A Duke by Any Other Name by Grace Burrowes Page 0,25

the third letter caused a vague unease to roil in his gut. He’d seen that hand before or something very like it.…

And he’d read the few words the note contained as well: I know your secrets, Your Grace, and you will pay for my silence.

Nathaniel had ignored the same warning when it had arrived a month ago, because really, what was there to do? No demand for payment had been made, no specific action threatened. He shoved the letter into the desk drawer, dropped the rest of the damned mail onto the blotter, and left through the nearest door.

“You issued a summons.” Rothhaven made a simple statement of fact into an accusation.

“You turn away all callers,” Althea retorted. “How else was I to ensure your cheese found its way to you other than by putting it directly into your keeping?” She snatched his walking stick from him the better to ensure he didn’t do an about-face and let himself back out into the night.

“The first cheese found its way into my kitchen readily enough,” Rothhaven replied, making no move to unbutton his greatcoat. “The second was assured of safe passage if its quality was anything like the first.”

“And how was I to know that?” Althea set his walking stick amid the parasols and umbrellas by the porter’s nook. “It’s not as if you sent a note thanking me.”

Rothhaven drew himself up, then leaned near, like a dragon examining the morsel it would soon toast for a snack.

“Allow me to impress upon you, my lady, the distaste I have for being hailed by royal decree to retrieve cheeses from my neighbor.”

Something had him in a temper, not merely in the usual state of annoyance he wore like a highwayman’s cloak.

“Do we stand here in the foyer, Your Grace, arguing over a cheese like a pair of dockside streetwalkers, or shall we repair to my parlor, where we can have a fire to warm us while we bicker?”

“Surrender the damned cheese and I’ll be on my way.”

“The damned cheese is wrapped and waiting for you in my parlor.”

He unbuttoned two buttons. “You weren’t sure I’d use the front door.”

“You pride yourself on eccentricity. For all I know, you’d attempt to stuff yourself down the chimney purely for the sake of novelty. Come along.”

He stalked at her elbow, his boots thumping against the carpets. For a man bent on remaining undetected, he made a deal of noise when in a pet. The parlor was warm, the sconces lit. Septimus had been curled on the sofa but he was nowhere to be seen now.

“You were having tea,” Rothhaven said, sampling a jam tart. “These are good.”

“Monsieur Henri regards the kitchen as a vocation, not simply a job. Do help yourself, by all means.”

Rothhaven went wandering around the room again, though he put his tarts—all three of them—on a plate before settling at Althea’s desk. He shrugged out of his coat between bites and then picked up a sealed note Althea had spent the better part of an hour writing.

“You are corresponding with Lady Phoebe Philpot?” Munch, munch, munch.

“You have crossed the line, Rothhaven, from flouting convention to outright rudeness. That is my personal correspondence, and I did not invite you to examine it.”

“No,” he said. “You issued an imperial summons, and having conjured the Demon of Rothhaven Hall, you must now suffer his company. If you take exception to rudeness, then how do you tolerate Lady Phoebe?”

Althea poured him a cup of tea, added a dollop of honey, and brought cup and saucer to the desk. “I won’t be tolerating her company, as it happens. She sent the first invitation I’ve received in months, and I must decline it.”

He finished his tarts and dusted his hands over the empty plate. “You are disappointed to decline an invitation from the biggest gossip between here and London?”

“It’s an invitation, Rothhaven. Beggars can’t be choosers, even when those beggars grow up to acquire a title.”

He peered at her note again. “You don’t have a beggar’s penmanship, but then, you were speaking metaphorically.”

Althea would have taken the seat opposite the desk, but that was where a guest would sit and this was her parlor in her home. She took the wing chair by the fire instead.

“I spoke literally. From earliest memory, I did whatever work I could find, but when there was no work, my father would send his children out to beg. My brother Stephen lost the use of a leg early in life, and his job