he stood his ground.

“Lord Patrick Winslow?” the footman inquired.

“Yes,” Patrick answered uncertainly. “Why do you ask?”

“A message has arrived for you, sir. It is marked both urgent and important.”

For the first time, the brothers looked at the missive on the footman’s silver tray.

Patrick snatched it up. “It is from her,” he said jubilantly. “I must read it at once.”

“Sure,” Nathaniel returned and let both the footman and Patrick walk away in different directions.

It was all the same to him whether Patrick wanted his company or not.

Likely, he had only wanted to vent about his latest love’s absence.

Now that she had sent some soppy love note, undoubtedly explaining herself, everything would be set right, and Nathaniel had little desire to hear any more about the matter.

Food was the priority for the moment, he decided. Yes, he would eat a quick, light meal before the other guests arrived in a rush, then leave discreetly without anyone noticing. Patrick could find his own way home or stay somewhere else for the night.

Turning to look up and down the corridor to make sure no one might follow his lead or try to keep him company, Nathaniel pushed open the door and quietly stepped backward into the room.

When he turned around toward the well-provisioned buffet tables, however, he stopped dead at what he saw.

What the hell is she doing?