One Dance with a Duke (Stud Club #1)

“It’s not yet official,” he made himself say. “You haven’t signed. I will release you, if you’ve given some credence to Mr. Bellamy’s accusations.”


After a moment’s lip-biting hesitation, she reached forward and touched one hand to his. The light touch dissolved the tension in his wrist, and his fingers uncurled. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding them in a fist.

Wordlessly, she bent over the register and wrote her name in careful, deliberate strokes. After blowing lightly over her signature and returning the plume to its inkwell, she straightened and said simply, “There.”

It took a great deal to humble Spencer, but his bride—his wife—had just managed to do it.

Lily came forward next. She took the quill and signed in one of the two spaces marked “Witness” before extending the pen to Bellamy. “I think you should sign it, Julian. You know what an amiable sort Leo was. When he conceived of the Stud Club …” She paused. “Forgive me, I still can’t say that without wanting to laugh. Anyhow, he began it with the purpose of making new friends. This was why he decreed membership should be dependent on chance—he wanted to draw together people from different classes, form unlikely alliances. Don’t let his death tear that apart.” She pushed the quill at him. “Please. Do it for Leo. Or if not him, then—”

Cursing, Bellamy ruffled his hair. “Don’t ask it, Lily.”

“Then do it for me.”

With a strangled groan, he snatched the pen from her grip and bent as if he would sign. At the last moment, however, he cast the quill away. “I can’t do it. Even if I believed …” He swore. “I just can’t.”

“For Christ’s sake, I’ll do it,” said Ashworth. The battle-scarred warrior elbowed his way past Spencer. “There’s your unlikely alliance, my lady.”

Unlikely indeed. “You don’t think me a murderer, then?” Spencer asked. Strange, that Ashworth should become his defender. In his entire life, Spencer had only come remotely close to killing one man, and it was him.

“No.” As he bent to scrawl his name across the register page, Ashworth spared him a cryptic glance. “You don’t have it in you.”

The tone of his remark hardly made it a ringing endorsement of Spencer’s character. Then again, Spencer didn’t really care. “Meet me at the mews,” he told the men. “One hour.”

Chapter Seven

“This is a travesty.” As he approached the mews, Spencer swore quietly into the late-morning fog.

Osiris, the greatest racehorse of a generation—champion at Newmarket, Doncaster, Epsom Downs—was stabled here, amongst common carriage horses?

The barn was dark and dank as a cave inside. A blizzard of dust motes whirled in the lone shaft of light penetrating the gloom. The horses’ stalls were cramped, as they always were in Town. Spencer’s nose wrinkled at a trough of stale, fetid water—in Cambridgeshire, his grooms drew fresh water twice daily from the stream.

At his order, the groom opened the door of the stallion’s stall and released him into the small yard. The horse shook himself, nostrils flared and head swinging from side to side. The groom jerked roughly on the halter, and Spencer’s jaw clenched with anger. Had the man been in his employ, that one move would have cost him his post.

“How is he exercised?”

“We turn ’im out twice a day. Sometimes a walk about the yard on a lead. Don’t like to be saddled no more, this one. Touchy with the grooming, too.”

“So you’re letting him tell you what to do, instead of the other way around?”

Tsking softly, Spencer circled the horse. His dark bay coat was in dire need of a brisk raking with a currycomb. Gray hairs mingled with the ebony, giving a hoarfrost look to his forelock, a sign of the stallion’s advancing age. He’d worn a bald patch on his right flank, likely from chafing against the stable wall. Despite the deplorable state of his grooming, however, Osiris remained an impressive example of horseflesh. His high, taut haunches and long, arched neck displayed his Arabian ancestry.

Spencer circled to the front again, standing slightly to the horse’s side, allowing the animal plenty of space to see him, and several snorting breaths to investigate his scent. The look he saw in the stallion’s large, dark-fringed eye pleased him, as did the haughty head toss that yanked the groom off-balance. There was spirit there, and fierce arrogance. That look said, I’m better than this.

“Most certainly,” Spencer agreed. The horse was spoiled as the devil and would need a great deal of retraining with an expert handler, but at least his spirit hadn’t been broken.

He removed his gloves and tucked them beneath one arm, murmuring gently as he approached. After extending his hand palm-down for the stallion to nose and inspect, he laid it against the horse’s withers.