A Duke Worth Falling For by Sarah MacLean

2

Rupert Maximillian Arden, Fourteenth Duke of Weston and Earl Salterton, was waylaid from entering the Fox and Falcon, one mile from his estate house, by the sound of his mobile.

Pulling the phone from his pocket, Max cast an irritated look at the screen, where his sister’s face smiled up at him. He turned away from the pub and lifted the rectangle to his ear, crossing the street into the manicured greensward that marked the center of the town named eons earlier for his family. “I’ve been trying to reach you for two days.”

“Roo!” His sister shouted over the riot of noise wherever she was—no doubt one of London’s poshest clubs or some party thrown by some toff looking for a few pictures in Tatler.

Max gritted his teeth at the diminutive he’d only ever heard from two women in his life—Lottie, who’d given it to him when she was a baby, and his ex-wife, who’d thought it charming and claimed it as hers when they were at St. Andrews and he’d been too young to stop it.

“Dearest darling Roo!”

His sister always spoke in superlatives and exclamations when she knew she was in trouble. Which was often. The tabloids adored Lady Lottie, activist and street artist by day and delightful scandal by night, and Lady Lottie loved being adored. She was the opposite of Max, who would happily walk into the sea to avoid questions about his status as Britain’s Most Eligible Bachelor.

Of course, the tabloids had not chronicled the downfall of his sister’s marriage minute by minute.

“I’ve been so busy! I installed a half dozen pieces around Shoreditch a few nights ago, and between avoiding HMP and the rest of it, time has been absolutely impossible.”

“It’s almost as though vandalism doesn’t pay.” The words were dry as sand, and held no ring of truth. Max was as wild about Lottie’s art as the rest of the known universe.

“I’m ignoring that!” his sister singsonged. “The very moment I was able, I called! Tell me everything! Leave nothing out!” The sound muffled for a moment as Lottie spoke to someone else, then cleared when she returned, deep bass throbbing on her end of the line. “I am fully and completely yours.”

Max ignored the obvious untruth, looking round to be sure he was alone. “Your friend is here.”

“Right! Lilah!”

Lilah. It was a pretty name—he’d liked it the moment she’d said it in the field. Old-fashioned and perfectly suited for someone with a riot of curls and a riot of freckles.

“You should have told me.”

“That she was using the cottage? Why would you care? Is the drafty manor house too much for you? Finally unnerved by the ancestors in the paintings?”

“I care very much that she is a photographer.”

“Did she try to take your picture?” His sister was suddenly very focused, ice sliding into her tone. She might be an absolute loss when it came to remembering—or caring—that her decisions impacted others, but she was fiercely loyal when it came to protecting her family.

“No.”

The chill was instantly gone from his sister’s voice. “Of course she didn’t! Everyone knows she doesn’t do celebrities anymore.”

The words turned his stomach. “I didn’t know she did celebrities in the first place.”

“Ugh. Roo. It would do you well to read the news now and then.”

“Celebrity photographers are not the news.”

The line muffled again—he’d lost her to another conversation. He sighed and looked up at the sky, clear and sparkling with stars. It was later than he’d thought.

“Sorry! Sorry! I’m back!”

“I’m not a celebrity, Lottie. That’s the point.”

“We know,” Lottie replied, disdain and boredom in her tone. “You’re a perfectly ordinary duke in hiding, as though that’s a thing. Look. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t do portraits any longer. She’s photographing wheat or fish or cocoa farms or something for some sustainability thing now. She’s far more likely to be interested in the sheep than in you.”

I was trying to get a shot!

Lilah had been telling him the truth. A hint of guilt flared, and Max pushed it away. He’d been right to be cautious, dammit.

“ . . . all I know is that she needed some time alone, away from the world.”

The tail end of Lottie’s words collected his attention again. “Why?” The question was out before he could stop it, and he closed his eyes, instantly full of regret.

Lottie was silent, the heavy throb of music the only indication that she was still on the line.

“Never mind,” he said.

“Rupert Maximillian Arden,” his sister said at the exact same moment, “are you asking me . . . about a woman?”

“No.” His denial was instant. “I’m asking you about the photographer you allowed onto my estate.”

“First, it’s the family’s estate. And second, I promise you that Lilah Rose is far, far too skilled an artist to care one bit about you.”

Lilah Rose. Max resisted the instinct to repeat the full name—softer and prettier as a matched set.

Not that Lottie would have heard, as she was still talking. “—she’s certainly not there to take the first picture of the Dusty Duke in a century or however long it’s been.”

Nine years. It had been nine years.

Max grimaced at the odious nickname that the tabloids had bestowed upon him when he’d turned his back on London and the aristocracy and returned to Devon to take up the work of land steward on the Weston estate. He was about to take Lottie to task for using it with him when she added, “In fact, I’d bet now that she knows you’re a duke, she’s going to steer well clear of you—with what they say happened . . . ”

His admonition evaporated. “What do they say?”

“Sounds like you’re asking me about a woman, Roo.”

“I’m not. But if she’s going to guillotine me—”

Lottie’s laugh tinkled through the phone. “Dukes really have it rough these days, don’t they?”

He gave a little huff of laughter at the words. “Terrible. Can’t even get our sisters to return our calls.”

“She’s not going to guillotine you. And she’s not going to take your picture either.” Lottie’s exasperation was palpable. “She’s not after the title.”

She doesn’t know I have a title.

That thread of guilt again—but different now. Lingering, as though he should have told her who he was when they were in the pasture, covered in mud and grouching at each other. At first he’d thought she was playing coy and already knew, but then . . . then there’d been something freeing about her not knowing. And now—

“What happened to her?” He hated that he asked. It wasn’t his business.

And it didn’t matter anyway, because his sister answered in her smuggest tone, “She’s really adorable, isn’t she?”

A memory flashed, Lilah curled on her side in a muddy field, his heart pounding—terrified she’d be trampled. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“Are you sure?”

Lilah, toe to toe with him in that same pasture, covered in muck, and still ready for battle. Enormous brown eyes framed by thick lashes. Freckled face flushed with frustration and indignation, a smear of mud on her pink cheek.

Wide, full lips that made a man think wicked thoughts.

There was nothing adorable about that woman. She was stunning.

“I’m sure.”

“Then you won’t mind steering clear of her for two weeks.”

“Two weeks!”

“Sorry! Can’t hear you!” his sister shouted. “Mobile service is pants here!”

“You’re in London.”

“Headed into a tunnel! Ring you later!”

“Dammit, Lottie!”

“Bye-ee!”

The line went quiet, the sudden absence of Lottie’s cacophonous world making the silence of the greensward unsettling. Max pulled the mobile away from his ear with a choice word. Sisters.

He didn’t know how he’d expected the conversation to go—it wasn’t as though Lottie ever admitted wrongdoing. She had spent most of her adult life as a tabloid darling because of it. And even if she had offered up an apology for installing a complete stranger at Salterton Abbey without telling him, it wouldn’t have changed anything.

Lilah would still be there. For two weeks.

Pocketing the phone, Max crossed the street back to the pub—one of the few places in the world where he was not Weston, Britain’s Most Eligible Bachelor, the Dusty Duke, or Roo.

He’d spend the evening the way he spent any ordinary Thursday evening—he’d have a pint, throw some darts, let the ancient old men inside take the piss for a bit. And then he’d go back to the real world, filled with scandalous sisters and an estate in constant need of attention, and a title that came first. Always.

Tonight, he would put all that out of his mind, along with Lilah Rose, whom he only had to avoid for two weeks. Not so hard, that. It was an enormous estate, and the odds of coming into contact with one freckled photographer were slim to none.

He pulled open the door, an unexpected chorus of masculine cheering within. Max’s brow furrowed as he scanned the interior of the pub, all leather and mahogany, shadowy corners and—usually—quiet.

John, Richard and Paul—the three older men who were as much fixtures in the space as the ancient casks in the corner—were turned from their usual spots, rheumy-eyed attention riveted to the dartboard at the far end of the room.

Not the dartboard.

The woman walking toward it, where three red darts were sunk into its bright red center.

Lilah Rose.

He had no reason to recognize her. Her back was to him, and her muddy jeans had been traded for black leggings and a long, white cable-knit sweater that fell to mid-thigh, hiding the curve he’d pointedly not noticed when he’d helped her out of the mud. Her hair was no longer piled high atop her head in a messy knot—it was long and wild, the color of roasted chestnuts, gleaming in the gold light of the stained glass wall sconces.

Of course he recognized her.

Even if he hadn’t, his body—instantly tight and aware—would have.

“A tenner says ye can’t do it again!”

“I’ll take your money all night,” came her laughing reply as she yanked the darts from the board and turned back to the room.

She stilled, seeing him immediately. He read the surprise in her eyes as her pink lips parted, just barely, on an inhale. She wasn’t expecting him either.

She regained her composure quickly, spreading her hands wide, the darts held tight against the palm of her right hand. “No camera.”

He should have been gentleman enough not to look her up and down as she stood for inspection. But he wasn’t. He looked, cataloguing the line of her long neck, the swell of her full breasts, the flare of her generous hips beneath the sweater, down over the leggings to the red canvas trainers she wore.

When his gaze returned to hers, her head was cocked to one side as if to say, Finished?

He didn’t want to be.

He cleared his throat. “I was a prat.”

She smiled, and he enjoyed the way it filled him up and made him want to earn it. “That’s one of my favorite British insults.”

His brows rose. “There are others you’d have liked to have used?”

She neared and Max went hot, though whether it was from embarrassment—the boys were watching the scene roll out before them—or from her own frank appraisal, he didn’t know.

“Numpty?”

He nodded. “That’s a good one.”

“Wally?”

Simon—the owner of the pub, who’d been Max’s friend since birth—snorted from his place.

Max winced. “Also appropriate.”

“Can I say knob in polite company?”

“No one ever called us polite!” chortled John, the rest of the assembled men adding their laughter as Max slid the ruddy-cheeked farmer a look.

“No one’s ever called ‘im a knob round here either,” Richard pointed out.

Lilah looked to Max again. “You’re usually better behaved?”

He dipped his head in sheepish reply and said, “I am, actually.”

She nodded, her gaze on his, as though she was searching for the truth in the words. As though she expected them to be a lie. She must have seen something she liked, because she finally smiled, wide and winning, stealing some of the air in the room before she said, “So, Max, do you play darts?”

And like that, Max remembered that Lilah didn’t know the truth—that he was Duke of Weston. That the castle on the hill belonged to him, and the ten thousand acres of farmlands that surrounded it. That the town, complete with the land the pub stood on, bore his name.

Even here, at the Fox and Falcon, Max hadn’t been free of that name. The locals within might have known him since he was in nappies, and they might not treat him with ducal reverence, but they’d never quite treated him as an equal either. He’d been baptized Earl Salterton and spent his years at school with people who befriended him to be close to the title, one of the oldest in Britain. But it wasn’t the earldom anyone wanted. It was the other title—the one he’d inherited before he’d had a chance to discover who he was without it.

And along with it, the responsibility for this land and this community and his family—wild Lottie, and Jeremy, his younger brother who had left the UK the moment he’d been able to, bound for particle physics at MIT, where he’d received his PhD and control over a research lab before marrying an equally brilliant virologist and raising two terrifyingly intelligent nephews.

The last time Max had FaceTimed with the family, his brother had leaned into the frame to say one thing—Met any nice girls?

It was as tactful as Jez got. He wanted nothing to do with the family business and certainly didn’t want it for his boys, who would inherit it if Max didn’t meet a nice girl and do his duty. Wife. Heirs. Legacy.

But Lilah didn’t know any of that.

She didn’t know that he was rich, or powerful, or that half the tabloids in the country would allow her to name her price for a photograph of him. Lottie’s words echoed.

She doesn’t care one bit about the Dusty Duke.

She didn’t know who he was, and it was glorious, because when she smiled, she smiled at him, and not at the duke.

And he didn’t want that to change.

Not tonight, at least. Not when he could take this rare chance to live out a fantasy he barely allowed himself to contemplate.

Not when tonight he could just be Max.

“I do play darts, in fact.”

“Well enough to lay money on it?” Her smile went crooked and he was struck by the fact that his sister was right—Lilah was adorable.

He was right too; she was stunning. And he didn’t care that she looked perfectly happy to fleece him out of whatever he had in his pocket.

Max was happy to be fleeced, and Simon and the boys—not one of them younger than seventy—were thrilled to watch it happen. A chorus of chortles rose as he reached for the darts in her hand, his fingertips grazing her soft skin.

Did he imagine that small surprised breath?

He didn’t imagine the reaction he had to touching her. Tight, wanting. Just as he’d been in the field. Wanting to do more than compete with her.

Wanting to pull her close and kiss her, steal that breath for himself. Own the pleasure in it.

“Go ahead,” she said, softly, and for a moment he thought he’d spoken his desire aloud and she was on board.

But no. She meant the darts.

“As I am feeling magnanimous . . . and flush,” she added over her shoulder at the men watching, who groaned and jeered in unison, “you can go first.”

He raised a brow. “No concern about local advantage?”

“Not in the slightest.”

He let his first dart fly and landed it in the outer bullseye. “Oh-ho!” Paul said, brandishing his half-empty pint glass. “Well done!”

Lilah cast a critical eye at the dart before turning back. “Would you like a drink?”

Max raised a brow. “Are you trying to get me drunk?”

“Not at all,” she said with a grin. “Unless you think it will help me win.”

He laughed, the sensation foreign. When was the last time he’d been free enough to laugh? The last time he hadn’t worried about his siblings, the estate, the name, the world beyond Salterton Abbey?

What was the harm in giving himself up to it?

What was the harm in pretending to be Max, the land steward, for a little longer?

His gaze dropped to her lips for a heartbeat, soft and perfect, curved in an open, teasing smile. For him.

One night.

No harm in one night.

Tomorrow, he’d be duke again.