Page 11 of Her Wily Duke

And with that, she turned and nearly ran from the room, and the house, feeling stranger than she ever had in her life before.

*****

When Adam reached the door of the music room, he had expected to see Caroline with an older woman, a spinster who supported herself through teaching – but the vision which greeted him was far from that imagined picture. The woman standing near Caroline, obviously concentrating on Caroline’s singing, was young – of about the age when young women of the ton came out, he would have said, if asked to guess.

Not only was she young, but she was beautiful, in an unaffected way. Her mid brown hair was touched by soft streaks of gold from the sun, and her eyes, when they met his, looked to be hazel, on the very edge of being green. He couldn’t look away. Everything else faded from his awareness, and he fell into those eyes, captivated.

Caroline, facing the window as she sang, was still unaware of his presence, and sang on, oblivious. Her singing was beautiful, and if the young woman who held his gaze had taught her, then she was skilled indeed, for Caroline now sang far better than she had under Father’s tutelage.

It was only the ending of the song which broke the stillness that held them, and then that stillness was transformed into a whirlwind of action as Caroline saw him, and ran to him. He lifted her and spun her, as he had since she was a very small child, and she laughed with delight, hugging him close.

At least one of his siblings wished him to be here.

That thought brought a small sourness to the moment, and, as if the thoughts had summoned him, Adam saw, out of the corner of his eye as he spun with Caroline, Frederick, approaching around the corner of the hallway. An approach which was halted almost immediately. Frederick’s face twisted, showing bitterness when he saw Adam, then he turned and hurried away.

Adam brought his attention back to Caroline - and the beautiful music teacher who stood patiently on the other side of the room. His eyes went to her again, and he felt a compulsion to know more about her.

Gently, he reminded Caroline that an introduction would be polite, and found himself nearly dragged across the room to where the hazel eyed beauty stood.

The introductions were made, and he took her hand, a strange frisson of energy running up his arm as soon as he touched her.

“I do apologise, Miss Mowatt, for disrupting the lesson. If my sister’s beautiful singing is the result of your tuition, then the interruption of a lesson is most definitely a crime. I am delighted to meet you.”

She blinked at him, and for a moment, it seemed almost as if the touch of his hand was the only thing which kept her upright. Then she blushed, and turned her eyes down, as a demure young Lady should.

“And I you, my Lord. I assure you, there is nothing to apologise for. Greeting your sister after a long absence is far more important than the final five minutes of a single lesson!”

He lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to it, an action driven entirely by impulse. As he lifted his head again, his eyes fell on her lips, and fleetingly, the desire to kiss those lips overwhelmed him, before he sternly pushed it aside. He was in no position to think such things about a respectable young woman – for now, his focus must be on undoing all of the wrongs that his brother had perpetrated, in the year that Adam had been away. But the words which fell from his lips as he released her hand were still, despite his best intentions, flirtatious.

“Thank you. Still, I must make sure to provide you recompense in some way, in the future.”

Her deepened blush confirmed that her mind was capable of as varied an interpretation of those words as his was. After that, she quickly excused herself, and left.

He was unable to prevent his eyes from following her as she walked away.

*****

Frederick’s motivations had always been a mystery, even to himself. Not that he ever closely examined them, for he was convinced that he was always right, and did not wish to focus any scrutiny on his own actions…

As a result, his left hand, as the saying goes, was ignorant of what his right hand did.

At his initial interview with Emme Mowatt nothing seemed to have left an impression on him, beyond how appealing she was. Nothing she had said had more than momentarily displeased him, and he had ended the meeting by offering her a position tutoring Caroline in music, until she came of age — a rare gift at Foxridge Park where turnover of staff was high, and seemingly no position was permanent.

But if he had endeavoured to inquire more deeply into the inner workings of his own heart, what he saw there would still have mystified him. He was enamoured, as Wiggins had discerned, of her courage and vivacity. Twice during that meeting, they had argued, and Miss Mowatt had risen from the desk with her arms folded and a scowl on her face. That should have been the end of the interview — and had any of the male staff raised their voice at Frederick the way that she had raised her voice at him, they would have been sent packing — but Frederick had loved it. He was tired of being surrounded by flatterers and sycophants.

He relished the idea of marrying a woman who was willing to stand up to him.

In the play of his life, the one which Frederick was writing about himself in his head, Emme Mowatt was the spirited vixen sent from heaven to challenge and perhaps redeem an even more spirited man. She was Kate and he was Petruchio, and they were both fire, and one or both of them was going to devour the other.

*****

But, of course, Emme was utterly unaware of her role in the theatre of Frederick’s mind.

He puzzled her, and she wasn’t at all sure that she liked the way that he approached her, even if he had not done anything overtly wrong, or threatening – to her, at least. He had certainly threatened the Foxridge Park staff.

“The Duke is kind to his sister,” Emme said to her father as they sat in the library together one morning in late summer. “But I think that he fancies me.”

“Why is that?” asked her father, with an air of apparent disinterest.