The Duke’s Perfect Wife (MacKenzies & McBrides #4)(69)
Author: Jennifer Ashley

Eleanor sat still after Joanna finished, thinking the story through. “You haven’t explained about the photographs. How did you get them? Did Hart himself give them to you?”

“His Grace? No. He knows nothing about them. They came my way about four months ago, around Christmas.”

“Came your way how?”

“In the post. A little packet of them, and I must tell you, I blushed when I opened them. It came with a note that told me to send them on to you.”

Eleanor’s eyes narrowed. “A note from whom?”

“Didn’t say. But I was told to send them to you one or two at a time, starting in February. I knew who you were, everyone does, and I thought it couldn’t do no harm. His Grace always looks sad, and it tickled me to think you’d maybe go and see him, and show him the piccies and make him smile. And you see? You married him.”

“But what about the others?” Eleanor said, her curiosity not abated. “Why were they sold to a shop in the Strand?”

Joanna blinked. “Others? I don’t know about any others. I was sent the eight, which I started sending on to you.”

“I see.” Eleanor thought about the sequence of events. Hart had proclaimed his intention of taking a wife to his family at Ascot last year in June. Joanna was sent the photographs at Christmastime, told to start sending them to Eleanor in February. Eleanor rushes to London to see Hart, Hart begins his game of seduction, and Eleanor now was his wife.

Planned by Hart from beginning to end? He was devious enough to do it.

“How do you know His Grace himself didn’t send you the photographs?”

Joanna shrugged. “Handwriting was different. I’d seen the letter he wrote to Mrs. McGuire.”

Hart might be canny enough to know that, perhaps get someone else to pen the note, not telling that person what it was all about. Eleanor might have to interrogate Wilfred.

“How did you know I’d gone to London?” she asked. “The second photograph reached me there, in his house.”

“Mrs. McGuire,” Joanna said. “She knows everyone. Her friends in London wrote her that you were in London, you and your father guests of His Grace in Grosvenor Square. I was serving tea one afternoon when Mrs. McGuire read the letter out to her husband.”

Whoever had sent Joanna the photographs remained a mystery, though perhaps not such a mystery. Hart might be perfectly innocent of it, but he loved to guide a situation to the conclusion he wanted, so much that Eleanor could not help but suspect him. The man would drive her insane. But then, Hart excelled at driving people insane.

“Thank you, Joanna.” Eleanor got to her feet, took Joanna’s hands, and kissed the startled woman’s cheek. She reached into her reticule and pulled out a few gold coins.

Joanna held up her hands. “No, Your Grace, you don’t need to give me nothing. I was doing it for him. And you. He needs someone to look after him, don’t he?”

“Don’t be silly. You have a little boy now.” Eleanor took the maid’s hand and pressed the coins into it, then she kissed Joanna’s cheek again. “Bless you.”

She hurried away and out of the room, leaving both Maigdlin and Joanna behind as she went in search of her husband.

Hart broke from a clump of men arguing against Irish Home Rule, they saying that the Irish were too stupid to make decisions for themselves, and headed for the card room. His blood was up. The card tables, with their games of numbers and odds would soothe him. He understood why Ian liked to immerse himself in mathematical sequences—there was a purity about numbers that eased the mind.

He heard Eleanor’s light step behind him, then her clear voice.

“You’re a fraud, Hart Mackenzie.”

Hart turned. He and Eleanor were alone in the little hall. Laughter, masculine voices, and smoke drifted from the card room at one end, and feminine exclamations came from the drawing room at the other.

“Fraud? What are you talking about this time, minx?”

Eleanor came to him, her steps slow, her hips swaying under her bustle dress. Her color was high, and her eyes sparkled. “A complete and utter fraud.”

Hart frowned, but her hot little smile, the way she stepped close to him, stirred his desire.

Stirred? It had never gone away.

“I know how Joanna came to work in this house,” Eleanor said. “She told me everything.”

Hart remembered the maid, so many years ago now, standing before Hart, trembling and terrified. She’d been incoherent with fear. Angelina had been trying to tempt his appetite, as usual, but she’d miscalculated with Joanna.

Hart made himself shrug. “She didn’t belong there, she was an innocent, and I couldn’t throw her out into the street. How does this make me a fraud?”

“The hard-hearted Duke of Kilmorgan. All must tremble before him.”

“How much sherry have you drunk, El?” He wanted to draw his finger across her lips, down her throat to her bosom bared by her evening dress.

“You do an act of kindness, then beg her to tell no one, in case people discover you have a heart.”

“Beg is going a bit far.” He’d told Joanna to keep quiet to spare her reputation. The world was hard on young women tainted by the demimonde, even if they fell into it by no fault of their own. Once the line was crossed, there was no going back. Mrs. McGuire was the kindhearted one. She’d taken Joanna on Hart’s word and asked no questions.

Several men started coming out of the card room. Hart grasped Eleanor’s arm and steered her quickly up the stairs to the next floor. The gentlemen did not notice them, and went on to the drawing room, greeting the ladies there.

Hart opened the door nearest the top of the stairs and towed Eleanor inside. It was a little sitting room, lit by one gaslight, and Mrs. McGuire’s staff were apparently storing guests’ coats there.

“Say nothing about Joanna,” Hart said. “For her sake.”

Eleanor withdrew from his grasp. “I had no intention of saying anything. You had no need to drag me up here to tell me that. You could have whispered it into my ear.”

“I did need to.”

“Running from the pompous gentlemen already?” she asked, smile in place. “We’ve not been here above half an hour yet.”

Avoiding more tiresome arguments had only been part of it. Hart had had the sudden and overwhelming urge to be alone with Eleanor, and Mac’s town house, where they were staying the night, was too far away.