Rules for Heiresses by Amalie Howard

Two

Ravenna forgot that she’d been accused of cheating and almost stripped down to the altogether in front of a crowd in a popular local hotel and club. Not even the whispers of Your Grace and the Duke of Ashvale could take away from the fact that her childhood friend and nemesis, her once-upon-a-time betrothed, whom she hadn’t seen in eleven years and also thought long dead, was standing in front of her.

Hale, healthy, and cold as a winter ocean.

And so obviously alive.

No wonder he’d seemed so familiar. The last name was common enough, but her brain hadn’t connected the mister with the lord. Ravenna blinked her shock away. His family had mourned him. Stinson, Cordy’s younger half brother, had been devastated and inconsolable after his death, even taking to burning down the woodland fort she and Cordy had built. Ravenna had let him, guessing it was due to his inconsolable grief. A breath shivered out of her tight lungs. If Cordy was alive and living here all along, why wouldn’t he have let his family know?

“Answer me, damn you!” he demanded in a growl. “Where did you hear that name?”

The terse command shook her out of her memories. Blast it. If she admitted to knowing him, he might know who she was. And well, she wasn’t exactly dressed as Lady Ravenna Huntley at the moment. Revealing herself as the daughter of a duke and an unmarried female in the midst of a gaming room full of men would be the pinnacle of stupidity, not that her decisions leading her here hadn’t been foolishly reckless. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t in England; the scandal would be swift and inevitable. She had to deflect somehow, at least until she could run.

Piercing dark eyes held her prisoner, but Rawley, the enormous and handsome man with deep brown skin who had several stone of muscle on her, had released her arms. This was it! Her moment to escape. Her nemesis must have seen what she meant to do in the sudden tension of her body because he snarled a denial and lunged across the table for her.

For once, her small stature helped as she snatched up her fallen coat—it had her winnings in it, after all—and shoved through the dense crowd. She could hear a predator’s frustrated roar, and even as she reveled in her almost victory, a part of her quailed at the savage sound.

Luck was finally back on her side. She let out a soft whoop. Thankfully, everyone in attendance wanted to congratulate the new duke, which gave her plenty of opportunity to slip away. She’d lost her hat and she was certain half her face paint was now a sweaty mess. Oh, well, it was about time for the fantastic Mr. Hunt to abscond to another island anyway. She’d danced with the devil, nearly gotten caught, and the near discovery of her identity had tested her every nerve.

Lengthening her strides toward the exit without breaking into a sprint that would draw attention, Ravenna could taste the sweet, fresh tropical air on her tongue, just beyond the wide paneled doors of the hotel. It was a far cry from the smog and foul scents of London, and one she’d grown to love.

“Not so fast, you slippery little scamp,” a gravelly voice seethed into her ear, a huge hand encircling her upper arm in an unbreakable grip. Ravenna gasped, though it wasn’t pain that forced the air from her lungs.

Horrifyingly, the rush of hot breath against her skin and the sultry tenor of his words sent heat flooding through her body and her knees went rubbery.

What on earth was wrong with her? He was going to strangle her, and she was falling to pieces. Her breath was short, her stomach was weak, and her heart was racing like a horse on the last leg of a race. This wasn’t a swoon, was it? She’d never swooned a day in her life!

A powerful frame steered her into a receiving room off the foyer and manhandled her into a chair. The salon wasn’t empty, but Ravenna had much worse to worry about, like the incensed male looming over her whose face could be carved from granite. His mouth, which she’d thought so full and supple before, was a flat, furious line. His stormy eyes had gone full tempest now.

She couldn’t believe that this man was Cordy. It was unfathomable! For one, he was huge. Cordy had been scrawny with nary a muscle in sight. Built like a Roman gladiator, this man looked nothing like the rangy boy he’d been. His complexion was a much richer hue now, after being exposed to the hot sun of the islands, and his face…his face was even more dangerously beautiful up close. Ravenna had the sudden, inexplicable urge to run her hands over him.

A muscle flexed in that lean, stubble-dusted cheek, his intense gaze not veering once from her. “I’ll ask you once, brat, who are you?” The ruthless snap of his voice raked across her mind, reminding her that his good looks weren’t the problem. The fact that he was going to toss her into jail was. She had to get out of this mess somehow! “Speak or I’ll make you regret disobeying me.”

This was not good.

“I was a friend…of Lord Richard in Kettering,” she blurted out, fear of discovery making her quiver.

Was that too close to the truth? Richard was her second oldest brother who died years ago in a fire along with her father and eldest brother. Blast! Richard had been a bit of a loner, preferring his books to actual people. Mr. Chase—no, the Duke of Ashvale—would see right through her falsehood and ferret out her identity in an instant.

“Richard Huntley?” he said. His dark gaze scoured her, fingers still clamped over her arms, though not cruelly. Ravenna forced herself not to fidget or break eye contact. She needed him to believe her.

“I saw you once at Embry Hall,” she rushed out, panic overtaking her explanation. “His sister called you ‘Cordy’ and he said you were the duke’s grandson.”

Her body quivered when his eyes narrowed. Why on earth had she brought up a sister? Ravenna almost swore aloud and clamped her mouth shut, well aware of the obvious relation between her fake male name and her real one. It wasn’t much of a stretch to connect Raven and Ravenna. Deuce it, how could she have been so stupid? The real question was: Would he notice? The Cordy she’d known might have been lacking in muscle as a boy, but he’d never lacked for acuity. She doubted that would have changed as an adult.

“Sir,” a harried-looking man with his hair askew, who Ravenna gratefully recognized as the factotum, burst through the door and interrupted them. “It’s madness in there. Bingham is waiting.”

Rawley, following on his heels, entered the room with a nod. “I’m afraid you can’t hide much longer, Cousin. The gossip is like a bushfire…already rampant and impossible to contain.” His gaze came to rest on Ravenna. She peered back, not hiding her surprise that the two men were related. “What will we do with this one?”

The man who clearly did not want to be duke ran a palm over his face and nodded to his factotum. “Fawkes, escort Bingham to the library adjoining the office first. I’ll be along shortly.” He then turned brutally cold eyes on her. “It doesn’t matter who you are or how you know me. Cheaters are a disgrace, and the piper must be paid. I have to make an example of you, young buck, and I reckon you’d much rather a harmless night in the stalls than the loss of a finger.”

“Take it,” Ravenna blurted out, though her body trembled almost violently. A paltry finger was much less of a price to pay than being unmasked as a lady of quality or being thrown into a filthy jail.

“You jest,” he said with a long-suffering look.

“I do not. Take. My. Finger.”

“No.”

“Then let me go. You cannot accuse me of thievery without proof.” In response, Ashvale skimmed up her forearms as if attempting to feel beneath her sleeves for evidence. “I didn’t cheat, Your Grace.”

She spat the title with a mouthful of mockery, enjoying the tightening of his face and the ashen cast to his sun-kissed skin. A part of her wondered why he was so against being duke. It was his birthright, and one of privilege and power. No gentleman of sound mind would refuse a coronet, and yet, he seemed to loathe the very idea.

“I don’t require proof. I’m judge, jury, and executioner here.” He released her arm and handed her over to his man who had returned. “Rawley.”

“No, wait, please,” she said in alarm, her fingers catching on his coat. “You can’t. I can’t go there. Anything else. I’ll do whatever you want me to here in the club, scrub pots and clean carpets, but not the jail.”

“It won’t kill you, boy,” Rawley muttered. “It’s a damn sight better than losing a body part.”

Ravenna ground her jaw. If he only knew that she was in danger of losing much more than that should her secret be discovered by a bunch of criminals who wouldn’t care that she was nobility. Or female. She suppressed a shudder. “I’m begging you. Please.”

When the duke made to leave, Ravenna panicked, yanking her arm from Rawley and heaving herself between him and the door. Hushed gasps from their avid onlookers reached her ears, but she had no choice. She would not survive a single hour in the local jail. Her reputation might turn to tatters, but she wasn’t about to give up the last of her dignity.

“Grow a pair of ballocks, Hunt,” the newly minted duke growled.

Her voice lowered. “I can’t.” She peered up at him, though she kept her chin tilted down. There was still a chance she could salvage everything by not giving away exactly who she was, at least in public. “I’m female.”

The whispered confession seemed to stump him for a second, but then his face hardened. “Being female doesn’t win you leniency.”

Gracious, he truly was without a heart, but enough was enough.

Ravenna drew up her shoulders, channeled her mother’s hauteur that had been drilled into her since birth, and met his burning gaze. “You are making a grave mistake, Your Grace,” she told him with clipped diction that left no doubt that she was female and of unquestionable high birth. “Either release me at once, or you will not like the consequences, I assure you.”

A menacing growl ripped from his throat. “Don’t threaten me.”

She’d never met such an autocratic man in all her life. One would imagine he was made of fire and brimstone with a clockwork heart beating in his chest. A chill settled over her—this was it, the point of no return. She should have known her freedom or anonymity wasn’t going to last. She had one last hope.

“Then in that case, I doubt the Duke of Embry would appreciate you sending his precious sister to jail, regardless of any error in judgment on your part.”

“Embry’s sister?” he echoed, dark eyes glinting.

He studied her, his face giving away nothing as the chatter in the salon around them grew, the whispers of her identity a delicious on-dit. Scandal tended to have its own decibel level, after all. Ravenna breathed out. “What a delightful surprise to see you alive and well, Cordy.”

* * *

The little hoyden from the neighboring estate in Kettering had grown up into a spitfire. Wearing men’s clothing and cheating at cards in his hotel. What were the odds?

Lady Ravenna Huntley.

Courtland didn’t doubt she was who she claimed to be. When he’d thought her a young gent, something about her face and swagger had struck a vague chord of recognition in him, and when she’d brought up Richard Huntley, it had clicked. He’d assumed her to be a distant relation or some such. But now, as he took in her heart-shaped face, blazing eyes, and that stubborn jaw, he saw distinct signs of the girl he once knew.

Though she wasn’t a girl anymore—she was grown.

In spite of her clever disguise, that much was obvious. His lip curled in irritation. What the devil had she been thinking?

As if she could sense his thoughts, her chin lifted and she met his gaze with defiance.

“Does Embry know you’re here?” he demanded.

“What do you think?” Her tongue was as cutting as he remembered.

“I think he should put you over his knee.”

She rolled her eyes. “My brother is not a barbarian.”

“Then perhaps the task should fall to me.”

A furious copper gaze slammed into his. “Touch me and you will be the one missing a finger, I promise you. I’ve learned a few things since we were children.”

His brow dipped. He didn’t doubt that, considering she was here, and not tucked away in a ducal residence somewhere in England, being waited on hand and foot like the gently reared lady she was. What the hell was she doing here? And come to think of it, did she have a lick of sense left in that idiot head of hers? She had just announced her identity in a public drawing room while scandalously dressed in men’s clothing. And yes, it was a far step away from London, but oceans didn’t stop gossip.

Swearing under his breath, he shrugged out of his own coat, draped it over her shoulders, and shepherded her from the room to his personal offices, which he should have done from the start. Then his own ill-timed ducal news as well as her revelation would have occurred behind private, closed doors. Too late for any of that.

Bloody hell.

“Drink?” he asked her.

“No, thank you.”

In silence, he poured two fingers of imported French brandy into a tumbler and took a healthy sip. Coppery irises of the same changing hues as the brandy met his. Had her eyes always been that color? He’d remembered them being brown. Her shorn hair was a surprise, the close-cropped curls lying flat beneath the copious pomade. As a girl, her long hair had been braided tight to her scalp and gingery-red—to the point where her brothers had called her gingersnap mercilessly—and not such a dark auburn.

It was no wonder he hadn’t recognized her outright, though some instinct deep within him had sensed…something.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why what?”

Thick russet lashes lifted and he questioned how he’d ever thought she was male. Even with smudges of dark ink on her chin and cheeks, she was comely. Too much so. Courtland shrugged. The now defunct mustache, obviously fake, had been a damned convincing touch.

But now, he couldn’t stop thinking of her as a woman—scrutinizing each of her features—including those copper-bright eyes and the wide, rosy pout that he hadn’t noticed before. The meddlesome, nosy little Lady Ravenna had grown up to be a beauty, one whom gentlemanly suitors in London drawing rooms would have been fawning over.

Speaking of, why wasn’t she married? Was she married? He was only two years older than she was, so she should be three-and-twenty or thereabouts. Long past marrying age.

“Why are you here?” he asked, enunciating each word.

“My grand tour?” she replied. “A pleasure trip?”

He couldn’t help noticing that the huskiness in her voice stayed that way. Put together with the fact that she was an adult woman, the raspy just-waking-up-after-hours-and-hours-of-sex sound of it shaping the word pleasure arrowed straight to his groin. Scowling at the reaction, he moved behind his desk. “Ladies don’t do grand tours.”

“Hence my ingenious disguise,” she said. “At least until today.”

“You would have been found out eventually. Be glad it was by me and not someone else.” He cringed to think that he’d nearly sent her to a public jail. “So I take it Embry doesn’t know you’re here then?”

Courtland wasn’t close with the duke though they were close in age. The sons of the Duke of Embry had all gone to Eton when he’d been fighting for his life at Harrow. Even in Antigua, however, he’d learned about the tragic fire that had made the youngest Huntley duke, and then the news had come about said duke’s nuptials with an Anglo-Indian princess.

Good for them, he remembered thinking.

If only the marchioness and his own brother had been that accepting, the path his life had taken might have been vastly different, though the final destination had turned out to be inevitable. While his grandfather had written steadily over the years, always knowing exactly where he was—first in Spain, and then Antigua—they hadn’t cared.

Courtland had received all of the late duke’s letters but had refused to read them. He’d instructed Rawley to dispose of them. If he was being summoned to Ashvale Park, he didn’t want to know. He had no intention of going back to England.

Without Courtland’s presence, his ambitious stepbrother would no doubt have led a charge to prove he was the Duke of Ashvale’s true heir. Courtland wondered idly if his stepmother had tried to have him declared dead through the courts. He also wondered what his grandfather might have had to say about that or if he even knew of their plans.

Scowling as fresh feelings of bitterness rose, Courtland stalked forward to refill his glass, lifting a brow and waiting for her answer. Her brother would never have condoned this, that much he knew. He glowered at his mutinous quarry who had yet to reply.

“Stop trying to think your way out of this and answer me—what does Embry believe?”

“He thinks I’m in Scotland with Clara.”

“Clara?”

“A recently married dear friend. She wed a Scottish earl.”

Courtland frowned. “How is Embry not worried?”

“I wrote several letters in advance, which she will mail out at monthly intervals, and swore Clara to secrecy as long as I was in good health.” She gestured to herself. “Which as you can see I am. No need to trouble my brother.”

“And this Clara considers you a friend?” He didn’t hide his sardonic tone.

Her eyes narrowed on him. “The best kind.”

“Forgive me if I’ve been out of London society too long, but friends don’t force friends to lie on their behalf. Much less lie to a respected and rather formidable peer of the realm.”

Turning pink, Ravenna tossed her head. “What Embry doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and besides, he’s just had a new baby and deserves every joy. If he knew where I was, he’d be frantic with worry instead of focusing on his own happiness.”

“For good reason, you daft girl!”

“Because I’m female?” she shot back. “Why should men have all the adventure and women be forced to sit at home tending the hearth? We are not possessions or brainless biddable toys designed for male consumption.”

He almost choked on his drink at the images her provocative words produced, but the hostility beneath was clear. “Because it’s not safe or smart for a woman to be traveling on her own.”

“I know how to use a pistol, Cordy,” she said. “I was a better shot than you, remember? Or perhaps you choose not to remember how many times I bested you just to preserve your insufferably delicate male pride.”

He didn’t remember her being this…caustic. Silent laughter rippled through him. Who was he fooling? She’d always been a hothead.

“We were children then,” he said. “And my name is Courtland, not Cordy.”

“Apparently, it’s Ashvale now,” she reminded him.

The sound of the ducal title set his teeth on edge. He was going to have to deal with that complication as soon as possible, too. “How did you get here anyway?”

“I took one of Embry’s clippers.” She lifted an ungloved hand to sift through the pressed strands of her shorn mane. “Hacked off my hair and disguised myself as a boatswain. Learned a lot over the last few years from my brother and his old quartermaster so it was easy. Kept my head down, did the work, and no one was the wiser.”

Courtland balked in horror—she’d spent close to five weeks on a ship full of male sailors? His hands fisted at his sides at her foolhardy actions. “Why not an ocean liner?”

“Too easily tracked. I didn’t need luxury, I needed to disappear.”

“Why?”

Her lip curled. “None of your deuced business.”

“If you were mine, I’d definitely put you over my knee.” Courtland regretted the words as soon as he said them. The thought of her lying across his lap, her pert bottom bared to his gaze, was not something he wanted to envision, not while she already had him clinging to his temper by a thread. She busied herself with her gloves, but he could see more color flare into her pale cheeks.

“Good thing I’m not then.”

Not yet.Courtland had no idea where that thought came from, nor did he want to know. He had no time for a smart-mouthed, self-centered heiress who knew no better than to traipse willy-nilly around the world with no regard for her own welfare. When he thought of the misfortunes that could have befallen her, his anger surged again. “You got lucky, you know. How could you have been so foolish? Things could have been so much worse.”

“But they weren’t.”

He was going to throttle her. “They could have been.”

“Let’s agree to disagree. Are you going to send word to Embry?”

Controlling his irritation, Courtland shook his head. “I won’t have to.”

He heard her sharp exhale. They both knew what his answer meant. Lady Ravenna would be disgraced just from being in the West Indies on her own without a chaperone. If word got out about her travels on a ship with a bunch of rough-and-tumble sailors, her reputation would take an unrecoverable thrashing.

But that was none of his business. Her virtue, or lack of it, wasn’t anyone’s concern, but he more than anybody knew the exacting nature of the ton’s rules. Upon her return, they would shred her to ribbons. Any hope for a suitable match would be lost. Courtland felt an expected stroke of pity for what she would face, even if she’d brought the storm upon herself.

They fell into tense silence.

“What would it take for you to forget you ever saw me?” she asked after a while.

Courtland blinked—she couldn’t possibly be asking what he thought she was. “I couldn’t in good conscience do that.”

“Yet you were willing to throw me in jail an hour ago.”

“You weren’t you!” He glared at her.

She cleared her throat. “Look, I’m serious. You know what awaits me if I’m sent back to London in disgrace. What will it take? Money? You are welcome to whatever I have. My body? Though I don’t know what good it’ll do—it’s as frigid as they come, or so I’ve been told.”

He ignored the bolt of pure lust at her wicked offer, even as her face flamed. “I’ll protect you.”

“How? Trust me, you can’t.”

“Bloody hell, woman, I will not let you go off on your own.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and sighed. “Embry would pulverize my bones to meal and my father would turn in his grave if he knew I abandoned an innocent girl to her own foolish devices.”

“I’m not innocent or foolish.”

“Your actions prove otherwise,” he said.

“Then I’m sorry for this.”

A noise that sounded uncannily like a cocking gun made his eyelids snap open. He was right—a loaded pocket pistol was pointed right at his face.