Step One:
Every rogue has a weakness. Find it.
The duke made his way out of Hyde Park with his usual loose-limbed, easy gait. The evening was excellent for walking despite the heat of early-summer London. Ahead waited his luxuriously appointed townhouse, a snifter of brandy, and not a woman in sight to scold him. In a word, perfection
-from The Dulcet Duke
Chapter One
Manhattan; June 24, 2009
Sam Carson strolled out of Central Park, a long blade of grass between his teeth. What a rush that meeting had been, selling the client on his riskiest campaign, then dinner at Lutece with champagne corks flying and the ad agency brass begging him to sign on for the long haul. As if he would ever commit to an agency when his day rate was so bloody—
Veronica.
He pulled the grass from his teeth and stuffed it into his pocket. The spirited version of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow he had been humming petered out into a single flat note of dread.
Across the street, Veronica paced in front of his building, looking pissed enough to vault the six lanes of streaming traffic in a ferocious leap, plant one of her red stiletto heels into his chest, and then fling him under the tires of the nearest SUV, after first, naturally, retrieving her Jimmy Choo.
Did he deserve punishment? He had told her from day one he wasn’t the marrying kind. A pang of something that might have been guilt sprung up, but he shook it off. I told her not to expect more of me than good times and fun. Maybe a really nice birthday gift if the timing was right.
He scowled. It had been up until now such a successful, lovely summer’s evening.
He considered his options. Talking to her. Again. About how it was OVER. Again.
SUV tires crushing his skull sounded more appealing. Veronica was a lot of things. A subdued, rational conversationalist wasn’t one of them.
On to plan B: retire to Boule’s Pub to argue about Premiere League soccer with Angelo, the wrong-headed bartender, until the danger had passed. With a pint of warm Guinness. Or two. Because Veronica notwithstanding, he’d had a very top-notch, lucrative day.
He looked around. Every cab was taken. There wasn’t a bus in sight. He had ten more seconds at most before Veronica spotted him.
Nine, eight, seven…
On six, a horse and carriage trotted smartly out of Central Park, turned onto Central Park West, and stopped in front of him for a red light. A wrinkled, gray-haired speck of a woman in an elaborate gown in the back of the open carriage cried down to him, “A marquis walking! How charmingly odd!”
Not as charmingly odd as a costumed grandma in a carriage on a sweltering June evening at West 72nd and the park, but this was no time to quibble. Sam’s life had always been a precarious balance of creativity, luck, and strange circumstance, and he recognized this hatter-mad and/or drunk dottering woman for what she was at once: Plan C.
He bowed deeply to the dowager and said, “Marquis? You are mistaken, Madame. I am a duke. Duke Whatthehell.” Then he added for good measure, “The third.”
The opposing light turned yellow. He couldn’t see Veronica, but he was sure her heels were clicking his death march on the opposite sidewalk.
“Ah! A Duke!” The old woman gazed down at him adoringly. “But a Duke walking? Do climb in! I’m on my way to see my granddaughter.” Her accent was British, but just muddled enough for Sam to guess it was part of the act.
The opposing light clicked red.
Sam vaulted into the rig just as his light turned green. The horse pulled forward, incongruous and regal in the stream of yellow taxis and road-rage commuters. Sam would trade the smell of horseshit for Veronica seething mad in a heartbeat. It was messy business, leaving a woman who somehow, despite his up-front declaration of perpetual bachelorhood, had gotten the wrong idea.
He ought to be better at it by now.
He glanced back. Veronica stared down the avenue in the wrong direction. His doorman, Clive, however, had seen the whole affair, and shot Sam a crisp salute.
Sam leaned back against the leather seat, bathed in triumph, even if he knew his escape was temporary. He found his blade of grass in his pocket and planted it back between his teeth. “To whom do I owe the pleasure?” he asked the costumed woman beside him. She was delicate, practically see-through, with soft, unfocused pale blue eyes. Her pink lace gown was high-waisted with puffy sleeves, spot-on for the dresses in the endless Jane Austen movies he’d been dragged to by excited, weeping dates whose names he had long forgotten, if he’d even bothered to learn their names in the first place. Gad, those movies. Besides the torture of having to see his native England on-screen (he shuddered just to think about it), the movies were too close to his own life for comfort. His preferred The Terminator.
“I am Lady Donatella,” the old woman said, her voice clear and steady. “But since you will marry my granddaughter, you can call me Granny Donny.”
Marry? Bollocks. He had almost been looking forward to finding out Lady Donatella’s story. Now he’d have to jump out at the first red light and bid the sweet, unhinged woman a hasty farewell.
Except that the blue of the old woman’s eyes was so pure, her lips so well drawn. Peel away her age, and he saw with his connoisseur’s eye the beautiful woman she had once been.
Maybe the granddaughter was beautiful, too. It wasn’t as if he was in a hurry to get home. After all, a potentially beautiful, young, single woman was always, always, worth a look.
If not more.
