Tamed by her Duke (Seductive Mysteries #4)

Chapter 23

CHAPTER 23

T he Duchess of Graham hosted a ball as the last major event of every Season. It was not to be questioned; the event had taken place every year for the last three decades, and, if the current duke had his way, would transpire for at least three decades more, as the man did not intend to let something so trivial as human mortality stop him.

Once, after her return, when Grace had gotten tipsy with Diana (something, to Grace’s delight, took Diana only three quarters of a single drink), Diana had even sullenly admitted that her parents hadn’t cancelled the event the year Grace had been abducted .

“I believe,” she said, scowling into her drink, which was now just water, as Grace had worried for her friend’s headache the following day, “that their excuse was that ‘a good countryman keeps up his spirits even in dark times.’”

And then, to Grace’s delight, she’d muttered, “Wankers.”

It didn’t surprise Grace to learn that her family hadn’t cancelled the ball. It did surprise her how much it stung to learn that they hadn’t cancelled the ball.

When she’d realized that she and Caleb would be in London for this year’s event, which she only did when an invitation with perfect penmanship and the highest quality paper appeared in the post, she wondered if they should give up their whole mission and just return to Montgomery Estate, to avoid the headache of it all.

Indeed, she put the idea to her husband one morning over breakfast.

“We could find ourselves suddenly called back on an urgent matter of business?” she suggested hopefully.

Caleb gave her a look .

Things had changed between them, ever since he’d opened up about his past, his family, his brother. She had felt that they were becoming partners, people who were united in their goals and who knew how to be honest with one another. She might even say that she was becoming friends with her husband.

Friendship was why, she reasoned with herself, she was incandescently angry to hear about how his father had mistreated him. Friendship was the reason she indulged in vicious little fantasies about destroying whatever marked the late duke’s grave, so that he could molder in the ground unnoticed, until he was dust, and nobody even recalled his name.

She would imagine resurrecting and re-murdering anyone who hurt her friends, wouldn’t she?

(She resolutely ignored the fact that she had never had similar fantasies about, say, Theodore Dowling, who had hurt both Grace herself and Diana, not to mention Andrew. That was obviously immaterial.)

In any case, the increased honesty between them had deepened their rapport, which had made their time together more pleasant, even before one counted that she could not make love to her husband in the daylight, which provided a great number of appealing things to look at.

All of which meant that she was confident in her ability to parse that look.

“No,” she said, whining just a little—but not too much, of course. She was a duchess. She had her dignity. “Come on. You hate London events, and this is the London event. It will be so crowded that we’ll scarcely be able to walk.” An idea occurred to her. “You know, we could probably say we’d attended and just stay home. It will be so busy that nobody would be able to say for certain that they hadn’t seen us.”

“We’re going,” he said.

“Ugh,” she said, hanging her head. “You know, I do not care for this little reversal of roles between us. Quick, growl at something before I become too disoriented.”

He ignored this. She’d been growing braver, bolder with her teasing, and though he still gave her quelling looks in response, he gave them in a way that made her suspect he was secretly enjoying himself. If she kept at it, she might even wear him down enough to make him smile in a mere two- or three-years’ time.

“We’re going to the ball,” he said, “because it will be our best chance to spy on your father.”

Grace paused. “To do what?” she asked politely.

“I understand if ye don’t like the idea—” Well, that wasn’t the problem at all; Grace had waited a lifetime to be free from repercussions of annoying her father, and marriage gave her that wonderful bit of leeway. “—but I’ve thought about it, and I think he’s the most likely man to have some information.”

Grace focused on what he was saying, even if it was hard to tear herself away from the mental image of rifling through her father’s things—the ones she’d been sternly forbidden from touching, looking at, or even thinking about since childhood—like a child at Christmas.

“Because he’s so well connected,” she said, nodding along. “You think he might know something we don’t, might be keeping track, say, of who is selling land where.”

“Aye,” Caleb agreed. “And ye told me that yon madwoman, the countess of wherever, she took part in this whole scheme because she fancied him, aye?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “You think someone else is blackmailing him? Or, not blackmailing, I suppose—that someone else sought to use me to punish him for some other transgression?”

Caleb’s expression was grim. “I daenae know what I think, leannan . Not yet.” Something about his face told her that he might not know what he thought, but he certainly suspected something. “That’s why I want to know more. Normally, I’d say we just ask the man before resortin’ to skulkin’ about, but…”

“But it’s my father,” Grace said dully. “He’d not tell us, not even if he knew.”

“Aye. I may have ruined that when I spoke against him.”

“No,” Grace said, waving a hand to dismiss that concern. “He’d never have done so anyway. He’s always said that knowledge is the greatest weapon in the world, that controlling how to reveal that knowledge—how to tell a story about it—is more powerful than any sword, rifle, or cannon.”

“Man’s never faced down a cannon, I gather,” Caleb observed.

Grace’s lips twitched into a brief smile. “No, he has not.”

Caleb gave an evocative hmph .

Grace spent the remainder of the day trying to think up reasons that they should still not go to the ball—interspersed with pleasantly imagining how Caleb’s father would be burning in the fires of hell—but came up empty.

So, instead, she spent the following two days at the modiste’s, securing herself a ball gown that was at the peak of fashion, no detail overlooked—and which was exorbitantly expensive, given the rush.

“I do hope you’re prepared to bear the cost of insisting we go to this dreadful thing,” Grace had said one evening as she brushed her hair while her husband lounged on her bed. They were still maintaining separate bedchambers, but this was becoming more and more like a pretense. They went to bed together, they rose together.

And now Caleb was watching her prepare for bed, which felt even more intimate, in some ways, then allowing him into her body.

It did not mean anything.

“I’ll bide, leannan ,” he told her, through half-lidded eyes. “Ye do seem to forget I’m a duke, with the coffers to prove it. One frock shan’t break me, no matter how fancy. Now, do come to bed.”

The dress was rather magnificent, she had to admit as she got dressed and primped for the ball. It had been an absolute nightmare to put on—poor Mrs. O'Mailey had spent near on half an hour wrestling with the thing. Taking it off would no doubt be just as challenging…though, if Grace’s suspicions were correct, that would be Caleb’s problem.

She would, however, be forced to murder him if he tried to cut through this dress.

Grace never could have gotten away with Blackmuir House colors at a London ball, let alone this London ball—they were too bold, too arresting. The blue, however, she could incorporate and did. The main silk of her frock was the deep azure, only a shade or two different from her husband’s eyes. That color would have been still a touch too bold, even for a married woman, so she’d muted it slightly with an overlay of pale lace, which was thicker at the top, leaving her bodice nearly silver-white, and thinner at the bottom of the gown, letting the blue peek out more and more the further down you went. When she moved, the effect was like the waves of the sea.

The North Sea, she thought privately. No other.

She wore a necklace of orange and brown garnets; similar gems peeked from her coiffure, nearly blending in with her hair, but not quite.

It was a statement, but only one that her husband—and perhaps his housekeeper, judging by the knowing glint in her eye—could read.

When Caleb saw her in all her finery, his hands stilled, though he’d been in the process of fastening his plaid at his shoulder.

He took her in for a long moment before he spoke.

“Ye’re looking very fine, Grace,” he said.

Somehow, this gruff understatement made her blush to her toes.

When they encountered her friends at the ball, Diana and Emily exclaimed over her gown—and she over theirs. Diana was resplendent in a pale sage green, while Emily looked more beautiful than any debutante in a cream gown dotted with pink accents.

Frances, whose ice blue gown complimented her fiery hair, smiled, though there was reservation in her gaze.

“You look marvelous,” she murmured. “But don’t let your mother see you, maybe. She has already informed me that blue is an uninspired choice that indicates a weakness of spirit.”

It was horrid, how her father’s words so often came from her mother’s lips, Grace thought.

“That’s terrible,” she said. “You look wonderful, and she’s awful for saying it. I can’t believe Evan stood for it.”

“Oh, he doesn’t know,” Frances said hastily. “I’ll tell him eventually…but maybe after we leave. He’s already tense enough as it is.”

Grace nodded in understanding. “I won’t say a word.”

Frances gave her hand a grateful squeeze before melting back into the crowd to return to her husband’s side.

She had a perfectly terrible time though dinner, and the first round of dancing, the latter of which was only somewhat improved by standing at her husband’s side and watching him glower at any gentleman who dared approach her until they slunk away.

“As delightful as it is to observe your power to terrorize aristocrats,” she observed after several rounds of this, “it does not necessarily help us make an unobtrusive escape later.”

Caleb sighed like she really did ask too much of him.

“Fine,” he said.

True to his word, he very pointedly did not glower when Andrew and Benedict—clearly both at their wives’ exhortations—asked her for a dance. Only Evan seemed to have asked for his own sake.

As she waltzed with Andrew—who, she thought, really ought to be friends with Caleb, if only to compare glowering techniques—she thought about how much things had changed.

When she’d been a debutante, she’d loved events like this. She’d danced with everyone, had laughed, flirted, had fun. When she’d returned from her time away, she’d dreaded Society events so much that they made her stomach ache. Yet she’d still accepted every dance asked of her, fearing the gossip if she declined.

Now, she had no real desire to attend this event, but she didn’t feel that same gut-twisting knot of anxiety over it. She was here with her husband, and if she only spent time with him and her friends?

Well, the gossip rags could say what they wanted. The newly minted Duchess of Montgomery seems fond of her husband . Please. It was boring, not untrue, and she’d had far, far worse.

It was a wonderfully liberating feeling.

So, as she returned to her husband, Grace felt her spirit grow lighter. None of this was real, she reminded herself—the talk, the shine, the sidelong glances. It didn’t actually matter.

What mattered was her friends, her husband, the families they were building together.

And catching a villain, she reminded herself, when her husband bent down to whisper low in her ear.

“Come along, leannan . It’s time.”