Duke of Desire (Maiden Lane #12)(57)

Iris contemplated that revelation. What had made Raphael so angry as a child? She frowned, feeling a sort of dread as if she didn’t want to know the answer.

She took a sip of the wine and asked, “You said you were Raphael’s closest living relative?”

Donna Pieri blinked and straightened again, her bearing proud. “I am the daughter of a conte. He ruled lands in Genoa. My estates in Corsica were given to me by my mother. My sister, Maria Anna, was also given land in Corsica. So you see Maria Anna had no need to marry Raphael’s father. No need at all. She could have come to Corsica with me and lived there. We would have been very happy.” She shook her head, reaching for her wineglass.

“How did your sister meet the Duke of Dyemore?” Iris asked. Genoa seemed a very long way away to hunt for a bride.

“He said he was on his grand tour.” The older woman shrugged expressively. “Leonard came and courted my poor sister and she was won over by his elegance and his foreign ways. My family knew nothing of him. Of his reputation. Of why he did not seek a bride amongst his own people. She should have never married him. Never. He was truly a monster.”

Iris felt her heart beating faster at Donna Pieri’s words. At the hatred there. The shame and grief.

She thought about the portrait of the old duke that she’d seen—the handsome, ordinary face—and the sketchbook of naked children.

And that last drawing—the one that resembled Raphael.

She shuddered.

Then Iris asked the question that hadn’t left her mind since the first night she’d seen Raphael de Chartres, the Duke of Dyemore: “Who scarred Raphael?”

But the older woman shook her head. “That isn’t my story to tell. You must ask Raphael himself.”

A half hour later Raphael lifted the brass knocker on the Grant town house and let it fall. He glanced around the darkened neighborhood as he waited for an answer. The Grant brothers lived on a semifashionable street, but in a rather small house in an older style. If they were profiting from their association with the Lords of Chaos, they weren’t showing it.

At least not yet.

The door drew open and a butler with watery, bloodshot eyes looked at him. “Yes?”

“The Duke of Dyemore to see Viscount Royce.”

The butler straightened on hearing his title. “I’m sorry, Your Grace, but my lord is not in.”

“Then Mr. Grant.”

“This way.”

The butler led him back through a dark corridor and up a narrow, barely lit staircase. On the upper level was a dining room.

Andrew Grant was seated by himself at the long table, eating a dinner of roast beef. The fire was down to embers in the grate and the room was lit only by two candlesticks.

Parsimony or apathy?

Andrew glanced up on their entrance, starting when he saw Raphael. “Dyemore! What are you doing in London already? When we last saw you I had the impression that you were to stay at the abbey for a while.”

Raphael shrugged, taking a seat without waiting for an invitation. “I’d always planned to come back. Business concerns.”

Andrew took a gulp of his wine. “And your new bride?”

“What of her?”

The other man shook his head, keeping his eyes on the thick slice of beef on his plate as he sawed into it. “I thought with your marriage you might decide to stay longer in the country. As a sort of honeymoon.”

Raphael raised an eyebrow, simply watching the other man.

Andrew chewed and swallowed and at last was forced to meet his eyes when the silence became prolonged. “Yes, well. I should’ve remembered what a cold bastard you are. Course you weren’t always, as I recollect. As a boy you were quite sweet. Your father certainly changed that.”

Raphael ignored the sly probe.

“Whom did you see after you called upon me and before you set out for London?” he asked Andrew.

“No one. Would you like some wine?” At Raphael’s impatient nod, the other man motioned for a footman, then continued, “We were already on the way to London when we stopped to see you at Dyemore Abbey.”

Then how had the Dionysus known to send an assassin after him? But perhaps the murder attempt had nothing to do with his marriage to Iris. Perhaps the Dionysus had had his men watching Raphael all along.

Or perhaps Dockery had acted on his own.

“Why do you ask?” The footman set a wineglass before Raphael, and Andrew filled it.

Raphael looked at him. “I was attacked on the way to London.”

Andrew’s eyebrows rose as he sawed at his beefsteak. “Highwaymen?”

“Lawrence Dockery and nine hired ruffians.”

The other man froze. “Dockery?” He glanced at the footmen, abruptly waved them from the room, then waited until the doors closed before turning once again to Raphael. “Dockery the redheaded ne’er-do-well who married a horse-faced heiress?”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t have thought him capable of murder.” Andrew shook his head. “What happened?”

Raphael twisted the stem of his wineglass. “We’d stopped for the night at an inn. Dockery and his men attacked in the stable yard. Dockery himself tried to stab me in the back.”

“He always was a sneaky thing.” Andrew shook his head and sat back. “I take it he was unsuccessful.”