Sizzling Duke Summer

Chapter One

All he’d wanted was an uneventful journey.

An easy and blissfully dull sojourn back to the countryside.

Instead, he’d suffered torrential downpours since leaving London.

Now, only a short distance from home—from the blessed peace to be found behind the ivy-covered walls of Sedgewick Hall—the bloody river had crested its banks and there were no rooms to be had at the local inn.

But, unlike the holy infant, he would not be seeking his shelter in a manger.

No. There was a hunting lodge—a damnable place haunted by memories of a life that might have been—where he would be able to take his ease.

Whatever specters of his past that yet lurked within those walls, it would at least be dry.

Still, he had at least managed to procure some provisions at the inn, even if they hadn’t a room for him.

He couldn’t stave off every misery, but he’d banish those which he could.

Taking his small parcel of slightly stale bread, hardened cheese, and a couple of wizened apples, he dismounted from his horse and made his way inside the small hunting lodge.

The stream which ran directly in front of it was rain-swollen already.

The simple footbridge which allowed access was already covered by an inch of chilly, rushing water.

What struck him instantly, as soon as he crossed the threshold, was that the small structure felt wrong to him. So much so that he recognized one indisputable fact. The lodge was already occupied.

“Filthy squatters,” he muttered. It was one more thing to impede his peace. One more thing to plague what little patience he had managed to retain.

A noise from the upper floor of the small lodge reached him then.

Withdrawing the small knife that he carried in his boot while traveling, a necessary precaution he had learned the hard way, he moved on silent feet deeper into the structure.

Whoever it was, they’d leave—of their own accord or otherwise.

Climbing the narrow stairs, staying close to the wall to avoid the creaking of wood, he made his way to the solitary bedchamber that was his by right of ownership. A bedchamber that he would not be denied for any reason.

Pausing atop the landing, he closed his hand over the rustic latch and then, with one swift motion, released it and flung the door wide.

The knife clattered to the floor as the shock of recognition rattled through him.

Despite the familiarity, what he saw there was truly the last thing he’d ever anticipated.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he snapped.

The woman before him, clad at present in only a dusty sheet and a veil of damp scarlet tresses, glowered at him from behind the curtain of her hair. “I was attempting to take shelter from the rain. Did my mother send you?”

“I’d hardly be the one to play lackey for her,” he replied, as if offended at the very thought. “Who is with you?”

“Apparently not good fortune.”

His gaze raked over her from head to toe, from every disheveled strand of her glorious hair to the bare toes peeking from beneath dusty linen. “I’d beg to differ, Cecily… I would consider you to be especially well favored. As always. I’m certainly in a position to know.”

*

Of all the people to wander into her escape—madcap, ill considered, and apparently plagued as it was—it had to be Malcolm Alexander Winthrop, Duke of Sedgewood.

Bane of her existence. Thorn in her side.

Purveyor of all her torment. The man she loved.

The man she hated. The man, for better or worse, who had haunted her dreams for nearly a decade.

“If you ever had even the slightest feeling for me, you will turn around and leave. Forget you ever saw me here and allow me to escape once and for all,” she implored him.

“What are you running from?”

“My mother,” she answered simply. “And her machinations… She’s decided it is past time I wed. Whether I choose to or not.”

He leaned against the doorframe, his gaze roaming freely over her as though he still had the right. “And who is it she has you traipsing down the aisle with now? Being a second son as I was back then, I was certainly not good enough for her.”

Cecily looked away. She refused to be baited by his knowing gaze and his deceptively casual stance. “She lost me—or rather my dowry—on the turn of a card… to Bartwell.”

“Refuse him!” he snapped instantly, half in shock and half in amusement based on his tone.

“I did. And then I ran, because apparently they weren’t overly concerned with whether or not I was in agreement with their plan…

I fled under cover of darkness when he sent men to fetch me.

” It was humiliating to admit, humiliating to own to him especially, that she had not married yet because she was still pining for him.

As much, of course, as she would pine for anyone.

Pining wasn’t her way, after all. Stamping her foot, throwing a temper tantrum, and stalking away was much more her thing.

“They can hardly force you,” he mused. “I have never known you to hesitate in speaking your mind and any vicar who dared ask would surely get the full force of it!”

Cecily rolled her eyes. “You are so blastedly and infuriatingly honorable that it never even occurs to you others may not be! Malcolm, they intended to drag me off to Gretna Green and force my hand. I have but to wait five more days. Then I will have reached the age my grandfather deemed reasonable to no longer need Father’s, and in his absence, Mother’s, approval for anything.

Then the dowry, as well as the annuity, shall be mine outright.

Five days to hide here. That is all I ask. ”

“I will not allow that,” he said.

Allow? Before she could overcome her shock to challenge his autocracy, he continued.

“You cannot remain here unprotected. Not when Sedgewick Hall is but a day’s ride away…

well, a day’s ride when the whole of the county is not flooded by the Severn…

You will accompany me to Sedgewick Hall, Cecily, and I shall provide you shelter and protection there until such time as it is safe for you to leave. ”

Oh, no. No. No. She most assuredly would not. “I cannot imagine that Elspeth would take kindly to your bringing your former betrothed into her home.”

His face darkened. “My home. Apparently you are the only woman in all of England who does not thrive on gossip… Elspeth is dead, Cecily. This past year. And by all accounts, I am the cause of it. Apparently, being dismally unhappy and perpetually disappointed drove her straight to the bottom of a bottle of laudanum.”