their painting held high—
“Did we escape?” came a low, velvet voice from within the carriage.
Chloe’s skin went cold. Who was that? Graham wouldn’t be hiding in the back of the carriage. A stranger was in the coach! She twisted about and wrenched the privacy curtain to one side.
A handsome face with soft brown hair and sculpted cheekbones stared back at her, glacial blue eyes wide with surprise.
“Faircliffe?” she blurted in disbelief.
“Miss…er…you?” he spluttered when he found his voice. “What the devil are you doing driving my carriage?”
4
Chloe swung the privacy curtain shut in Faircliffe’s shocked face and spun back toward the horses.
No, no, no. This could not be happening. She had come so close to completing a perfect mission with no one the wiser until she…accidentally abducted a duke in the process? Her blood pounded loud in her ears. What the dickens was she supposed to do now?
Faircliffe jerked the curtain back open.
She did not turn around.
“Stop the carriage!” His Grace’s imperious tone sent shivers up her spine.
Chloe urged the horses faster.
And to think she’d bragged to her siblings that the next time she saw Faircliffe, she’d give him the cut direct. Instead she was carting him across town like a gin-crazed hackney driver.
They were out of Mayfair, at least; that was something. But they had to get off the road before someone noticed the House of Lords’ prized orator hanging his head out of the front window like a puppy, with some nondescript chit at the reins.
“I demand you stop this coach at once!” the duke thundered.
She made a sharp left into a narrow alley. One of the inns her family used as a safe harbor was a few miles from there. The proprietress was paid well not to ask questions. Chloe could jump from the carriage and slip through the kitchen and out through the laundry door before the duke scrambled out of the coach.
Not that a duke would scramble. At least, not a dignified nob like Faircliffe. He moved with stiff, austere precision—a godlike statue come to life. He was as clever as Apollo, as forbidden as Bacchus, as dangerous as Ares.
No matter where she glimpsed him, he managed to look utterly majestic and extremely uncomfortable in his own skin at the same time—as though a great prophecy had been bestowed upon him and he did not relish what the future had in store.
But today Chloe held the reins. She alone determined her path.
The rapid beating of her heart was due to the surprise of finding him behind her, not from his closeness or the way she could feel the energy radiating from his body along her spine and the back of her neck. He was a problem, and she would deal with it.
“I am warning you,” Faircliffe began, “you haven’t just stolen my coach; you’ve made off with my entire person! Do you know what happens to… Wait a minute.” His words were slow and increasingly certain. “This isn’t a proper theft at all, is it? I see your game. You don’t wish to kidnap me. You wish to compromise me. You’re a common social climber hoping to obtain an advantageous marriage by nefarious means!”
His smug certainty at his own hilariously inaccurate conclusion made Chloe wish Tiglet were still in the basket so she could toss him back at Faircliffe.
In Parliament, the duke seemed accustomed to being the cleverest person in the room. This gave him the obnoxious tendency to assume others could not keep up with him. But in this case, his arrogance was a boon. If he wished to believe her some silly debutante scheming to land a duke “by any means necessary,” so be it.
“H-how did you figure me out?” she stammered, injecting a measure of mortification into her voice.
Now that she’d stolen her painting and replaced it with a forgery, she couldn’t let him suspect she was fleeing the scene. Absconding with an eligible bachelor was a far better alibi.
He snorted. “The only reason any respectable young lady would orchestrate a private encounter with a lord is to force him to the altar. What else could this be?”
What else, indeed! Chloe steered the horses down another back alley. She was more grateful than ever that she hadn’t been born to aristocracy, if their marriage mart was this cutthroat.
“Well?” His velveteen voice was right behind her. “Aren’t you going to tell me your name?”
“I’m…” Jane Brown.
But she didn’t need that alias anymore. That was her painting in the basket beside her, which would