Page 15 of The Duke's Stolen Heart
Chapter 6
The sheercheekof this woman. Malcolm crumpled her latest, infuriating missive and tossed it at the fireplace. It missed. He snatched it up. A red haze blurred his vision as he read it again.
Then I suppose you don’t need Heart’s Cry after all.
Twenty thousand pounds was affordable, but it meant cutting in other areas, perhaps selling a parcel of land. Miss Antonia Lowry had forced him to think long and hard about how much he was willing to risk to obtain his mother’s favorite parure.
Five years before, his father had passed on in his sleep and the dukedom had passed to Malcolm. In clearing out his father’s effects he had come across a tiny square of painted ivory that had upended his entire understanding of his parents’ marriage. Memories of rustling silk and gentle, floral-scented kisses were punctuated by what had come after. Specifically, his mother’s untimely death at her own hand, after she had caught his father in the arms of another woman.
His parents’ marriage was supposedly a love match. His father’s excuse, hammered into Malcolm’s head from the day his mother had died, was that he had married his duchess for love, but he could not compete with her unyielding expectations. The bright, bold woman who had tempted the previous Havencrest to cross enemy lines in a blood feud with the Summervales—the source of which had been lost to faded memories—had given him a son and prompted the duchess to fall into a melancholy so deep it stole her away from them both. Malcolm, who had been but a child, remembered little besides hushed arguments punctuated by the sound of pottery breaking against marble.
There had been happy moments, though. His mother had sketched paper shapes and colored them with pencils or gouache. She had spent hours cutting out intricate paper dragons and knights on horseback to tell him stories of princesses rescuing fallen knights. Before her marriage, Lady Havencrest had been an acolyte of Mary Wollstonecraft’s, to her mother’s great consternation. She liked to pretend the princesses rescued the men as often as the men saved the ladies from destruction. It had driven his father mad.
“Your mother was daft as a rat in a chamber pot,” he’d insisted with exasperation every time Malcolm tried to broach the topic. By the time he was ten, four years after his mother’s death, he had fully accepted his father’s version of events.
Specifically, Lady Havencrest had caught her husband in the arms of another woman while they were supposed to be attending a performance at the opera.
When his father arrived home that evening, she had gone missing. Lady Havencrest had walked out into the night wearing her best gown and the Heart’s Cry parure her husband had given her as a wedding gift. Two days later, her body was found in the moors. A hole in her temple told the story. It had required every ounce of his father’s influence, but he managed to have her death declared an accident under suspicious circumstances.
Lady Summervale held the duke responsible anyway. All her arguments with her daughter were cast aside in favor of blaming the previous Lord Havencrest. Malcolm had inherited her continued animosity along with the title.
No wonder that when he had offered to purchase the top half from Lady Summervale, she had laughed in his face. Really, Miss Lowry’s fee was a relative bargain—if they didn’t get caught. Even his status as a duke couldn’t fully protect him from the consequences of stealing a valuable and storied necklace.
Lost in his ruminations, Havencrest almost missed the sight of Antonia Lowry sweeping down the stairs in her ivory gown. She made a beeline to the coat check.
“Oh, no you don’t,” he whispered into the night. The man took his time retrieving her cloak. Miss Lowry didn’t pause to put it on. It billowed out behind her as she swung the garnet-colored wool over her shoulders. She stopped short, her breath steaming into the night air.
“I had wondered whether you’d attempt this,” Havencrest muttered as he clamped one hand around her arm just above her elbow. Startled, Miss Lowry glared up at him.
“Why do you need it so badly?” Antonia demanded, eyes narrowed with annoyance. Havencrest’s heart caught in his throat.
“That is not a discussion for here,” he said tightly. Havencrest motioned for his footman. His large gleaming coach, the same one that had carried them away from the riverbank a few days before, glided up to the curb. Antonia eyed it warily.
“Get in.” Malcolm ordered.
“I don’t want to.”
“Shall I summon the magistrate?” he asked. He wouldn’t do it. Antonia Lowry was too magnificent to meet her fate at the end of a hangman’s noose—not that he could afford to let her know the direction of his wayward thoughts. He didn’t like her, but a certain begrudging respect for the lady was impossible to suppress. Wily, smug women were a luxury no man could afford if he wanted to keep his sanity. It was too bad his cock didn’t know better.
Miss Lowry made a moue of disdain. She bounced into his coach in a huff of silk and wool and settled herself with the ruffled disdain of a duchess.
“Explain to me, Lord Havencrest,” she said coldly as the vehicle lurched into motion, “Why this particular gem is of such great importance to you?”
Havencrest shifted. His hand was halfway into his inner pocket before he thought to pause. Hell, he had to tell her the whole sordid story eventually. But the thought of showing Miss Lowry the object in his pocket still gave him pause. After a beat of silence, he withdrew the oval of ivory and held it out.
Miss Lowry’s fine eyebrows knit together over the slope of her nose. “Her face has been scratched out. Is this deliberate?”
“No. It happened quite by accident. This was a portrait of my mother. I found it amongst my father’s personal belongings after he passed five years ago.” Why was he sharing this with a woman who was no more forgiving than your average shark?
“Well, it’s too damaged to see much of her face now…” Antonia tilted the rectangle into the light. “There’s a gold necklace set with a red stone. I can barely make it out.”
“You already have half of it in your possession.”
Miss Lowry inclined her head, neither confirming nor denying.
“The stone is a red diamond said to have first surfaced in Peshawar, shortly after its discovery. Before it was cut, the man who brought it to the city to sell perished in a building collapse. According to legend, his widow found the body and the two pieces of the broken stone. She used the sharp edge of the broken gem to cut her own throat.”
“How grisly.” Miss Lowry made a face. She squinted at the miniature. “Your mother must be so proud to wear a symbol of so much misery.”
