How to Tempt a Duke (DF1) by Michaels Kasey

Author:Michaels, Kasey [Michaels, Kasey]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Romance, General, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9781460305515
Publisher: HQN Books
Published: 2009-09-02T07:00:00+00:00

RAFE DIDN’T KNOW EXACTLY why he was feeling more comfortable both in his skin and within his changed circumstances, but he was.

Perhaps he had taken his first steps toward confidence the day he had ordered the portrait of his uncle and cousins removed to the attics.

Perhaps it was because Charlotte had goaded him, insisting that he was not his uncle or his cousins. That he was so much better than they had been, and he should no longer feel guilty about having stepped into their dead boots.

Perhaps it was because, while he’d been off fighting his war, Charlotte had fought one of her own, and somehow come out of the horror just as frank and open and honest as he remembered her to be.

Or perhaps it was because he’d gone upstairs to Fitz the evening Charlotte had told him what had happened to her, bared his soul, and the two of them had made great inroads on the late duke’s store of brandy before Rafe finally passed out lying sprawled at the bottom of his friend’s bed.

Whatever the reason, and even if it was a combination of all of those things, Rafe now rode the fields of Ashurst Hall with new confidence. He sat at the head of the table in the formal dining room without once glancing at the chair near the bottom of the table, where he’d once sat, welcomed on sufferance.

John Cummings had noticed the difference in his employer. The estate manager now asked, then did, rather than doing and then informing Rafe of what he’d done. Rafe spent long evenings studying years’ worth of estate books. He took copious notes on planting dates and field yields and market prices, just as he had once managed guard duty schedules, battlefield maneuvers and the rationing of supplies when the provisions wagons had not kept up with his advances in the field.

As Fitz had told him—as he’d thrown a volume of Hamlet at his head—Captain Rafael Daughtry was not a stupid man. He was a capable man, perhaps even brilliant when he put his mind to a thing, and it was about damn time he showed the world what a duke should be.

Charlie wasn’t a coward. Rafe couldn’t be a coward.

He and Charlotte hadn’t spoken of the past again, not since that day. They rather danced around each other for nearly a fortnight, but slowly, carefully, they began slipping back into their former easy relationship.

Now, near the end of January, they were somehow once again the best of friends; laughing, joking, teasing. With no secrets between them, they could actually enjoy each other again.

Even if he sometimes caught out Charlie looking at him from across a room or down the length of the dinner table, a question in her eyes, her mouth slightly opened as if poised to say something to him, something that might change both their worlds.

Even if that meant that Rafe had to sometimes isolate himself from her, when the urge to hold her, to kiss her, to soothe her and teach her became almost overpowering.

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