Page 17 of Stolen By the Cruel Duke
“He’s a close friend of my father’s,” she breathed. “He comes over for dinner regularly.”
The Duke’s jaw tightened. “Of course… They were working together the whole time. I should have realized.”
Iris, meanwhile, was looking back over the bill of sale. “There’s another thing…” she said slowly. “This was never notarized. Without the notary’s signature, it might not be legally binding.”
The Duke took the paper from her and scanned the document. Slowly, he set it down, his eyes wide. “You’re right. How did I not notice that?”
“It’s not always easy to see things clearly when we’re the ones who have been harmed.”
The Duke’s expression hardened, and he nodded.
Iris leaned forward until she could reach across the tea table and place a hand on his knee. As she did, she thought she felt him shiver.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know any of this. But we’re going to make my father pay for what he did to you. We can speak to a new solicitor, get his opinion on the legality of a bill of sale that hasn’t been notarized.” She quelled the nerves inside of her—the nerves that told her she had no right to tell a man this handsome and powerful what she needed—and looked him in the eyes. “But in order to do this, we need to be a team. And that means being honest with each other. Agreed?”
Slowly, the Duke of Eavestone, the most feared man in England, nodded. “Agreed,” he murmured. “From now on, we’re a team. In fact, if we are to be a team, I’d like us to be on more equal terms. I’d like you to call me Phineas. ”
Iris blinked, taken aback by the intimacy of his request. “I will try,” she said slowly. “But it may take some time to get used to. You may… call me Iris if you wish.”
“I do wish,” he confirmed, surprising her further. His voice was husky, and she felt her cheeks flush.
“Phineas,” she murmured, testing it out.
The word tasted sweet on her lips, and immediately, she shuddered. She’d never known a name could make her stomach ache with longing like that, that it could make her want to touch his cheek and feel his breath on her neck.
He responded to his name by leaning toward her, until his face was only inches away from her. For one wild moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think. All she could feel was the pounding sensation of need coursing through her body.
Then he coughed and leaned back, and the spell was broken. “Right, well, I will leave you to your sewing,” he said awkwardly, and before she could say another word, he stood up and exited the room, leaving her feeling more confused and flustered than she ever had in her life.
A week later, Phineas and his new wife sat down together to write a letter to Lord Carfield. They’d decided to wait a few days so that it would be more realistic for Iris to have discovered something incriminating about her husband.
“Write that a solicitor called William Barstow visited me,” Phineas dictated as Iris sat at the writing desk in the room downstairs with his parents’ portrait, which she had turned into her private parlor. “Tell him you aren’t sure if that’s relevant, but that I wouldn’t let you meet him or serve him tea, and that we were locked up for several hours together. After he left, I was in particularly fine spirits.”
Iris paused her writing to raise an eyebrow at him. “You? In fine spirits? Well, now he’ll know I’m lying.”
Phineas was so caught off guard by her coy, teasing tone that he almost laughed. Almost. Instead, he gave her a hard stare, until she rolled her eyes and giggled.
“I’ll say you were less surly than usual and even had a slight spring in your step,” she offered, smiling to herself as she turned back to the letter. “That sounds more like you.”
“I’m not surly all the time,” Phineas protested.
Even as he spoke, however, he could hear the surliness in his voice. Iris looked at him and laughed again.
Briefly, Phineas felt the corners of his mouth twitch, and he wondered if he was about to smile. The sight of his wife laughing and smiling did lift his spirits a bit. And hearing her tease him made him want to be in on the joke, to laugh with her, even tease her back.
But he wasn’t sure how, so he kept silent. The feelings his wife elicited in him were strange, indeed. They made him feel like an uncertain fifteen-year-old again, unsure of how to act or what he even wanted.
So far, she still hadn’t called him by his Christian name, but he felt certain that soon, she would. He had similarly held off on calling her Iris, determined that she should take this next stepbefore him. What surprised him was how much he wanted her to, how much he longed to deepen the familiarity between them.
“Who is this William Barstow, anyway?” she asked as she scratched lines across the paper.
“He negotiates business acquisitions,” Phineas replied, glad for the change of topic. “It’s a purposeful misdirection. Your father will think my plan is to buy him out.”
“I see…” She paused, then started a new paragraph.
“What are you saying there?” he asked.
“I’m asking my father if he might allow my sisters to come visit me. Now that I’ve decided not to visit him anymore, I’d like to see them here. I’m just telling him that I miss them very dearly. Not that it will do any good. If anything, it’ll make him deny my request, just to make me suffer.”
