He stilled.

Was there a previous duchess? With seventeen dead dukes, Alec would bet there was more than one previous duchess.

He growled at the thought. All he needed was a widow to deal with on top of the scandalous ward and the petulant staff.

The staff in question heard the sound of displeasure. “I knew they called you the diluted duke, but I did not think you would be so . . .”

The impertinence trailed off, but Alec heard the unspoken worlds. Beastly. Coarse. Unrefined. He lost his patience. “I suggest you fetch Lady Lillian. Immediately.”

“It’s Miss Hargrove. She’s not highborn.”

He raised a brow. “This is England, is it not? Have they changed the rules, then? You gleefully correct dukes now?”

“I do when the duke in question is wrong,” she said, “Though you should be fine, as few will understand enough of your monstrous accent to know if you are right or wrong.”

“You seem to understand me well enough.”

She smiled too sweetly. “My vast good fortune, I suppose.”

He resisted the urge to laugh at the quick retort. The woman was not amusing. She was moments from being sacked. “And what of the respect that comes with the title?”

“It comes from people who are impressed by said title, I imagine.”

“And you are not?”

She crossed her arms. “Not particularly.”

“May I ask why?”

“There have been eighteen of you in five years. Or, to be more precise, seventeen in two weeks, followed by you for five years. And despite this being the first time you’ve set foot in this house, it—and all its contents—belong to you. Are cared for. For you. In absentia. If that’s not evidence that titles are ridiculous, I’m not sure what is.”

She wasn’t saying anything he didn’t believe. But that did not mean she was not maddening—likely just as mad as the other woman in the house. “While your insubordination is impressive and I do not entirely disagree with your logic, I’ve had enough,” he said. “I intend to speak with Miss Lillian, and your task, whether you like it or not, is to fetch her.”

“Why are you here?”

He let stony silence stretch between them for a long minute, attempting to intimidate her into doing as he asked. “Fetch your mistress.”

She was not intimidated in the slightest. “I think it amusing that you refer to her as mistress of the house. As though she isn’t a prisoner of it.”

That’s when he knew.

His ward was not the swooning type, after all.

Before he could speak, however, she continued. “As though she were not a belonging just like the door you summarily destroyed like a great Scottish brute.”

He didn’t mean to hear the word.

But somehow, standing here, with this impeccable Englishwoman in this impeccable English town house in this impeccable English square, wearing an uncomfortable suit, barely fitting in the open doorway, feeling big and out of place, he couldn’t help but hear it.

Couldn’t help but feel it, close and unsettling, like the tight cravat around his neck.

How often had he heard it from beautiful women? Whispered in awe, as though they were too busy imagining the fine, deep notch he would make in their bedposts to keep their innermost thoughts to themselves. When one came in the size he did, women tended to desire it, like a prize. A bull at the county fair.

Massive and beastly.

The word honored their desire even as it demeaned his own.

Just as it had demeaned him on his mother’s lips, marking her regret as she’d spat it at him—always too large to be fine enough for her. Too big to be worthy of her. Too coarse. Too Scottish.

Too much a reminder of her disappointing life.

She’d loathed his size. His strength. His inheritance from his father. Loathed it so much that she’d left, that single word her parting gift to her only son.

Brute.

And so, when he heard it here, in this place, on the lips of another beautiful Englishwoman, with such thorough disdain, he was unable to avoid it.

Just as he was unable to resist retaliating. “I had hoped you wouldn’t be beautiful.”

She narrowed her gaze. “The descriptor does not seem a compliment on your lips.”

A vision flashed, this stunning woman laid across a bed, hair spread like fire and gold across white linen, long limbs beckoning, pink lips parted. Desire shot through him like pain, and he forced himself to remember his place.

He was her guardian. She was his ward.

And English at that.

She was not for him.

“It’s not,” he said. “It makes it far more likely you did it.”

Her eyes were glorious, more expressive than he would ever have imagined, and filled instantly with challenge. “Did what?”

“Ruined yourself.”

The anger changed to something else, gone so quickly that he might not have recognized it if it were not so unbearably familiar to him.

Shame.

And in her shame, in the way it bore the shadow of his own, he instantly regretted his words. And he wished them gone. “I should not have—”

“Why not? It is true.”

He watched her for a long moment—taking in her straight spine, her square shoulders, her high head. The strength she should not have, but carried like honor, nonetheless.

“We should begin again,” he said.

“I would prefer we not begin at all,” she said, and turned away from him, leaving him in the hallway, with nothing to keep his company but the sounds from the square beyond floating through the permanently open doorway.


She needed the Diluted Duke like she needed a hole in the head.

She closed the door to the sitting room off the foyer, pressing her back to it and releasing a long breath, willing him gone from the house. Gone from her life. After all, it was not as though he’d taken an interest in her for the last five years.

But, of course, he was here now, literally banging down the door of her home, as though he could barge in like an avenging guardian king, as though he had ownership over her and her scandal.

Which, of course, he did.

Damn Settlesworth and his copious letter writing.

And damn the duke for turning up, uninvited. Unwanted.

Lily had a plan, and it did not require the duke. She should not have incited him. She should not have insulted him. Indeed, one did not catch flies with vinegar, and the duke was a rather fat fly.

She crossed the room to the sideboard on the far end.

Not fat.

Poured herself a glass of the amber liquid there.

He was all strength. Lily did not think she would forget the image of the great oak door bursting from its hinges, as though made of paper. And she did not think she would ever not lose her breath at the vision of the enormous man, big as a house and handsome beyond measure, standing in the wake of his destruction, framed by sunlight as though the heavens themselves had sent him down.

She stopped.

What utter rubbish. Being housebound for the past two weeks and four days, hiding from the rest of London, she must have been addled by the onset of fresh air that had arrived when the man had beat the door down.

That alone was enough to set any woman on edge.

Particularly one who had been fooled by handsome men before.

Lily had no interest in his broad shoulders or his brown eyes or his full lips that seemed at once soft and firm and terribly tempting. And she hadn’t even noticed the cheeks and nose and jaw, strong enough to have been hewn in iron by the most talented Scottish blacksmiths.

She sipped at the whisky in her glass.

No, the only interest she had in the Duke of Warnick was in getting him gone.

“Lillian.” She whirled around to find the object of her lack of interest in the now-open doorway. His brown gaze fell to the glass in her hand. “It’s half-ten in the morning.”

She drank again, purposefully. If ever there were a time for drink, it was now. “I see you are aware of how doors properly function.”

He raised a brow and watched her for a long moment before saying, “If we are imbibing, I’ll have one, as well.”

She gave him her back as she poured a second glass, and when she turned to deliver it to him, it was to find that he’d already crossed the room without sound. She resisted the urge to move away from him. He was too large. Too commanding.

Too compelling.

He took the glass. “Thank you.”

She nodded. “It’s your drink. You’re welcome to it.”

He did not drink. Instead he moved away, to the fireplace, where he inspected a large classical oil painting of a nude man, sleeping under a willow tree beneath the gaze of a beautiful woman, dawn crawling across the sky. Lily gritted her teeth as she, too, considered the painting. A nude. Unsettling in its reminder of—

“Shall we discuss the scandal?”

No.

Her cheeks burned. She didn’t like it. “Is there a scandal?”

He turned to look at her. “You tell me.”

“Well, I imagine the news that you broke down the door in broad daylight will get around.”

Something flashed in his eyes. Something like amusement. She didn’t like that, either. “Is it true, lass?”

And, in that moment, in the four, simple words, spoken in his rolling Scottish brogue, warm and rough and almost kinder than she could bear, she wished herself anywhere but there. Because it was the first time anyone had asked the question.