The Duchess Deal (Girl Meets Duke #1)(82)

Khan stalked about the ballroom, gathering the errant cricket balls into the basket. “Every one of those men failed Emma in the same way: He chose protecting his own pride over standing by her. And now you’ve done the same. You’d rather skulk about London playing at ‘monster’ than stand at her side for one night and be the man she needs. How utterly infantile.”

Ash groaned.

“You’re going to lose her. And when you do, you are losing me. I’ve served your family for thirty years. I’m due a pension, and I’m not enabling this self-pitying codswallop any further. I wish you all happiness living alone and growing old with your twenty cats.”

“I never expected any different outcome,” Ash protested. “Emma and I had an arrangement of convenience, not a love match.”

“Your Grace, you wouldn’t know a love match if it punched you in the stomach.” The butler plunked the basket of cricket balls at Ash’s feet. “Dodge.”

“What?”

Thwack.

Khan dealt him a solid blow to the gut. Ash doubled over.

The butler tugged on his vest. “You were supposed to dodge.” He bowed deeply, then departed the room.

Ash was left dazed and hunched over, working for breath. He braced one hand on the wall. “Damn, Khan.”

He supposed he’d deserved that. And really, what was one more injury atop all the others?

He’d spent years hurting. For that matter, so had Emma. Neither of them could undo each other’s wounds. He couldn’t go back in time and tell her not to waste her love on a series of increasingly worthless men.

Ash was her worst choice of all. He was supposed to be the one and only man in her life who hadn’t let her down?

Impossible. It was already too late.

But curse it all, perhaps his butler was right. Tonight was different. The gossips of London would eat her alive, and the least he could do was throw himself out as the bloodier cut of meat. Drawing attention was one task to which he was especially well suited.

“Khan!” He stormed into the corridor. “Brush down my black tailcoat and polish my boots.”

From the opposite end, the butler gave him a bored look. “I already did, Your Grace.”

“You are so insufferably presumptuous.”

“You’re welcome.”

No time for further conversation. He needed to dress.

Upstairs, Ash hopped around the bedchamber on one foot, pulling a boot onto the other. He windmilled in a backward circle, chasing his own coat sleeve. His cravat knot resembled a boiled potato. At last, he decided he had sufficient wool and linen heaped upon his person, even if it was in complete disarray.

After a mad scramble down the stairs, he flung open the rear door to leave, and—

And the damned cat streaked between his boots, disappearing into the alley behind the mews.

The little bastard.

Ash jogged in pursuit. He couldn’t let the cursed beast get away. Someone, or something, had to be there for Emma if everything else went to hell.

“Breeches!” he called, dashing down to the corner and then hooking left. “Come, Breeches. Come.” He whistled, chirped, snapped his fingers, peered into every crack and crevice. “Breeches!”

Ash tried, very hard, not to think about how this scene must appear. A scarred madman sprinting up and down the dark lanes of Mayfair, calling the words “come” and “breeches” repeatedly while making kissing noises. Sporting wild hair and a misbuttoned waistcoat. Excellent.

When the trio of men cornered him in a blind alley, tackling him to the ground and throwing a sack over his head, he couldn’t claim to be terribly surprised. Ash was certain they meant to take him to Bedlam.

He was, unfortunately, mistaken.

Gravely so.





Chapter Thirty-One




Ash paced the jail cell, muttering to himself. All the words he’d held back for years, every curse his father had forbidden him to utter . . . he’d been saving them for this occasion. Now was the time.

“Shite. Bugger. Bloody hell. Christ.”

His drunken cellmate watched him from the corner, following him back and forth with glassy eyes. “Oi. Mind yer language, will ye?”

“Mind your own affairs.” He kicked at the wall of the cell. “Fuck.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

This was a disaster.

He went to the door of the cell and shouted for the guards. “You, there. Release me at once. I’m the Duke of Ashbury.”

The guards laughed among themselves.

“Hear that, boys?” one said. “We’ve a duke among us! The very Monster of Mayfair, what’s been terrorizing women and children for months—a duke. Fancy that.”

“I’m not a monster,” Ash protested. “I . . . I’m merely misunderstood. Look at the most recent broadsheets. I gave a fortune to war widows, lavished candy on orphans.”

“Don’t credit any of it, m’self,” another guard said.

The first agreed. “False news, if you ask me. Never can trust newspapers.”

Ash groaned. If you don’t trust the newspapers, why am I here?

“Puppies!” he called in a burst of recollection. “I saved puppies from a burning building.”

“To be sure, ye did. And then drank their blood, most likely.”