
The Ruthless Duke (When A Duke Vows #1)
Prologue
PROLOGUE
" T he fact of the matter is," pontificated Richard Longman, future Duke of Beaumont, with the confidence of the very drunk, "that we're all doomed. Have you ever met a duke who is not a complete arse?"
Joseph Pike, future Duke of Culton, who tended to be proper and a bit too literal at the best of times, and dramatically more so when drunk, pondered this seriously. "No," he said after a moment.
"No!" agreed Richard emphatically, as if the lull in conversation never happened. "Old Billy said it best, lads: 'Our faults are not in ourselves, dear Brutus, but in our terrible fathers and the cursed legacy they will one day leave us'."
Joseph frowned into his glass of port. "I'm not sure that's how it goes." He knocked back the rest of his glass. "Truly, Richard, I know I'm completely legless at the moment, but I don't think you've got it right."
"No, no," Seth Barton, future Duke of Downton, protested jovially. Seth wore his inebriation less obviously than Joseph or Richard; he had the same lighthearted affect after a long night's drinking as he did stone cold sober. " Julius Caesar is famously about English primogeniture. Do go on, Richard."
From the corner of the room, Percy Dunn, future Duke of Haddington, couldn't help but grin at the antics of his friends. "Yes, Richard," he chimed in. "Do tell us why you ought to be sent down from university for your dreadful misrepresentation of literature alone." Richard shot him a very rude gesture.
By rights, they likely shouldn't have been friends, the four of them. It was unheard of, frankly, to have four dukes' heirs all born within a year of each other, and when they'd arrived at Eton, knobby-kneed, half-grown little lords, it had dramatically upset the normal education in power dynamics that hummed beneath the school's nominal curriculum.
Normally, anyone lower born or less rich—which was to say everyone, as there weren't any sons of royal dukes attending Eton during the four friends' tenure—would cozy up to a duke's son, attempting to make a friendship that would benefit them, or their families, long after the schoolboy years were over. Adolescent boys, even sons of the nobility, were not celebrated for their skills in diplomacy, so nobody really knew what to do with four duke's sons—all heirs, no less!—least of all the boys themselves, who circled each other like sharks (a very polite shark, in Joseph's case), until Seth, who had always been the friendliest, gathered them in the library one afternoon and announced that this whole thing was stupid, and they were going to be friends now.
Oddly enough, it was easy as that.
They'd made their own little club at school and now at university—Percy, Joseph, Richard, and Seth—and had found that it was far more enjoyable to be friends with each other than with the sycophants that were constantly toadying up to them for what Seth, who was a bit of a radical, called "a completely arbitrary quirk of birth." Joseph had once called them the "future dukes club," but had never mentioned it again, as his friends had all immediately pelted him with their dinner rolls.
"All I'm asking," Richard went on, "is how we're supposed to manage avoiding turning into our fathers if we've never seen any other way to do things?"
Through the fuzziness alcohol had wrapped around his brain, and through his friend's effort to hide his true feelings, Percy spotted something that suggested that this question was more than frippery. This was something that actually concerned Richard.
Not that Percy was surprised by this. None of them liked to talk too much about their fathers—misquoting aside, Richard wasn't far off when he spoke of feeling like they were all destined to inherit doomed legacies—but Percy had always had the impression that Richard's father was just a bit worse than the rest of them.
Percy wanted to have an answer—for himself, for his friends.
And suddenly, he did. With the clarity that comes from being young, and clever, and surrounded by one's dearest friends in the world—and yes, yes, from the depths of a liquor bottle—the answer appeared right in front of him.
"We refuse," he said with the kind of confident, final tone that caused all three of his friends to look up at him in unison.
Seth cracked the silence first. "We refuse?" he asked, letting the phrase dangle in the air.
Such a lackluster response should have lessened Percy's enthusiasm, but instead he felt certainty building inside him. "Yes," he said, just as firmly. "We refuse to be like them."
A flash of something like anger crossed Richard's face. "You think it's so easy?" he demanded. "You think just because you don't want to do something—don't want to be something—that you're automatically safe from ever becoming it?"
Percy was already slashing his hand through the air. "No," he said. "Not me—us." Richard didn't look totally mollified, but he didn't look angrier either, so Percy kept going. "We vow we won't—we don't promise ourselves; we promise each other . And then we hold each other accountable."
Seth was nodding and Joseph had half his mouth quirked into a smile. "I like it," Seth said, leaning back on the rear two legs of his chair. Then, with a smirk, he added, "Besides, even if it doesn't work, it can't really hurt." Percy made a halfhearted kick in his direction and missed by a mile.
"We do better," agreed Joseph. "We do right ."
They all turned to Richard. Whether the drink, or the hour—closer to dawn than midnight—or the company, it felt obvious: it had to be all of them. The frown on Richard's face lessened the slightest bit. "It might work," he conceded. Seth leaped to his feet and pretended to cheer until Richard grabbed a book from a nearby table and threw it at him.
"So we swear?" It was stupid, probably, to be this hopeful. You couldn't count on people—Percy knew that as well as he knew anything. But these specific people had never let him down, so maybe that was something. "We don't become like our fathers. No matter what happens—we help each other, and we do better than they did."
"So sworn," said Seth with a nod, a note of seriousness in his typically lighthearted demeanor.
"I promise," said Joseph.
"Yes," said Richard. "Me, too. No matter what—nothing like them."
Percy nodded, feeling certain that something had just gone absolutely right. "I swear it. We'll figure it out. The four of us, together."
And the four heirs sealed their vow with a drink.