Wagered By the Duke (Dukes of Temptation #3)

Chapter One

“You are the most tedious man in London, Ravenhurst, and I say that with genuine admiration.”

Ash Hambridge, third Duke of Ravenhurst, allowed the gold casing of his father’s pocket watch to turn once, twice, three times between his fingers before he deigned to reply.

The metal caught the low flame of Madame Aurelie’s upper salon with each rotation, a small bright pulse against the stale air.

“If your admiration were genuine, Devlin, you would afford me the courtesy of silence.”

Devlin laughed, the sound carrying the particular warmth of a man who had consumed two glasses of brandy more than the rest of the room.

Lord Rourke, sprawled across the chaise beside the window, joined him.

Young Lord Aldous chimed in a moment too late, still laboring under the impression that laughing with earls at three in the morning made him interesting.

“Silence is the refuge of the uninspired,” Devlin countered, lifting his glass to signal one of Aurelie’s girls for a refill.

“And we are desperately in need of inspiration. Look at you. Surrounded by the finest velvet and the most accommodating company in Mayfair, and you are timing the demise of the evening.”

Ash closed the watch with a soft click. “I am timing your monologue. We are approaching the five-minute mark.”

Lisette shifted in his lap, her bare shoulder warm under his gloved hand.

She watched his fingers with the careful, trained attention of a woman paid to find a duke fascinating.

Her hair was unpinned, falling across one shoulder, and the cloying, floral scent of her perfume rose with each small adjustment she made against his thigh.

“He has a point, Stormont,” Rourke said from the chaise, entirely failing to suppress a yawn. “You have been complaining about the season since March, and it is only April.”

“The season is entirely without merit.” Devlin leaned forward, the firelight catching the signet ring on his little finger.

The charm sat on his face like gilt on cheap furniture, bright until one looked too closely.

“Rourke lost the Langley wager inside a fortnight. Aldous lost his barouche at Epsom before the mud was even dry. I have orchestrated three separate entertainments myself, and each one of them has ended before the second act.”

“The Langley business required me to stay sober for nine consecutive evenings,” Rourke protested. “You try surviving Almack’s without being thoroughly fortified. The difficulty was unreasonable.”

“The difficulty was the only point,” Devlin said, ignoring the interruption. “We have run out of things that are difficult. There is no sport left. Especially not for Ravenhurst.”

Ash kept his gaze on the watch in his palm.

He had spent eight London seasons doing precisely what a duke of considerable fortune and no attachments was expected to do, and the pursuit had long since become scenery.

He did not need to participate to know how the play ended.

“I am perfectly content with my lack of sport.”

“You are entirely vacant,” Devlin corrected, smiling the hungry smile he reserved for traps.

“You have routed every matchmaking mama from Mayfair to Bath, you have bedded every widow of note, and you sit there staring at a timepiece because you cannot manufacture a single reason to care about tomorrow morning.”

Ash’s thumb found the hinge of the watch, pressing it just enough to let the casing open a fraction before snapping it shut.

He had not opened it fully in front of another person in four years, and he had no intention of starting now.

The small click was the most interesting sound in the room.

“And you have a remedy for this profound tragedy.”

“I have a proposal.”

“No.” Ash slid the watch into his waistcoat pocket. He had heard Devlin’s proposals before. They ranged from the merely ill-advised to the actively destructive.

“Five thousand,” Devlin said, letting the words hang in the thick air of the salon, “and the chestnut.”

Rourke sat up from his sprawl, and Aldous carefully lowered his glass to the side table.

Ash finally lifted his eyes. “You cannot afford Dorado.”

“I can afford the wager,” Devlin said smoothly. “Five thousand pounds and the Andalusian stallion against your ability to make the most invisible girl of the season fall in love with you by the end of June.”

Ash considered the man across from him. The candle nearest Devlin’s chair had burned down to a stub, casting his features in sharp, uneven relief. “Define invisible.”

“A wallflower. Fourth season at minimum.” Devlin ticked the requirements off on his fingers.

“No recorded suitors. No prospects. No connections to any family that might demand a duel. The kind of girl the rest of the ton has already decided does not exist. The kind who would believe you if you told her she was worth looking at.”

Lisette’s fingers paused their slow tracing against Ash’s lapel. She recognized a shift in the room’s temperature, a sudden sharpening of the attention around them, even if she did not understand the stakes.

“You are asking me to seduce a spinster,” Ash said, his voice stripped of whatever slight amusement he had carried a moment before.

“I am asking you to make her believe you.” Devlin spread his hands. “Anyone can seduce. You must secure a public declaration, a refusal to deny the attachment, a display of devotion that the most seasoned gossips would accept as genuine.”

“End of June gives him ten weeks,” Rourke calculated, the odds already turning behind his eyes.

“Ten weeks,” Devlin agreed. “And you cannot simply choose a lady who might harbour a secret penchant for rakes. We leave the selection to fate.”

The salon went quiet, the sudden silence heavy enough to swallow the crackle of the hearth. Even the two dark-haired girls sharing a settee at the far end of the room ceased their murmuring.

“How?” Ash asked, the single word quieter than the rest.

“Debrett’s,” Devlin said instantly, leaning back in his chair. “A page, a finger, a name. You take what the fates serve up.”

Ash ought to have refused. The absence in his chest, the quiet gray space that had replaced any mechanism for wanting, demanded nothing more than another glass of brandy and a carriage ride home. Simulating tenderness required acting, and acting required energy.

He set Lisette off his lap. She went gracefully, settling herself on the arm of Rourke’s chaise without complaint, an easy redistribution of her evening. Ash stood, straightening his waistcoat, and glanced toward the half-open door where Aurelie’s man lingered.

“Bring me a copy of Debrett’s.”

The servant blinked. “Your Grace?”

“A peerage,” Ash clarified, his tone leaving no room for a second question. “Now.”

He opened the volume at random. The page that fell open was somewhere near the middle of the G- entries, a column of names in small black type, families that occupied the middle distance of English society without ever quite arriving at its center.

Baronets. The younger sons of younger sons. The respectable and the forgotten.

He closed his eyes, placed his finger on the page and let it rest there for the length of one slow breath, and then opened his eyes.

Miss Imogen Goodall. Daughter of the late Sir Philip Goodall, Bt., of Hertfordshire. Fourth season. No recorded suitors.

He said the name aloud once. “Imogen Goodall.”

It sat in the room the way a pebble sits in a pond, making no impression, disturbing nothing. He searched his own chest for some movement, some flicker, some reaction to the name of the woman whose season he had just agreed to ruin with his attention. There was nothing. The absence held.

“The terms are acceptable,” he said.

Devlin’s smile arrived slowly, and it was the smile of a man who had just been given a toy he intended to break. “Five thousand and the chestnut, by the thirtieth of June. The lady falls in love. You report progress. I keep score.”

“You keep nothing,” Ash said, and his voice was flat and cool in a way that made Aldous glance at the door. “I will win your wager because I am bored, Devlin, not because you are clever. Do not confuse the two.”

He stood. The room rearranged itself around his standing, the way rooms always did, the courtesans shifting, Rourke pulling his feet off the chaise, Aldous making himself smaller without meaning to.

The Duke of Ravenhurst standing up in a room full of men was not a small event, and the weather shifted accordingly.

He did not put on his coat. It was draped across the back of his chair where he had thrown it three hours ago, the dark wool creased from the careless way he had discarded it, but he left it there because the night was already growing pale through the salon windows, the walk to his carriage would be short, and the early April air might do something useful to the fog in his head.

The watch was in his hand again. He did not remember taking it out.

His thumb found the hinge, and this time he opened it fully, in the corridor where no one could see, and looked at the small portrait inside.

Gouache on ivory, no larger than a sovereign.

A young woman with pale eyes and dark hair and a mouth that was smiling in a way that suggested the painter had said something funny and she had not entirely decided whether to forgive him for it.

His mother. Painted the year before she married his father. Dead of a fever when Ash was eleven.

His father had carried the watch for thirty-one years. Ash had carried it for eight. Between the two of them it had not been set down since before the century turned, and the weight of it in his palm was the only weight that had never become part of the absence.

He closed the casing and slid it into his waistcoat pocket. He walked down the stairs and through the front door of Aurelie’s into the thin gray light of a London dawn, the cobblestones still wet from the rain that had passed through while he was inside, not caring about anything.

His valet, Collins, was waiting at the kerb beside the carriage, upright and expressionless in the particular way of a man who had been waiting since midnight and would wait until noon if required because the Duke of Ravenhurst’s indifference to time was not a thing that could be corrected by a servant.

Collins took one look at Ash, coatless, his cravat half-undone and his hair pushed back from his forehead by a hand that had run through it too many times, and opened the carriage door without comment.

“Home,” Ash said.

He climbed in. The leather was cold. The carriage rocked forward, and through the window the pale sky was turning from gray to the faintest suggestion of color at the eastern edge of the city, light that arrived whether anyone was awake to see it or not.

He thought about the name once more. Imogen Goodall. Hertfordshire. Fourth season. No recorded suitors. A woman so thoroughly overlooked that the ton’s own directory listed her with the biographical enthusiasm of a parish register.

He did not think about what it meant to make a woman like that believe that she could be loved by a man like him.

He did not think about the ten weeks, or the five thousand, or the chestnut, or the way Devlin’s smile had changed when Ash said the terms were acceptable.

It was a shift so small that only someone who had spent eight years studying the mechanics of other people’s faces while feeling nothing in his own would have caught it.

He thought about nothing and he was very good at it.

The carriage rolled through the empty streets toward Grosvenor Square, the dawn came on regardless, and the watch in his waistcoat pocket kept its own time in the dark.