The Duke I Tempted by Scarlett Peckham

Author:Scarlett Peckham [Peckham, Scarlett]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-64197-032-7
Publisher: NYLA
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Peerage marriage settlements were meant to be drawn by solicitors in austere London offices and signed by the signet-banded hands of noble relations in plush drawing rooms. Brides took no part in these activities. Surely they did not do so in the flickering light of a tallow candle in a drafty outbuilding that smelled of moss and soil.

But Poppy Cavendish had no intention of leaving her fate in the hands of others. If marriage was to be a business, she would see that her interests were protected. Whatever Westmead proposed, she would begin by doubling it.

Except. Oh.

The figures on the page made her eyes water.

Thirty thousand pounds would transfer to a new concern, under the direction of the Duchess of Westmead. She would be granted signatory rights over her husband’s capital and made a principal of Stonewell Holdings, his investment concern. She would receive her ship and land and glass in addition to a lavish personal allowance, her own carriage and six, agents to run the ducal homes. It went on and on, in such sumptuous and implausible detail—imagine, her, needing eighty pieces of millinery in a year, needing livery for her private servants. It seemed she had not understood the scale of her future husband’s life, or his wealth.

Archer meant these pages as a message to her: if he could not wield the power to preserve her independence under law, he could transform her—an orphaned, grass-stained spinster with only a shambling farmhouse and a hundred pounds of seed debts to her name, save for a banknote from his sister—into an unfathomably wealthy woman.

It was chilling in its exactitude.

Was this what her autonomy was worth?

She walked slowly through her dark workshop, remembering her excitement at finding the shillings to purchase each tool pegged to the wall. She fingered the waxen leaves of hybrid plants she had imagined and brought to life like a demigod. She would lose all this. She would lose the fine feeling that every box and packet and leaf and flower on this small property had been earned outright and against the odds. That she owned it free and clear.

She would trade it for a man who saw her as the solution to a problem. A bill of goods.

Why, then, could she not dismiss him? What tempted her?

Blast him. Blast him and the molten feeling that had risen in her chest when he had walked into this room five days before, unsure if he was wanted.

The truth was that she did want him. She had wanted him since the day he had stood outside his house in the sunlight waiting for a carriage and told her the truth about herself. And that made her doubly foolish. For she wanted the only thing he wasn’t offering her: his heart.

Wrong, Cavendish, he would surely lecture her. A clever businesswoman does not base decisions in emotion.

She had a predicament indeed. She wanted to preserve herself, and she wanted to unravel him. She wanted to be fierce and fearless, and she craved to be undone.

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