The Cold Duke’s Heart (Dukes of Deception #1)

Chapter One

"Smile, Daniel. You look as though someone has died."

"No one has died, Rosanne. I am simply standing."

"You are glowering. There is a difference." Lady Rosanne Wynthorpe tucked her hand more firmly into the crook of her brother's arm, as though she feared he might bolt for the house at any moment. Which, to be fair, was not an unreasonable fear. "The tenants will think you disapprove of them."

"I do not disapprove of them."

"Then perhaps you might inform your face of that fact."

Daniel Wynthorpe, sixth Duke of Wyntham, did not dignify this with a response.

He was, he felt, being perfectly pleasant.

He had arrived at the tenant fair at the appointed hour.

He had shaken the appropriate hands, nodded at the appropriate children, and made the appropriate remarks about the weather, the harvest, and the general state of the county.

He had even, at Rosanne's insistence, consumed a meat pie from one of the village stalls, though it had sat in his stomach like a small, resentful stone ever since.

What more could possibly be required of him?

"You might try enjoying yourself," Rosanne said, as though she had heard the question he had not asked aloud. "It is a fair, Daniel. There is music. There are games. Mrs. Hendricks has made her famous apple tarts."

"I am aware of Mrs. Hendricks's tarts. She has made them every year for the past decade."

"And every year, you refuse to eat one."

"I do not care for apples."

Rosanne made a small sound of exasperation; a sound Daniel had become intimately familiar with over her seventeen years of existence. It was the sound she made when she found him particularly impossible, which was, admittedly, often.

He supposed he could not blame her. The fair was pleasant, in its way.

The September sun was warm without being oppressive, the village green was festooned with bunting and ribbons, and the air smelled of roasted meat and fresh bread and the particular golden sweetness of autumn.

Children darted between the stalls like small, shrieking comets, their laughter rising above the general hum of conversation.

Farmers compared livestock with the grave intensity of generals surveying a battlefield.

Young couples walked arm in arm, stealing glances at each other when they thought no one was looking.

It was, by any reasonable measure, a scene of simple happiness.

But Daniel found it exhausting.

Not the happiness itself; he did not begrudge his tenants their pleasures. But there was something about all this feeling, all this unguarded emotion on display, that made him want to retreat to the cool silence of his study and remain there until everyone had gone home.

You are a cold man, his mother had told him once, during one of their final arguments. You will die alone, Daniel, with nothing but your precious control for company.

She had been wrong about many things, but perhaps not about that.

"Oh, look!" Rosanne's grip on his arm tightened suddenly. "Something is happening over there. By the puppet show."

Daniel followed her gaze and saw a small knot of people gathering near one of the far stalls.

A woman was crying, one of the tenant farmers' wives, he thought, though he could not recall her name, and several others were speaking in the raised, urgent tones that suggested crisis rather than celebration.

"Stay here," he said, already moving toward the commotion.

"Daniel, I am not a child."

"Stay here."

He did not wait to see if she obeyed. His long stride carried him across the green in moments, the crowd parting instinctively as he approached. Being a duke had its advantages; people tended to move out of one's way.

"What has happened?" he demanded, addressing no one in particular.

A dozen voices answered at once, creating a cacophony of overlapping explanations from which Daniel extracted the following: a child had wandered off, a boy of perhaps four or five years, and his mother had only just noticed his absence.

The puppet show had been very engaging, you see, and she had only looked away for a moment, and now the boy was nowhere to be found.

What if he had wandered toward the river, what if. ..

"Enough." Daniel held up a hand, and the voices fell silent. "How long has he been missing?"

"Only a few minutes, Your Grace," someone offered. "But he's so small, and there are so many people."

"Then we shall find him. You,"he pointed at one of the young farmhands, "check the livestock pens. You, the food stalls. You..."

"I believe I have found him."

The voice came from behind him, and Daniel turned.

A young woman was walking toward the group, and in her arms was a small, dirt-smeared boy who appeared to be eating a sticky bun with single-minded determination.

The child's mother let out a sob of relief and rushed forward, gathering her son into her arms with the sort of fierce, trembling embrace that made Daniel deeply uncomfortable to witness.

"Oh, thank you, thank you! Where was he? Where did you find him?"

"Behind the cheese stall," the young woman said.

Her voice was calm, her manner unhurried, as though reuniting lost children with their hysterical mothers was simply part of her afternoon routine.

"He had discovered a litter of kittens and was attempting to convince them to follow him home.

We negotiated a compromise involving baked goods. "

The mother laughed, a wet, relieved sound, and thanked her again, and again, until the young woman gently extracted herself from the effusions of gratitude and stepped back.

It was only then that Daniel truly looked at her.

She was not beautiful. Or rather, she was not beautiful in the way that London society defined the term.

She lacked the porcelain delicacy, the artful ringlets, the studied grace that characterized the young ladies who paraded through Almack's each Season.

Her hair was brown and she was simply dressed.

Her gown was modest and slightly unfashionable, and her complexion suggested she spent rather more time outdoors than was strictly proper.

But there was something about her face, something in the steadiness of her gaze, the slight curve of her mouth, the way she stood with her weight evenly balanced, as though she were rooted to the earth itself, that made it difficult to look away.

She was looking at the child now, watching as his mother carried him off toward home, and there was a softness in her expression that did something peculiar to Daniel's chest. A sort of tightening, or loosening, he could not quite tell which.

He did not like it.

"That was well done," he said, and immediately regretted speaking, because now she was looking at him, and the steadiness of her gaze was considerably more unsettling when directed at his person.

"It was nothing, Your Grace." She curtsied correctly, if without particular flourish. "He was not truly lost. Only temporarily misplaced."

"There is a distinction?"

"A significant one, I think. Lost implies genuine danger. Misplaced suggests merely a failure of organisation."

Her tone was perfectly polite, but there was something in it, a glint of something that might have been humor, that made Daniel narrow his eyes.

"You have a philosophical turn of mind, Miss...?"

"Whitcombe. Lillian Whitcombe." She met his gaze directly, which was unusual.

Most people, particularly women, tended to look at his cravat or his shoulder or some fixed point in the middle distance when speaking to him.

Miss Whitcombe appeared to have no such compunction.

"And I would not call it philosophical, Your Grace.

Merely practical. I have younger cousins.

One learns to distinguish between genuine emergencies and temporary inconveniences. "

"I see."

He should say something else. Something gracious and ducal and appropriate to the occasion. But his mind had gone curiously blank, and he found himself simply standing there, looking at her, while the noise of the fair continued around them.

Say something, he commanded himself. You are a duke. You have been trained in the art of conversation since birth. Say something.

"Your hem is dirty," he said.

Of all the things he might have chosen to say, this was perhaps the worst. Miss Whitcombe glanced down at the muddied edge of her gown, a consequence, no doubt, of kneeling behind the cheese stall to retrieve the wayward child, and when she looked up again, there was definite amusement in her eyes.

"Indeed," she agreed. "It is."

She did not apologize. She did not blush or stammer or offer excuses. She simply acknowledged the fact and waited, as though curious to see what he would do with it.

Daniel had no idea what to do with it.

"Daniel!" Rosanne's voice cut through his paralysis, and he turned to find his sister hurrying toward them, her cheeks flushed with exertion. "There you are. I told you to wait for me, but you never listen. Is everything...Oh!"

She stopped short, her gaze fixing on Miss Whitcombe with sudden, delighted recognition.

"Miss Whitcombe! How lovely to see you again!"

Again? Daniel looked between the young woman with the dirty hem and his sister, feeling as though he had missed a step on a familiar staircase.

"Lady Rosanne." Miss Whitcombe's smile warmed perceptibly. "The pleasure is mine. I did not expect to see you at the fair."

"I insisted," Rosanne said, with a pointed glance at her brother that suggested insisted was a rather generous description of the negotiations involved.

"Daniel thinks public gatherings are a form of torture specifically designed to inconvenience him, but I maintain that it is good for his character to occasionally interact with other human beings. "

"Rosanne," Daniel said, in the tone he used when she was being deliberately provoking.