Page 6 of The Truth About Love and Dukes

Irene watched from the doorway as Clara led Mr. Shaw past the printing press and the long table of typewriting machines. Those machines were silent now, for the three journalists on her staff were off pursuing the investigations that would comprise next week’s edition, and there was no one in the office save Clara and herself. She continued to watch until her sister had ushered Mr. Shaw out to the street, then with a sigh of relief, she stepped back and closed her office door. Only after she had resumed her seat did the ramifications of her decision hit her, and her relief was displaced by a sudden throb of panic.

She slumped forward with a groan, plunking her elbows on her desk, thinking of all the revenue she’d just tossed out the window. “Oh, dear God,” she mumbled, rubbing her hands over her face, “what have I just done?”

If Shaw’s could not be replaced, and soon, the loss to the paper would be enormous. They might be making a profit now, but Irene knew how easily they could descend back into destitution if she did not take care. And while genteel poverty made for romantic stories in the paper’s fiction section, it was too much a part of Irene’s recent past for her to find anything romantic about it. In fact, the possibility that her decision might return her family to that state made her feel slightly sick.

Still, what was done was done. The question was what to do now. With that reminder, Irene lifted her head and reached for notepaper and a pencil.

Within three minutes she had scribbled down the names of twenty companies that might be suitable replacements for Shaw’s Liver Pills, and her innate optimism began to return. There were a dozen or more possible prospects in her mind, but before she could write them down, there was a tap on her door, and she paused, looking up as Clara once again entered the room.

Her sister’s big brown eyes were wide and her lower lip was caught between her teeth. Irene felt compelled at once to offer reassurance. “It’ll be all right. I already have a plan to make up the lost revenue. We shan’t miss that old curmudgeon and his liver pills in the least.”

“I know.” Despite those words, her sister did not look reassured.

“I shan’t let us descend into poverty again, I promise—”

“I know, I know.”

Irene frowned in bewilderment. “Then what has you looking as if we’re headed back to queer-street?”

The younger woman leaned back in the doorway, casting a glance into the room behind her, then looked at Irene again. “There’s a gentleman out front,” she said in a low voice as she approached Irene’s desk, a card in her hand. “He wants to see Lady Truelove.”

“And I’d love to own a unicorn,” she whispered back, smiling, her good humor restored. “We shall both be disappointed, I fear.”

“This is serious, Irene.” Clara held out the card. “This man isn’t some nobody from nowhere.”

Irene stood up, shoved her pencil behind one ear, and took the card from her sister’s outstretched fingertips. Plain and white, it was unadorned but for a thin silver border and a coronet watermarked across its surface. She didn’t know one coronet from another, but she knew the feel of expensive, high quality paper.

“Duke of Torquil.” She read aloud the black copperplate words printed over the watermark, and as she spoke, yesterday’s Lady Truelove column flashed through her mind. She looked up to meet her sister’s apprehensive gaze with a dismayed one of her own. “Good Lord.”

Clara nodded, confirming that they were both thinking along the same lines. Even if one didn’t own a scandal sheet, it wouldn’t have been hard to guess the identity of the “lady of society” who had fallen in love with an artist, and upon receiving her letter, Irene had known at once who she was. Gossip about the widowed Duchess of Torquil and famous Italian painter Antonio Foscarelli had already been bandied about in several scandal sheets, including her own.

“Even so . . .” Irene paused and swallowed hard, looking again at the card. “Why should the Duke of Torquil want to see me?”

“Why indeed?” a hard voice intruded, and Irene looked past her sister to find a man standing in the entrance to her office, a man whose tall form and wide shoulders seemed to fill the doorway. His face was one of finely chiseled features and gray-blue eyes, but it was also a face of uncompromising lines and implacable resolve. In those brilliant, pale eyes, there was the unmistakable glint of anger.

She could make a fair guess as to the cause, and she felt a sudden shiver of apprehension. As a woman in a man’s occupation, however, she knew she couldn’t allow herself to be intimidated by anyone, so she tossed the card aside, lifted her chin, and met his hard gaze with an unwavering one of her own.

He glanced over her in the toplofty way so characteristic of the nobility, and one dark brow arched upward as if the woman before him was not quite what he’d been expecting.

“Your question is an excellent one, madam, and a telling one, too.” He removed his hat and bowed, that icy gaze once again meeting hers, and as he straightened, a grim smile touched his lips. “Lady Truelove, I presume?”

Henry had once been afforded the dubious honor of meeting a lady novelist, and in the vague recesses of his mind, he had assumed Lady Truelove to be cut of a similar cloth—a plump figure swathed in rubbed velvet and lashings of jet, middle-aged, with frizzy, henna-dyed hair, and a simpering mouth.

Now, however, seeing London’s infamous columnist in the flesh, he appreciated how inaccurate the picture in his mind had been.

For one thing, Lady Truelove was not middle-aged. She was perhaps twenty-five or -six, no more. She was clothed not in velvet and jet, but in a serviceable white shirtwaist, plain gray skirt, and dark blue necktie. Her hair, piled high atop her head in a careless sort of chignon, was not henna red, but a deep, rich blond that gleamed in the dim light of her musty office. Her figure, tall and shapely, was nothing like that of the rotund creature he’d envisioned. Instead, this woman was like a Gibson drawing come to life.

Though not yet invited to enter the room, Henry did it anyway, for he had little time for ordinary civilities. As he came in, the brown-haired wren of a girl who’d greeted him upon his arrival dipped a bow, begged his pardon, and murmured something about bringing tea. Ducking past him, she departed, closing the door behind her.

Henry returned his attention to the woman behind the desk, and as he crossed the room toward her, he noted another sharp contrast between her and the novelist of his acquaintance.

This woman was beautiful.

Wide eyes in a heart-shaped face stared back at him, hazel eyes surrounded by thick lashes much darker than her hair. In the tawny depths of those eyes, he could see a riot of rich colors that made him think at once of the woods at home in Hampshire, of dappled sunlight falling on moss, bark, and lichen.

He lowered his gaze, taking in as much of her figure as he could see above the desk, and as he noted her full bosom, tiny waist, and generous hips, he felt another glimmer of surprise. Such a sensuous figure usually owed more to artifice than to nature, and yet, her clothing was not the sort worn by women who favored tight corseting, bust improvers, and other such falderals.

Given the beauty of her face and the exquisitely feminine lines of her body, her surroundings and her attire seemed even more incongruous. This wasn’t the sort of woman who ought to be wearing the uniform of shop girls and typists, slaving away in an office. Such a splendid body belonged in a boudoir, its curves tantalizingly visible beneath a layer of sheer silk chiffon. Those gold tresses ought to be loose and falling around her shoulders, not piled up in a haphazard mass of curls. She should certainly not be at a desk with ink-smudged cuffs and a pencil stuck behind her ear.

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