When You Wish Upon a Duke Page 2

“What business is it of yours, my age?” She was seven and twenty as of last week.

  “I was led to believe you were a cynical, gray-headed matron, running this shop behind spectacles and a stack of dusty travel books.”

  A vision of Isobel’s future flashed before her eyes, and she wasn’t certain she liked it.

  He went on. “And you’re shorter.”

  “Led to expect by whom?”

  “The Foreign Office.” He stepped up and gestured to Lumley Street with an open arm. “After you.”

  Isobel’s feet moved of their own accord, walking toward the sunlight. “What foreign office?”

  “The one that serves the interest of His Majesty King George outside our United Kingdom.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “The governmental office where national heroes mill about, doing their duty. For Crown and Country.”

  Isobel’s brain began to spin. On leaden feet, she walked into Lumley Street. She blinked. She took a step toward her shop. And another.

  “I’m sorry our first encounter was in the alley,” he said. “I’m not a thief, I promise you. I was doing a bit of reconnaissance, although very poorly, I’m afraid. I cannot account for the debacle of this introduction.”

  “This is not an introduction.”

  “I was being obtuse, and there’s no excuse, although I do have one.” He flashed her a heartbreakingly handsome look and Isobel turned away. She felt a ping inside her chest like a reverberating chime.

  He went on. “My file on you and this shop was riddled with bad intelligence. Obviously.”

  She looked back. He was staring in open assessment, his gaze methodical, like he was in the business of studying people.

  “Deuced unprofessional,” he continued. “Amateur, really. No wonder you don’t believe I’m a duke.”

  “I’ve asked you to go,” Isobel said weakly. No matter who he was, he had to go. Drummond Hooke, the meeting. She reached for the door—

  “Not before,” he said, taking hold of the door above her head, “we discuss this journey.”

  “But you cannot mean . . .” Her brain swam with the highly unlikely (and yet very small possibility) of dukes and foreign offices and national heroes and a file about her. She drifted to her desk.

  Behind the counter, Samantha looked up. She stared at the Lurker with narrowed eyes. “You’ve found him, I see,” she said, her tone suggesting that a snake had been found beneath the barn.

  “How do you do?” the Lurker asked pleasantly.

  “Managed to find our door, did you?” Samantha asked.

  “Indeed,” said the man.

  “Did you tell him?” Samantha looked to Isobel.

  Isobel stared back, her brain going almost entirely blank. Her only thought was, I’ll tell him nothing.

  Samantha said to the man, “Please be aware, sir, that we’ve an important meeting in ten minutes’ time. The owner of this agency has traveled from Shropshire for a review. When he arrives, all customers will be asked to—”

  “He’s not a customer,” corrected Isobel, her heart thudding in her throat. “Samantha, can I trouble you to prepare tea? Mr. Hooke relishes little flourishes.”

  “The kettle is on,” said Samantha, looking back and forth between Isobel and the man.

  “Go and check it,” Isobel bit out.

  “It’s not whistled.”

  “Please.”

  “Right,” drawled Samantha. “Now may I get the saber—?”

  “Samantha!” breathed Isobel.

  Samantha backed from the room with exaggerated stealth. When she was gone, Isobel hurried behind her desk. With the safety of the familiar oak between them, she took a deep breath and turned to the Lurker. In two frustrated yanks, she pulled off her gloves.

  He exhaled. “Can we begin again?”

  “Can you be gone in ten minutes?”

  “My name is Northumberland—North, if you prefer—and I’ve come to book a journey.” He approached her desk in two easy strides.

  Isobel braced against his proximity. The alley was one thing, dark and easy to flee. Now sun through the window illuminated him like an angel and she was trapped behind her desk.

  She checked the clock. How had he evaded her for days but now trailed her inside? Perhaps if she changed tack. What if she simply went along?

  “This trip is for yourself?” she asked. She took up a pen.

  “Yes.”

  “As I’ve said, Everland Travel primarily arranges holidays for female clients.”

  “But are you capable of booking passage for a man? It’s possible?”

  She sighed heavily and sat down. She scooted her chair behind her desk. She hovered the pen over a blank piece of parchment.

  “Where do you wish to go?” She looked up with faux professional interest.

  “Iceland,” he said.

  Her professionalism and detachment dissolved. Isobel blinked. She squeezed the pen. A single drop of ink dripped to the sheet.

  “I beg your pardon?” she said to the drop.

  “Iceland?” he repeated. “Nordic island? Recently ceded to Denmark? Covered with volcanoes and, one would assume, ice?”

  Isobel felt the blood drain from her face in the same moment her cheeks caught fire.

  “Why?” she rasped.

  “I’ve business on the island,” he said simply.

  “And your business is . . . shepherding?” she asked, her voice strange and high and breathy. “Goat shepherding? The only work to be had in Iceland at the moment is goat farming and agronomy.”

  “No,” he said carefully, “I’m on assignment for the Foreign Office. As I’ve said.”

  She closed her eyes. This again. “And why hasn’t the Foreign Office booked this Foreign Office–related travel on your behalf? Surely if the Crown dispatches you to . . . foreign shores, they manage the details of the journey.”

  “My office could arrange it,” he said, “but it would take time I do not have, and the nature of the mission is particularly delicate. More secret than most. I’ve come to you because my file—that is, the background information on this mission—pointed me in the direction of a woman called Isobel Tinker in a travel agency in Lumley Street. It’s been suggested to me that you might know a devil of a lot about Iceland, more than anyone on the travel desk at the Foreign Office. And so here I am.”

  “You’re joking,” she said, dropping the pen. She’d never had a conversation that sounded so patently false but also so terrifyingly possible.

  If he was some sort of governmental agent, and he did have access to information (“files”?) on private citizens, was it possible his office knew something? About her? Isobel Tinker? After years of being so very good and so very stationary and so very . . . so very—

  Isobel closed her eyes. Was it possible that her uncle had left a trail of documents when he’d extricated her?

  Could this strange man possibly know anything about the time she spent in Iceland?

  “It is not a joke,” he said easily. “And by the look on your face, I’d say you’re not entirely surprised that I’ve sought you out.”

  “I am wholly surprised,” she whispered. “I am in shock.” The truth.

  “Why?”

  “Because Iceland is an obscure island that is impossible to reach seven months out of any year and difficult to reach the rest. The least traveled destination in all of Scandinavia, to be sure.” This was also true, but only a fraction of why she was surprised.

  She managed to add, “It’s sparsely populated by common laborers and a handful of landowning families. There are no trees. To say that it is remote is an understatement.”

  She scooped up the pen and jabbed it back into the inkpot. She shoved back from her desk. “That is really all I have time to say on the matter, Mr.—”

  “It’s ‘North.’ The Duke of Northumberland.”

  “Please stop saying that.”

  “It’s my name.”

  “You are not a
duke . . . you do not work for the king . . . you are not standing in my travel shop asking to book passage to an island that I—”

  She couldn’t say it.

  “You don’t sell holidays to Iceland?” he asked. He looked so very confused.

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I do not believe you when you say you wish to travel there.” In her head, she thought, Because I was utterly destroyed in Iceland, and the memory of it is too painful to bear.

  “Well,” he sighed, shrugging giant shoulders, “it’s where I’m going.”

  “Then you’ll have to find some other travel agent, because it is out of my realm of expertise.”

  “But the file—”

  “Do not mention ‘the file,’ or the Foreign Office, or your identity as an alleged duke again,” she said.

  He blinked at her. His handsome face was creased with innocent confusion.

  Isobel narrowed her eyes and planted her fingertips on the desktop, leaning toward him. “I’m sorry that I cannot help you. You’ll need to find someone else. As I’ve said, I have a very important meeting. Now . . .”

  A deep breath.

  “. . . I’m afraid I must ask you to—”

  She was cut off by the arrival of Mr. Drummond Hooke sailing through the door.

  Chapter Two

  Jason was confused.

  Jason was confused, and irritated, and extremely pressed for time, and no one in the hallowed halls of Everland Travel seemed to care.

  Miss Isobel Tinker had gone from dismissing him and dodging him and moved to simply ignoring him.

  She ignored him.

  Even before he’d become the Duke of Northumberland, Jason “North” Beckett was not accustomed to being ignored. Or dismissed. And certainly not dodged, not by a woman.

  “If you’ll excuse me, sir,” she’d said, evading him smoothly when the little bell on her door jingled. “My meeting. It’s happening. Now. I’m afraid we’ll need to postpone your . . .”

  She’d stopped talking, seemingly at a loss about what she might do for him.

  At a loss, after he’d clearly said, “Please sell me passage to Iceland,” at least five times. It was almost as if she knew what he really wanted was not a holiday package at all. It was almost as if she knew what he really needed was a guide inside Iceland.

  Jason looked again at the man who’d breezed through the door. He stood in the center of the agency’s small lobby and turned a slow, deliberate circle, assessing the room. He was of medium height, thin, with a patchy beard. Small eyes, like a subterranean creature prone to burrow. A mole? He wore the ostentatious greatcoat and voluminous cravat of someone far older, a country squire on his first trip to London. He carried a gold-tipped walking stick and teetered on high-heeled boots. And he looked at Miss Tinker like a puppeteer looks at his favorite marionette.

  Miss Tinker, in turn, greeted the man with the bracing smile one reserved for pushy vicars.

  Jason tried to remember if she’d flashed that smile at him. He’d tailed her for three days. She’d demonstrated polite cordiality to neighbors and crisp helpfulness to strangers, but she did not waft about with a freewheeling grin. In the alley, her pervading expressions had ranged from irritation to impatience. There had been no smiling.

  The alley had been a turning point. Jason had realized that his file was all wrong; the profile of Isobel Tinker bore little resemblance to the Isobel Tinker of life.

  Generally speaking, diminutive women did not interest him, but Isobel Tinker was very pretty. Although not sweet-pretty or fancy-pretty; more unpredictable-pretty, exciting-pretty. Like a baby snake. Or a lit fuse.

  There was something about her that reminded him of a demonstration he’d seen in a chemist’s lab at Oxford: a luminous burst of electrical current flickering inside a tiny glass orb. She strummed. Her bearing suggested coiled energy. He was afraid to look away for fear of missing the explosion.

  Ducking into the alley had been, quite literally, the act of “looking away.” He’d hoped to learn more about the shop; instead, she’d materialized behind him. She’d been direct and articulate, calling him out for the dark-alley marauder he’d been.

  And she was so bright. Big blue eyes, swinging umbrella, pale hair in a bobbing bun on the top of her head.

  He’d spent fifteen years in the Foreign Service and seen mortal combat, but in the alley, he’d had to work to keep up.

  He was working still.

  “Samantha?” called Miss Tinker now. “Can I trouble you to provide this gentleman with literature about our Scandinavian destinations? And to set an appointment for another day?”

  She meant him, of course. He was the gentleman. He would receive literature about Scandinavia and be sent off until another day.

  Surely not. He looked at Isobel Tinker.

  Surely yes, Miss Tinker said with her eyes.

  The clerk called Samantha bit out the words, “Right this way, sir.” She pointed a sharp finger to a desk near a window.

  Given no other choice, Jason went.

  At the desk, Samantha thunked down a stack of travel guides and slid them to him. “You,” she whispered, “must go.”

  “Who’s the bloke?” Jason whispered back, flipping open the topmost book.

  “Who are you?” the clerk countered.

  “I’m the Duke of Northumberland,” he said, enunciating the words with tight poshness, perhaps his first time ever to emphasize the title.

  “Why have you been stalking Miss Tinker for a week?”

  “I—”

  Jason stopped. Wasn’t the title enough? For his father and brother, the title had always been enough.

  He tried again, speaking like the foreign agent he’d been long before he was a duke.

  “I’m not stalking Miss Tinker,” he whispered. “I’m appealing to her. On behalf of the British Foreign Office.”

  “Appealing for what?”

  “Information. About the island nation of Iceland. And possibly a booking. Although she seems very young to be an expert on foreign destinations. She seems too young to be an expert on anything at all. I was led to believe she was . . . older and, er—Older.”

  “She’s seven and twenty,” the clerk said slowly. She glanced at Miss Tinker and back at Jason, the movement of someone who knew she was speaking out of turn.

  “Miss Tinker has assured me,” Jason lied, “that she can provide information about Iceland. She said she’s spent a considerable amount of time there. She was an expatriate, I understand, some eight years ago?”

  The clerk bit her lip. She glanced again at her employer.

  Jason flipped a page and tried again. “But can you tell me how often she returns to Iceland?”

  “Miss Tinker will never return to Iceland.”

  “Why is that, do you think?”

  The clerk gave a slow shake of her head.

  “Right.” Jason fell back. “But how long did she live there? Two years? Or was it three?”

  “She does not discuss Iceland with me,” said the clerk. “Or anyone.”

  Jason nodded and returned to the truth. “Well, she was very shrewd to have spotted me these last few days. I was only surveying the shop to get the lay of the land. I had no idea she was the owner. Or is she simply the manager?” He eyed the girl.

  “Miss Tinker is the manager,” informed Samantha. “But she might as well own the shop. She should own it.”

  Jason shut the book, filing away this bit of information. “This book is written in Dutch,” he said. “Which I cannot read. How long will she meet with this person?”

  “With Mr. Hooke? They will meet for hours. At least.”

  “Why?”

  “He is the owner of Everland Travel.”

  “This man owns the shop?”

  A nod. “He inherited it from his parents. Most of the year, he lives in Shropshire and Isobel manages the business. W
hen he travels to London, he must be included. And validated.” Another frown. “He must bask.”

  Jason made a grunting noise. “Bask?”

  The clerk inclined her head, indicating the ongoing conversation in the center of the room.

  “I see you’ve worn the dress I enjoy so very much,” Hooke was telling Miss Tinker, his voice a singsong.

  Irritation flared and Jason stifled the urge to join the conversation. His skin buzzed with the familiar, jumpy energy that tormented him whenever he was forced to sit idly by and wait. He reached into his pocket for a coin and flicked it into the air. He caught it, spun it in his palm, and flicked it again.

  “Was this a favorite?” Miss Tinker asked her employer.

  “But you’ve not worn the pinafores, I see,” said Hooke.

  “Oh yes, the pinafores,” hedged Miss Tinker. “I’ll need to call to the seamstress’s. There was some issue with the embroidery, I believe.”

  “Oh, the embroidery must be perfect,” said Hooke. “Please remember, the tailor in my village can do up the confections I have in mind—”

  “Do not trouble yourself, Mr. Hooke,” soothed Miss Tinker. “We shall have them for next time . . .”

  Jason caught the coin and whispered to Samantha, “Pinafores?”

  “He wishes for us to wear ruffled yellow aprons with the words ‘Hooke’s Everland Travel Lass’ embroidered on the bib.”

  “No.”

  The girl nodded. Jason made a coughing noise and flicked the coin again.

  “I was surprised,” Hooke was saying, “to see you’ve not closed the shop for our meeting. We’ve so much to discuss. Ideas and directives. Money-saving measures . . .”

  Now the man looked pointedly to the desk by the window. Jason stared back, flicking his coin into the air.

  Miss Tinker rushed to say, “Oh, this gentleman was just on his way out.” She shot Jason a pleading look.

  “A drop-in client, I assume?” Drummond Hooke said, studying Jason.

  “Indeed,” said Miss Tinker.

  “How often,” Drummond Hooke now asked, “do lone gentlemen come to us without wives or sisters in tow?” He puffed up, inhaling deeply. “I cannot say it’s—”

  “Oh, very rarely,” assured Miss Tinker. “In fact, I cannot remember the last time we’ve served a gentleman without his family. The ladies wish to be involved in each step of the planning. Anticipation is part of the holiday.”