Devil in Disguise (The Ravenels #7) by Lisa Kleypas

“Are you going to talk to Father?” Phoebe persisted, bringing his thoughts back to the present.

“He hasn’t asked me to,” Keir muttered.

“He’s waiting for you to ask.”

“I dinna know what he wants. He has enough sons. There’s nothing I could give him he doesn’t already have, and nothing I need from him.”

“Must it be a transaction? Can’t you simply accept the relationship, and enjoy whatever it turns out to be?”

“Oh, aye,” he said sarcastically, “I’ll enjoy it like a trout being guddled.”

“Guddled?”

“’Tis when you stand in a stream, near a boulder or steep bank, and ease your bare hand into the water beneath the trout. After a while, you start to tickle his belly and chin with your fingertips. When you’ve won his trust, and he relaxes to your hand, you shove your fingers into the gills, haul him out, and soon he’s in a hot pan with butter and salt.”

Phoebe laughed. “My father …” she began, and paused. “Well, I suppose he is something of a guddler. But you won’t end up in the pan. Family is everything to him. When he was a young boy, he lost his mother and four sisters to scarlet fever, and was sent away to boarding school. He grew up very much alone. So he would do anything to protect or help the people he cares about.”

She hefted the album into Keir’s lap, and watched as he began to leaf through it dutifully.

Keir’s gaze fell to a photograph of the Challons relaxing on the beach. There was Phoebe at a young age, sprawling in the lap of a slender, laughing mother with curly hair. Two blond boys sat beside her, holding small shovels with the ruins of a sandcastle between them. A grinning fair-haired toddler was sitting squarely on top of the sandcastle, having just squashed it. They’d all dressed in matching bathing costumes, like a crew of little sailors.

Coming to perch on the arm of the chair, Phoebe reached down to turn pages and point out photographs of her siblings at various stages of their childhood. Gabriel, the responsible oldest son … followed by Raphael, carefree and rebellious … Seraphina, the sweet and imaginative younger sister … and the baby of the family, Ivo, a red-haired boy who’d come as a surprise after the duchess had assumed childbearing years were past her.

Phoebe paused at a tintype likeness of the duke and duchess seated together. Below it, the words “Lord and Lady St. Vincent” had been written. “This was taken before my father inherited the dukedom,” she said.

Kingston—Lord St. Vincent back then—sat with an arm draped along the back of the sofa, his face turned toward his wife. She was a lovely woman, with an endearing spray of freckles across her face and a smile as vulnerable as the heartbeat in an exposed wrist.

Keir’s gaze lifted to Phoebe’s classically beautiful face, with clean-chiseled angles inherited from her father. “You favor him more than her,” he said.

“You favor him more than anyone,” she replied gently. “The resemblance is too close to be coincidence. You can’t deny it.”

Keir let out a quiet groan. “I’m nothing like him or the rest of you. My world is different than yours.”

Phoebe’s mouth twisted. “One would think you’d been brought up on a pirate ship, or another planet. You’re Scottish, that’s all. You were only raised a few latitudes north of here.” She paused. “I’m not even sure you’re technically Scottish.”

Keir gave her a blank look.

“The only Celtic ancestors on the Challon side are Welsh,” she explained. “I’ve looked up your mother’s family, the Roystons and the Plaskitts, and according to Debrett’s Peerage, there’s no Scottish blood in either lineage.”

“I’m no’ a Scot?” he asked numbly.

Whatever Phoebe saw in his face caused her to say hastily, “I’ve only gone back two generations.”

Keir dropped his head in his hands.

“Is something wrong with your lungs?” Now she sounded worried. “You’re wheezing.”

He shook his head, breathing through his fingers.

“I’ll look farther up on your family tree,” he heard Phoebe say firmly. “I’ll find a Scottish ancestor. I have no doubt you’re as Scottish as … as a leprechaun wearing a kilt, riding a unicorn through a field of thistle.”

Keir looked up long enough to tell her dourly, “Leprechauns are Irish,” before he dropped his head again.





Chapter 23


BY THE END OF the second week at Heron’s Point, Keir was chafing to go home. He was tired of relaxing, tired of soothing scenery and luxurious rooms and days of unrelenting sexual frustration. He wanted a blast of cold sea air in the face, and chimney smoke fragrant with peat, and the sound of familiar accents, and the sight of rocky hills with their shoulders in the clouds. He missed his distillery, his work, his friends. He missed the old version of himself, a man who’d known exactly who he was and what he wanted. This new version was riddled with uncertainty and torn loyalties, and wracked with desire for a woman he could never have.

Dr. Kent had stopped by on his rounds yesterday and pronounced that Keir was healing remarkably well. The back wound had almost closed up, his lung capacity was back to normal, and according to Kent, his ribs would be fully mended within six to eight weeks.