Claiming the Courtesan

Neither looked at her.

The duke continued, still in that same soft, teasingly threatening tone. “How does it feel to know she gave it all to me for so long? To know you begged for another man’s leavings? Did you listen at the door to hear every sweet little moan and sigh she made as I did exactly what I wanted to her?”

“I said stop it!” Verity insisted more sharply. The duke had discovered most of their secrets—how else had he found them? And he was clearly mistaken, and fuming, about her relationship with her former manservant.

Ben’s smile was scornful. “You’re nowt to her but a nice fat fortune. Every moan and sigh meant gold. Gold for her and gold for me. So, my lord, still feel so bloody high and mighty?”

Verity glanced across to where her maid-of-all-work watched from the corner with a mixture of avidity and horror. Whatever else resulted from this afternoon, her chances of remaining in Whitby as a respectable widow had just disintegrated. But before she worried about that, she somehow had to stop her lover from murdering her brother.

Kylemore smiled back at Ben with a distinctly vulpine curve to his lips. “Perhaps it was you she gulled. While your filthy hands defiled that perfect white flesh, she lay there wishing for a real man.”

Ben’s face twisted with revulsion. “You? A real man? You’re nowt but spleen and vanity tricked out in fancy rags. When the lass wanted a real man, she knew where to turn.”

Dear heaven, if she didn’t do something quickly, there would be bloodshed. The scent of impending violence rose another notch. While Ben might outweigh the duke, Kylemore’s lean body was lithe and strong, as she was intimately aware.

“Listen, you idiots!” With unsteady hands, she grabbed a large blue-and-white platter from the dresser near the door.

“I’ll kill you.” Unbelievably, Kylemore’s voice didn’t rise, although Ben, she saw, struggled to contain his thirst to fight back. She knew if her brother made the slightest retaliation, the duke would set out with utter mercilessness to destroy him. That cane concealed a sword. He’d shown her the mechanism one afternoon in Kensington.

“Then who will hang, Your Grace?” Ben asked snidely.

This had gone more than far enough. “You’re both acting like schoolboys!” She lifted the platter and deliberately dashed it against the flagstones.

The sound of smashing crockery echoed in the suddenly silent room.

Her gesture finally captured their attention. The duke turned toward her, his blue eyes blind with anger. Ben, too, looked in her direction, although the duke’s stick kept him trapped. She realized that through all their squabbling over her, neither had actually known she’d been in the room with them.

She drew herself up and spoke with all the authority the woman who had once been the great Soraya could muster. “Benjamin Ashton, stop baiting him. We’re in enough trouble.” She turned to the duke. “And you, Your Grace, let him go.”

Kylemore’s lip lifted in a sneer. “Pleading for your lover, madam?”

She resisted an urge to hurl more crockery. “He’s not my lover.” Then, momentarily forgetting the respect due to his exalted rank, she spat, “He’s my brother, you damned fool.”

“Your brother.” Strangely, Kylemore didn’t even consider questioning the truth of her assertion.

He stared at the woman he’d at last found, then around the stark little kitchen. He hadn’t noticed much about it when he’d stormed in to find the abhorred Ben Ahbood showing every sign of being at home. All he’d wanted then had been to kill. The incongruity of this adequate, but hardly luxurious, house as a setting for his jewel of a Soraya hadn’t registered.

But it registered now as he took in the details of his surroundings.

“Yes, my brother.” She moved forward and righted the chair he’d knocked over when he’d lunged at his rival.

Except his rival was apparently no rival at all. He’d tormented himself night and day over a chimera.

“Let him go. Your quarrel is with me,” Soraya said. In spite of all the hatred he’d expended on her since her disappearance, that husky voice fell on his tortured, lonely soul like rain on parched earth.

He lowered his stick, and Ben Ahbood—Ben Ashton, he supposed—slumped gasping against the wall. The hostile black eyes, familiar now as they had been in the Arabian manservant, focused on him.

“Get out,” the younger man rasped.

“Oh, be quiet, Ben,” Soraya

said wearily. She looked across at the maid. “Marjorie, please clean up this mess.” She turned on her heel. “If Your Grace would follow me? Ben, stay here. I wish to speak to the duke alone.”

Kylemore almost laughed. She did a damn fine job of turning a drama of Shakespearean proportions into a domestic comedy. He even found himself following that straight, black-clad back down the hallway and into a neat parlor. Discovering his exotic mistress ensconced in bourgeois—and apparently chaste—respectability was the last thing he’d pictured.

She turned to face him, her chin up. He could have told her she was wasting her time trying to blend in with her lackluster environment. No one—no man, in particular—would ever believe she was born for anything but sin.

The howling beast that had taken up residence in his heart since she’d gone quietened as she leveled her cool gray eyes on him. “I owe you an apology, Your Grace.”