One Dance with a Duke (Stud Club #1)

One Dance with a Duke (Stud Club #1)
Tessa Dare



Chapter One

London, June 1817

Blackberry glaze.

Biting the inside of her cheek, Amelia d’Orsay suppressed a small cry of jubilation. Even at a rout like this one, a well-bred lady’s abrupt shout of joy was likely to draw notice, and Amelia did not care to explain herself to the crush of young ladies surrounding her. Especially when the reason for her delight was not a triumph at the card table or a proposal of marriage, but rather the completion of a dinner menu.

She could imagine it now. “Oh, Lady Amelia,” one of these young misses would say, “only you could think of food at a time like this.”

Well, it wasn’t as though Amelia had planned to stand in a ballroom, dreaming of menus for their family summer holiday. But she’d been puzzling for weeks over a new sauce for braised pheasant, to replace the same old applejack reduction. Something sweet, yet tart; surprising, yet familiar; inventive, yet frugal. At last, the answer had come to her. Blackberry glaze. Strained, of course. Ooh, perhaps mulled with cloves.

Resolving to enter it in her menu book later, she swept the imaginary dish aside and compressed her grin to a half-smile. Summer at Briarbank would now officially be perfect.

Mrs. Bunscombe brushed past in a flounce of scarlet silk. “It’s half-eleven,” the hostess sang. “Nearly midnight.”

Nearly midnight. Now there was a thought to quell her exuberance.

A cherub-faced debutante swaddled in tulle grasped Amelia by the wrist. “Any moment now. How can you remain so calm? If he chooses me tonight, I just know I’ll swoon.”

Amelia sighed. And so it began. As it did at every ball, when half-eleven ticked past.

“You needn’t worry about making conversation,” a young lady dressed in green satin said. “He scarcely utters so much as a word.”

“Are we even certain he speaks English? Wasn’t he raised in Abyssinia or …”

“No, no. Lower Canada. Of course he speaks English. My brother plays cards with him.” The second girl lowered her voice. “But there is something rather primitive about him, don’t you think? I think it’s the way he moves.”

“I think it’s the gossip you’re heeding,” Amelia said sensibly.

“He waltzes like a dream,” a third girl put in. “When I danced with him, my feet scarcely skimmed the floor. And he’s ever so handsome up close.”

Amelia gave her a patient smile. “Indeed?”

At the opening of the season, the reclusive and obscenely wealthy Duke of Morland had finally entered society. A few weeks later, he had all London dancing to his tune. The duke arrived at every ball at the stroke of midnight. He selected a single partner from among the available ladies. At the conclusion of one set, he would escort the lady in to supper, and then … disappear.

Before two weeks were out, the papers had dubbed him “the Duke of Midnight,” and every hostess in London was jostling to invite His Grace to a ball. Unmarried ladies would not dream of promising the supper set to any other partner, for fear of missing their chance at a duke. To amplify the dramatic effect, hostesses positioned timepieces in full view and instructed orchestras to begin the set at the very hour of twelve. And it went without saying, the set concluded with a slow, romantic waltz.

The nightly spectacle held the entire ton in delicious, knuckle-gnawing thrall. At every ball, the atmosphere thickened with perfume and speculation as the hour of twelve approached. It was like watching medieval knights attempting to wrest Excalibur from the stone. Surely one of these evenings, the gossips declared, some blushing ingénue would get a proper grip on the recalcitrant bachelor … and a legend would be born.

Legend indeed. There was no end of stories about him. Where a man of his rank and fortune was involved, there were always stories.

“I hear he was raised barefoot and heathen in the Canadian wilderness,” said the first girl.

“I hear he was barely civilized when his uncle took him in,” said the second. “And his wild behavior gave the old duke an apoplexy.”

The lady in green murmured, “My brother told me there was an incident, at Eton. Some sort of scrape or brawl … I don’t know precisely. But a boy nearly died, and Morland was expelled for it. If they sent down a duke’s heir, you know it must have been dreadful.”

“You’ll not believe what I’ve heard,” Amelia said, widening her eyes. The ladies perked, leaning in close. “I hear,” she whispered, “that by the light of the full moon, His Grace transforms into a ravening hedgehog.”

When her companions finished laughing, she said aloud, “Really, I can’t believe he’s so interesting as to merit this much attention.”