How To Seduce A Duke

Chapter 20

The next morning, Mary awoke to find herself alone in the giant’s bed. Or rather, her soon-to-be husband’s bed. She smiled in her bliss.

Maybe someday soon they would actually use a bed for something other than sleeping. But until then, there were always gardens and carriages. Mary chuckled to herself.

They were as good as married already anyway.

Why, they’d had a ceremony, albeit an illegal one, attended by family and friends. The marriage had already been consummated. And she had the ring.

Smiling, Mary held up her left hand to look at it.

But the ring wasn’t there.

Blast!

A tremor raced through her, and she sprang from the bed and tore back the sheets and coverlet.

She shook the pillows and tossed them on the floor while she searched the mattress.

Oh, God, she couldn’t find it anywhere! How could it have come off? She’d tugged on it for two days, and it would not be removed.

Why now, when she would need it at any time?

Then it struck her. The garden. It must have slipped off in the grass last night.

Clad only in her chemise, Mary raced down the staircase, down the center passage, and into the bright courtyard.

“Good morning, darling.” Rogan sat beside another gentleman before a paper-strewn iron table in the center of the courtyard. “This is Mr. Lawson, my solicitor.”

Suddenly all too aware of her state of undress, she crossed her arms over her chest, then nodded her head and gave an embarrassed smile to the solicitor. “Good morning.” She moved her bare feet slowly backward, retracing her steps to the French windows leading back into the house. When her heel stubbed the threshold, she reached her hand behind her and felt for the door latch.

“Mary, is there something that you require?” Rogan asked politely.

She depressed the handle, and the door opened behind her. “No, no. ’Twas nothing really. I just…wanted to know if you were at home, nothing more.” She started to duck in through the door when she heard Rogan’s voice again.

“Mary.”

She held the door in front of her barely dressed form and peered around the French window at him. “Yes?”

Rogan had an amused smile on his face. “I received a note of response from the rector of Marylebone Parish. The wedding will be here, late Wednesday evening. Does that suit you?”

“Late on Wednesday?” Forgetting herself, she stepped from behind the shield of the door.

“Best not to alert the neighbors that the newlywedded couple is getting married again.”

“Oh, quite right. Yes, Wednesday suits me perfectly.” Then, without another word, she hurried back inside the house and to the bedchamber to dress.

She fumbled through the crystal bottles of scents and powders on the Pembroke table. She searched through every seam of the dress she’d worn the night before.

Nothing.

At least the wedding was not tomorrow. She had until Wednesday night to find the ring.

Mary dressed quickly, but her fretting about the ring set her pacing back and forth across the bedchamber.

Finally, she decided that she had tarried long enough in finishing her toilette.

There was no use circling the room like a caged beast. The ring was not to be found in the bedchamber.

Rogan and his solicitor might already have quit the courtyard by now, leaving her free to conduct a proper, and most thorough, search of the garden.

Whirling around, she hurried from the bedchamber, crept through the passage, and tiptoed down the shadowy staircase.

She supposed she could admit the ring’s loss, but Rogan had been so sweet declaring that the ring would not come off because it was meant to stay there forever.

No, if she couldn’t locate it, she would just have to buy another. It shouldn’t be too hard to locate another simple gold ring. Any jeweler on Bond Street should have them available, shouldn’t they?

Then it suddenly struck her.

I am supposed to be a married woman.

If the ring was not on her finger, she could not possibly leave this house! If she did, and was noticed, rumors might spread-and the truth of Lotharian’s hoax of a wedding might surface.

All of their plans to secretly wed would be for naught!

No, no, no. She needed her sisters’ help to find the ring right away. She’d just send a missive to them and ask them to call as soon as they were available.

Mary hurried downstairs and had only walked halfway along the passage when she heard Rogan’s deep voice coming from the direction of the courtyard.

She turned and went into the study for some paper and ink with which to write a note to summon her sisters to her.

Near the front window was a large, mahogany secretaire-bookcase, edged in satinwood with gleaming lion’s head brass pulls.

She grasped the two rings on the front drawer and pulled it open. Inside were numerous legal documents, letters, and…at last, a sheet of foolscap paper.

Snatching it up, Mary closed the drawer, then turned the key that opened the glassed bookshelves on the upper half of the secretaire. She withdrew a pot of ink and a pen.

She hurried with her takings to a rosewood writing table and sat down to pen her message.

“Oh, perdition!” Mary stared down at the foolscap. She hadn’t noticed that the reverse side had already been used.

Standing, she was about to return the scribbled page back to the secretaire’s drawer when she noticed her name written upon the sheet.

She walked to the window and tipped the page to the morning light.

Country Miss Wins Duke’s Heart

A Royle Wedding

Both of these were crossed through. Evidently not the winning selection. That was written below and underlined three times.

Miss Royle Weds

Duke in Surprise Wedding

As Mary read the writing below and recognized it as the column she’d read in the newspaper-the column that had necessitated another wedding, a legal wedding-her mood veered into black anger.

Rogan had written the column and had dispatched it to be placed prominently in the newspaper. He had done it!

She slapped the paper to the writing table. But why? Why would he do such a thing?

Bah! Did it really matter?

No, it didn’t.

He was manipulating her, again.

Nothing was sacred to him. Everything was naught but a game of chess.

She turned and ran to the bedchamber and snatched up her father’s book of maladies and remedies. Everything else she left behind as she stormed from the house, slamming the front door behind her.

She didn’t know or care what society would say about her or him and the sham of a wedding. At this moment, she didn’t care.

All she knew was that she was never coming back.

How lucky for her that she had lost the wedding ring.

Had she not, she might never have known what Rogan had done with absolutely no regard for her or her sisters.

Swinging her arms angrily as she walked, Mary barged across the square in the direction of Oxford Street, on her way home to Berkeley Square.

After Mr. Lawson left the courtyard, Rogan lingered a while longer. Everything about this day seemed sweeter-the air, the sun…his life.

With a smile curving his lips, he strolled down the shell path into the garden, tilting his face toward the warm sunlight.

He veered off the crunching pathway, stepped through the clinging ivy, and passed the walnut tree, until he reached the clearing.

He nodded to himself. This was the place.

The very place where Mary had confessed her love for him.

And it would be the place where he would do the same before God and family.

This was the spot where they would marry.

Just then, something caught his eye. Something glittering and winking at him through the soft green blades of grass. He knelt down and picked up a circlet of gold.

Mary’s ring.

It must have slipped off last night whilst they’d…made love.

Rogan rose and rubbed the gold ring on his coat, polishing it.

Then it occurred to him. When Mary had run into the courtyard in a state of undress, her face stricken, it had been because she had just realized that the ring had slipped from her finger.

Rogan grinned. Even now, she was probably tearing the bedchamber apart looking for it. Turning on his boot heel, Rogan headed back for the house.

The bedchamber was in shambles, as he had predicted. Pillows, sheeting, and the coverlet were thrown on the floor. Even the mattress had been turned on the bedstead. He chuckled, imagining what a sight she must have been in her panicked search.

Supposing she must be searching other rooms for the ring, he walked down the stairs. But he did not find her in the drawing room.

Nor in the library, nor the breakfast or dining rooms.

He headed down the passage for the study and poked his head through the doorway. “Mary, are you in here?”

Rogan started to turn away, when from the corner of his eye he noticed something out of place.

He entered the room and crossed to the writing table. He picked up a sheet of foolscap he found next to a pot of ink and a pen.

Though the writing utensils had not been there the evening before, he noticed immediately that the scrawl on the paper was in Quinn’s own hand.

Raising the document to his eyes, he began to read.

He had barely begun when, to his astonishment, he realized what he held in his hand.

And what Mary had found.

“Bloody hell.”