The Duke’s Perfect Wife

Eleanor blew out her breath as Hart closed the door. She went to her washbasin and bathed her hands and face in cool water, fetching yet another towel from her cupboard.

She was still shaking. What had possessed her? But it had been beautiful.

She went to the writing table, where Hart had left the book, and began gathering up the letters to return to their hiding place. Not many seconds later, she found herself sitting down to flip through the pages of the memory book, back to the photographs.

She smiled. Hart might insist he was past his first youth now, but he’d looked quite fine on her bed with his kilt bunched around his hips. Better even, than he had years ago. He’d filled out, his body reaching the potential his younger features had promised.

She sighed and began gathering the letters again. She unfolded the letter she’d found Hart reading and skimmed through it, her heart aching for him all over again.

Hart was right; she ought to have burned it. But Eleanor had reasoned the likelihood small that anyone would find the hidden letter in her out-of-the-way abode on the Scottish coast. The servants never touched her belongings, and her father went rarely to her bedchamber. She’d not thought about the letters tucked into the book as she’d packed for London; she’d simply not wanted to leave the book behind.

But Eleanor understood the danger of keeping the letter. Hart shooting his father had been an accident, she was certain—they had wrestled for the shotgun, and it had gone off. What had been in Hart’s mind the split second between the gun landing in his hands and the shot flying out of it was between Hart and God.

Whatever had happened, the duke’s death had brought Ian home to safety. But if Hart’s enemies ever got hold of the letter, it could spell disaster for Hart.

Eleanor marched to the stove and opened its door. “Let that be an end to it,” she said, using the words Hart predicted she would, and consigned the letter to the flames.

The shooting attempt made Hart rethink the travel arrangements to Berkshire. Hart would not be staying at Cameron’s the entire month anyway, as he usually did, but traveling back and forth to London as he could.

Train stations were extremely public places, full of opportunities for crazed assassins to fire at people. Hart agonized over the decision but concluded that Eleanor and her father well might be safer in public, with Mac to guard them, than they would alone in a coach on some empty stretch of country road. Hart would keep them safe by not traveling with them at all.

He climbed to the top of the house the day before they were to depart, having been told that the entire family and Eleanor were taking nursery tea in the room that had been set aside for the children.

When he entered, Eleanor looked up from sinking her teeth into a cream-slathered scone. Hart stopped. The sudden vision of him licking the cream from her lips made him dizzy for a moment.

When he could see again, he took in Mac sitting at a table with Eileen, Isabella next to him, Robert in a baby chair. Eleanor crammed in beside them at the table, while the nanny, Miss Westlock, supervised from a bench on the other side of the room. Aimee sat on a window seat with Lord Ramsay, the earl showing Aimee fossils he’d brought with him from Scotland.

Hart dragged his gaze again from the smear of cream on Eleanor’s lips and addressed Mac. “I’m leaving for Berkshire this morning. I have errands to run along the way, so I’ll take the coach. The rest of you will travel down by train tomorrow afternoon.”

“Coach?” Mac said. He licked clotted cream from his thumb and shook his head at his daughter. “Eileen, please don’t put butter in your brother’s hair.” He looked back at Hart. “Hadn’t you better come with us?”

“I told you, I have errands…”

Eleanor glared at him. “Hart, we know.” She lifted a copy of a gossipy newspaper from the chair beside her and held it up to him.

Duke of Kilmorgan narrowly escapes with his life! Shots fired outside Parliament. Have the Fenians found a new target?

“How the devil did that rag get into the house?” Hart growled. “Mac?”

Mac looked innocent, but Eleanor’s face was bright with rage. “You lied to me when I asked how you hurt yourself. You said it wasn’t important. How could you? You were nearly killed.”

Hart touched his face where the cuts were fading. “It isn’t important. The man was a terrible shot, and I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t tell you because I don’t want the lot of you fussing.”

“Fussing? Hart, this is dangerous. This is something you tell your family. And your friends.”

“Which is exactly why I don’t want any of you with me!” Hart’s voice rang as he lost hold of his patience. “If the man is such a bad shot, I don’t want my family and friends to become accidental victims when he misses me. Eleanor, you and your father will travel with Isabella and Mac, and I will go with my bodyguards and Wilfred. Wilfred used to be in the army. He knows how to duck.”

Eleanor’s stare turned icy. “Do not try to make a joke of this. I suppose you did not even talk to the police.”

“I did, as a matter of fact. I asked Inspector Fellows to look into it, because if anyone can scare up a culprit, it is our favorite Scotland Yard detective. But he doesn’t have much to go on, only a few chipped bricks. And the man might not have been shooting at me in particular, but at anyone coming out of the building.”

Lord Ramsay broke in. “You must understand that the thought of you traveling alone makes us uneasy, don’t you, Mackenzie? You in a coach? On an empty road between Reading and Hungerford?”

“I will not be alone. I hire former pugilists as footmen for their large bodies and quick reflexes.”

“Which did not help you the night you were shot,” Eleanor pointed out.

“Because that night I was not paying attention.” He’d been thinking about Eleanor in a corset, her hair up, high-heeled ankle boots on her feet. “Now I’ve been warned,” he said.

“Hardly reassuring.” Eleanor’s eyes still held anger. “But I suppose we’ll never talk you out of it. You will send a telegram the moment you arrive, won’t you?”

“El,” Hart said.

“No, never mind. Ainsley will do it. Please make certain you inform Cameron of the problem. Or Cameron might take umbrage, and he’s larger than you.”

Hart didn’t bother to keep the irritation from his voice. “Leave it, Eleanor. I will see you in Berkshire.”

She scowled at him, but Hart only saw her in his heady vision of the corset and boots, made more erotic by a liberal addition of clotted cream. He turned away and made himself walk out the door.

Eleanor had always loved Waterbury Grange, Cameron’s Berkshire estate, though she’d not visited it in ages. Cameron, second-oldest brother of the Mackenzie family, had purchased it shortly after his first wife had died, saying he wanted somewhere far from the place in which he’d spent his unhappy marriage.

Green fields stretched to wooded hills, and the Kennet and Avon Canal drifted lazily along the edge of the property. Spring meant lambs staggering after mothers across the field, and foals keeping close to the mares that wandered the pastures.

Mackenzie family tradition brought them to Waterbury every March. There the brothers, and now their wives and children, would watch Cameron train his racers while they withdrew from the eyes of the world. Here was their chance to be a private family for a short time before Cameron took his three-year-olds to Newmarket.

The house was old, a shapeless pile of golden brick, but from what Ainsley said in her letters, she’d been busily redecorating the inside. Eleanor looked forward to seeing her progress.

But when Eleanor, her father, Isabella, Mac, the exuberant children, their robust nanny, and old Ben climbed down from the carriages that brought them from the train, it was for Hart to meet them at the front door of Waterbury Grange and tell them that Ian had gone missing.

Chapter 12