The Ugly Dukeling Read online

  She let her shoulders slump. “I had to try, Trone. You’re in a mood.”

  He pulled back. “Well, that mood is about to change.” When she shook her head in confusion, he added, “Atty is here.”

  She gaped a moment as her mind went blank. Atty. Atrates. Trone’s brother was here. Good god, he was never here. Half a decade in Trone’s employ—managing his heir-to-the-estate accounts as well as the business operations of the recovery facility—and she’d never met his brother. Now his brother had come home to a disorganized estate because the mantle of duke was in transition. The dying duke was ineffective, and Trone had only marginal authority.

  Floundering, she flipped madly through her ledger. “What? He is? I’ve not made any arrangements—”

  “He’s been managed, Ciss,” Trone said, his tone heavy. “You keep on task.”

  She huffed as she wrangled her scattered thoughts. “You, um, made arrangements without me?”

  The corner of Trone’s mouth twitched. “I’m not an infant, Ciss. I can do things without you. Many things. Feed myself, dress myself—”

  She dismissed that rubbish with a wave. “Simmy does all that. Don’t steal his stage, Trone.”

  “How is he?” The quality of Trone’s voice changed, dropping his mirth.

  Her heart ached with sympathy when she saw her employer restrain his eagerness. Here, within his father’s house, Trone was always tightly wound. He remained constantly on guard as he behaved in accordance with the duke’s prejudiced expectations including a show of disdain for the two people closest to him: his secret lover and his own hybrid brother.

  “He’s well,” Cisnetta said, hoping her tone matched her warm smile. “He asked that I pass along something about being a beautiful bastard, but the rest, I believe, is anatomically impossible. Though, he sounded very eager to give it a try.”

  Trone stepped back then looked away. The muscle in his jaw clenched as he pressed his lips closed.

  “Beautiful bastard,” he chuffed as he ruefully shook his head.

  She smiled with him. “I’ll pass on your regards.”

  “Right, well, off with you.” Trone conferred with his farsimi. “The lancar is about here.”

  She nodded and started toward the door. Glancing over her shoulder, she clicked her tongue at the desk. “Come, Cobbs. Our carriage awaits.”

  “It’s a damn lancar,” Trone blustered at her. “Better be. I’m paying for it to be lancar.”

  Chapter 2

  Atrates shook his head in disgust as his ears thrummed. He could always rely on Trone’s bellowing to give away his position. The man would have been fodder in any regiment. A damned booming target that increased the survival rate of those farthest from him. That, and his brother had no discipline. The arse was hollering from the library.

  Atrates course-corrected, his strides eating up the carpet like he skimmed over the terrain in an Otaric armatura battlesuit. Hell, his blood practically rushed through him, powering his muscles and roaring in his ears.

  He rounded the corner, caught a flash of a petite figure, then dodged left, slamming himself into the wall. It was his only course of action, rather than mowing the woman down.

  His impact with the wall rattled the paintings all along the corridor. The woman’s small gasp, that had begun like a delicate chime of a bell, pitched into a horrendous honk and fervent cursing.

  Atrates cocked his head as he squared off and face the woman who had plastered herself against the far wall of the corridor.

  A woman who was embroiled in a mad tussle with a giant black swan.

  Atrates dropped his rucksack from his shoulder as he stepped toward her and reached out, “Here, allow me—”

  She pivoted away from him, fear pitching her voice. “No! No! Don’t touch.”

  Atrates flinched, staring at his dark granite-colored hand as he pulled back. Fucking Otar. They could graft a Mayreni baby with Otaric genetics, picking from a multitude of characteristics, and they’d chosen the most otherworldly colors possible. Granite black skin and blue eyes, whereas the Mayreni had dusky skin and mossy eyes ranging from green to brown.

  Her shriek echoed in the hall and soured him further. He should have expected her shock, but it had been weeks since anyone panicked upon sighting him.

  “Oh my god, did he bite you?”

  Confused by her alarmed tone, Atrates flicked his eyes up and they collided with her wide brown ones. Her brows slanted, furrowed in worry, and her mouth hung open.

  She was concerned? For him? Over a damn bird?

  Speechless, he gaped at her as three noises punctured the silence like laser blasts.

  Somewhere down the hall, a vase toppled off its pedestal with a shattering crash.

  A heavy, well-worn leather journal—tucked up under her arm—slid free and plopped onto the fine Otaric rug.

  The swan, with its six-foot wingspan unfurled and rattling, hissed at him.

  “Oh, Cobbs, stop posturing,” she said with a beleaguered sigh as she peeked over the swan’s black wing. Then she said, as if it should resonate, “He thinks he’s a person, yet he acts like a cob. Then he wonders why we’re all confused by his behavior.”

  He glimpsed enough of her to see her shrug.

  Good god. The swan woman shrugged at him.

  Narrowing his eyes at her, he dipped his chin. “Who are you?”

  “Oh, one second, milord,” she said as she flailed with the swan. “Just one—”

  She shuffled down the hall, opened the first door she came to, and tossed the mad fowl inside.

  “Sorry, Cobbs. Only for a bit,” she said beseechingly, her hand pressed to the closed door. She turned her big brown eyes toward Atrates. “Soothe your feathers while I soothe…”

  She raked her eyes over him, and damn if she didn’t ignite a response in him as he gazed back. Without the cob obstructing his view, Atrates laid eyes on a scandalously modern Mayreni woman. She no longer wore skirts that swept the floor, but a tailored brown pantsuit with a blue silk shirt under the jacket. She should have looked crisp, but the struggle with the cob left her tousled, flushed, and heaving. Her hair, pulled back into a now-compromised bun, had tendrils trailing across her forehead and brushing along her cheeks.

  His arousal, the lusty fiend, tried to rear its head and howl. But like a mongrel chained and muzzled, his desire rose up and butted against the irons of his last dose of synten.

  The Otar knew of this effect. Even though synten—synthetic bezeten—kept frenesia at bay, it shunted arousal in a way that was near unbearable. Blood continued to prime Atrates’s muscles while his scent and taste receptors strained to detect the musky invitation for sex. An instinctive Otaric impulse then battered against his sensibilities, spurring him to drag a partner close and wrestle until they both were satisfied.

  But then his sexual urges would crash head-on into the synthetic bezeten barrier. No erection. No working himself to exhaustion with a willing woman. No plying himself with single-minded determination that had his lungs and thighs burning. No coiling in his gut, the intensity tightening and tightening, turning like a screw until he would burst with fire and ice and a gut-wrenching groan as he would come undone.

  As the woman’s eyes continued to devour him from head to toe, he indulged in the fantasy that she truly wanted him. Not Atrates Valme Geswin, Baron of Barbotière and second-in-line to the Andrake dukedom. Not Major Atrates Geswin, Otaric battlesuit pilot. Not even as an obsessive Otarphiliac, wanting any hybrid whom they encountered.

  He was certain, by her heated gaze that mirrored dozens of women before her, that she only wanted one of those three. Never him. Never just Atrates.

  Within seconds of their encounter, her blatantly lustful perusal had earned his scorn.

  That and the downy feathers that clung to her suit and stuck in her hair.

  She was ridiculous.

  “Did he bite you?” She started to advance on him, yet her brow had furrowed, conveying concern.
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br />   Surely, it was feigned. His Otaric reflexes saved her from being flattened by his twenty-stone body that had literally, on occasion, been used as a battering ram against enemy fortifications. There was no way on god’s given Gisth that he would be nipped by a hissing swan.

  Never.

  Her tiny hand trembled as she reached out, attempting to grasp his fist.

  “He didn’t bite me,” he blurted out as he tucked his hand behind his back.

  Once hidden from view, he contritely opened his fist. He spread his fingers and held them stiffly open against the impulse to curl them back into a fist. How crude. How uncouth. To be close-fisted when, as of yet, she had not demonstrated this was an uneven exchange.

  She withdrew, making a fist herself, before she exhaled and forced her hand back open. Her limp fingers trembled as they hung by her hips.

  Then he caught it—the fragrance that he’d been dragging into his lungs with perturbed, billowed breaths. The woman was shrouded in a cloud of magone. Her trembling hand was an early sign of frenesia.

  Well, he couldn’t help her and siphon off the excess. First, it just wasn’t done. In Mayren, you never approached a stranger and asked for a bezeten exchange. And the second reason made the first one moot. His dose of synthetic bezeten wouldn’t wear off for another twenty-four hours, and its impotency impacted more than his cock. If permitted, he would barely siphon a snippet from her, and she looked like she had barrels to give.

  With nothing between them—no reason to mull about the hall like a lost fool—he snatched up his rucksack. Then he dipped his head in customary parting and brought his hands out from behind his back, holding them palms up and open.

  There, he could be a gentleman. On occasion. With much deliberateness.

  She jolted, her whole face lighting up as she stayed him with a hand.

  A tiny hand had him rooted on the spot.

  Atrates was average height for a hybrid, which made him a towering man compared to most Mayreni. She, though, seemed to skew the other way, being diminutive for a Mayreni.

  She gazed up at him. “May I try something with you?”

  His heart crashed against his chest, mimicking the arousal that beat against his synthetic bezeten barrier.

  “Try something?” His question scratched out of him.

  His skin prickled with awareness. Hell, standing beneath a barrage of twelve-pounder cannon fire never wracked him with such wariness.

  “I’ve always wanted to try this.” She licked her lips. “Good greetings, One of Us.”

  Atrates stood and stared as her jagged Otaric accent shredded his ears.

  She blinked. “Was that correct?”

  “That was awful.”

  “Oh.” Her shoulders fell. “Maybe I should try clicking more.” She inhaled. “Good—”

  He made a wordless shushing sound and was damn relieved when she snapped her mouth closed. But then she kept her eager eyes on him like she was awaiting further instruction.

  Bugger that.

  “Who are you?” His demand, that his opponent stand and present, sounded rather stupefied to his own ears.

  “Oh! Forgive me.” She curtseyed. If she’d been in a ballroom, her clumsy, bobbing display of deference would have triggered an outbreak of offended gasps faster than dysentery in an overcrowded brig. “Miss Cisnetta Fowler.”

  That told him nothing, yet like a daft idiot, he said, “Who are you?”

  He shook his head, scattering his bewilderment. A swan-toting, Otaric-butchering, lustful-gazing conundrum had knocked him offline. That never happened. He knew how to handle women like Cisnetta Fowler. An hour or two in a dark, secluded room always wielded acceptable results.

  She canted her head as her eyes softened. “I’m Cisnetta Fowler, your brother’s solicitor.”

  “Solicitor?” he echoed.

  “And siphoning partner.”

  Now that was utter bullshit. This woman, with her once-crisp suit and once-tight bun, reeked of magone. Its distinctive perfume wafted from her clothes, skin, and hair. This woman, who soaked herself in magone—the only remedy women had when they produced too much bezeten and became frenetic—would never find contentment with Trone. His bezeten needs were mundane, typical of men all over the planet of Gisth.

  His voice dipped. “My brother?”

  “Yes. Trone.”

  There. As boldly as she pleased, enthusiasm shone in her gaze.

  “You call him Trone?” Not ‘milord’ like she’d called Atrates only moments ago, when she thought a bloody bird had bitten him.

  She rocked back on her heels as her enthusiasm cooled to something contemplative.

  Fine. He knew he scowled. With his dark, Otar-grafted features, hardened soldiers had told him that he presented a terrible visage.

  But Miss Cisnetta Fowler ran her gaze over him once more. Not in fear or heat. She looked knowingly at him, and he didn’t like it.

  She hummed, nothing more than a wordless acknowledgment, then said, “We’ve dropped formalities.”

  With that, she turned, giving him her back and then her backside, as she scooped up her ledger. She went to the door where she’d stashed her feral fowl. Opening the door, she slipped inside and closed it with a soft click.

  Atrates stood, stuck to the spot like he was encased in a powered-down battlesuit. He’d experienced total shutdown a few times during training sessions. One moment, his battlesuit would have been moving smoothly with his body, running like water. Next, it would hold him rigid, locking him into position when the power would be cut. Sometimes he would have been left twisted, forced to hold a contorted stance until he would prove that he wouldn’t lose his composure.

  He hated the sensation.

  Miss Fowler—astounding Fowler with her foul fowl—had locked him down. She had him staring at a closed door, straining to hear her coo and scold a swan in equal measure.

  He gave himself a thorough, rough shake. Then he stretched out his limbs to prove to himself that he was in control. With a snarl, he hoisted his rucksack’s strap onto his shoulder before stomping down the corridor and heading away from her.

  “He’s in the library!” He heard her call out behind the closed door.

  With a curse he pivoted and headed back the other way, past where she sheltered, and to the library. To the place he’d been headed to originally until he met a swan-wielding-frenetic menace who turned him all around.

  He threw open the doors as he barged into the library. Trone was sitting awkwardly in an armchair, an open book in hand. Atrates knew that uncomfortable perch was his brother nesting on something he wanted to keep hidden, like the semi-erotic tomes peppered through the library. ‘Art,’ Trone had called them.

  Though, in this moment, Atrates bet it was an Otaric comms case. He could see the matte black casing under his brother’s ass, reminding him that Valment had given a contraband case like that to Trone, but not to him.

  Trone, the greedy glutton, had not only won the duke’s favor, but he’d charmed Atrates’s second father as well.

  “Oh, Atty,” his brother beamed at him. God, the man was over thirty years old, yet he still crowed like a cockerel. “Good to see you. Is the old jackass dead yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well, damn. I’d been hoping for good news.” Trone snapped the book shut and tossed it across the library, discarding it like a clay disk for target shooting. “So, are you settling in all right, then?”

  Like hell he was staying. He could smell her magone in the room. “Is that woman staying here?”

  “That woman?”

  He pushed back a flashing image of unflappable brown eyes that bore right into him. “Tight bun with the terror bird.”

  His brother grinned. “Noticed her tight bun, did you?”

  “Is she staying?”

  Trone laughed, a mixture of amusement and incredulity. “I’m not getting rid of her, if that’s what you’re asking. She’s needed.”

  Atrates pointed a dam
ning finger at his older brother. “I’m staying in town. Call me when there’s a corpse to spit on.”

  “Town?” His brother started to rise, but then dropped back down on his mounded seat. “That’s half a day by carriage. What if you’re needed?”

  Atrates turned and stormed out.

  Needed? No, Miss Fowler was the needed one. No one ever needed him.

  “Take the lancar!” His brother’s booming voice carried down the hall. “You can ride with Ciss!”

  Cisnetta fanned herself with her ledger as she headed toward the main foyer of the ducal manor. Despite Trone’s brother being a rude arse with low self-esteem, she very much enjoyed a man in uniform.

  Lord Barbotière, Trone’s brother, had arrived in tall boots, an Otaric standing-collar jacket, and thigh-hugging breeches. The material was all Otaric made—distinctive with the fine hexagonal weaving of the fabric—but styled like a uniform of the Royal Mayreni Cavalry. Though, with the Otar integrating into the military, horses had been removed from the battle arena on the Continent, replaced with Otaric transports and units of hybrids who wore battlesuits called armatura.

  Cisnetta had found it amusing that, at first, the Mayreni were skeptical of Otaric armor. The Mayreni had abandoned such cumbersome and expensive battle gear once flintlocks and siege engines made castle walls obsolete. That skepticism had persisted until a young hybrid colonel smoothly sidestepped a cannonball in a blur of movement, before charging straight at the enemy’s stone redoubt and pulling the structure apart with his armor-clad hands.

  Cisnetta’s father—an infantryman—had seen firsthand the colonel’s one-man forlorn hope. It had become one of her father’s favorite tales, the end of a military practice very aptly named ‘no hope.’ But Cisnetta had grasped onto a different aspect of the story.

  Oh, to have seen that colonel rip apart a fortified barricade…

  The Continent, where Cisnetta had spent her early childhood, was a miserable place to live. Women had few rights, merely seen as resources for men with bezeten needs rather than as partners. The Mayreni’s belief in an even exchange—where one offered and the other accepted—was why the Otar bestowed them with benevolence and technology. Thus, the kingdoms on the Continent declared war.