What the Duke Doesn't Know by Jane Ashford Page A

responded. “I thought some of the carvings were rather like those they make on the island. They were more intricate, of course.”
    She spoke without a trace of self-consciousness. Remembering the very graphic male figurines he’d seen on her island home, James discovered another way that Kawena was unlike a sheltered English girl. She seemed perfectly familiar with…certain bits of anatomy, and not at all embarrassed by the idea of them. His neckcloth felt tighter all at once. “Umm, you must have sailed south from Madras,” he said.
    â€œYes, we went down the coast of Africa, but the stops were brief. I didn’t see much else until we reached the Cape colony.”
    â€œThere’s a lovely spot,” James said.
    Kawena nodded. “The cliffs rising above the sea took my breath away. And it was thrilling to think that two oceans met in the waters offshore.”
    What other girl would think of that? James wondered. He remembered a day of mountainous waves as his ship rounded the horn of Africa and passed from the Pacific into the Atlantic.
    â€œThe one place I got to go ashore for a while was Gibraltar,” Kawena went on. “Captain Pierce thought I’d hardly be noticed among all the different sorts of people there.”
    James nodded. The Mediterranean base was chock-full of Italians and Portuguese and Spaniards, not to mention the Jews and the Moors. “It’s almost like a masquerade ball,” he commented, recalling the rainbow colors of the costumes he’d seen there. Robes and skullcaps, along with bright British uniforms and kilts.
    â€œLike nothing I’d ever seen,” she agreed. “I stood in the square and watched a British officer slouching at a corner, looking with such scorn at all the people shouting and gesturing as they bargained.”
    She smiled at James, and his pulse raced.
    â€œSome bowed with one hand to their chest.” She demonstrated. “There were men in turbans sitting cross-legged, selling slippers or oranges or I don’t know what. The din was tremendous. I felt I’d really made it to the other side of the world at last.”
    How well he knew that feeling, James thought. It was part of the adventure he’d dreamed of all his life—to see places and peoples unlike his own. He seldom met anyone who truly understood it. His family didn’t. They were rooted in England, in their different ways, and content to be. Even Sebastian. His cavalry regiment might be ordered abroad, and he would go full willingly, and do his duty. But he didn’t hope to be shipped to the Antipodes. He didn’t anticipate the call as a rare opportunity.
    A great many of James’s countrymen who went off to serve the empire, or themselves, in far lands kept their minds and hearts in England, he’d found. They didn’t share his delight in difference. Yet here, in the form of this lovely young woman, was a kindred spirit.
    He met her eyes, and saw that she recognized it, too. Similar impulses moved them, deep down. With that realization came a touch of comfort, a sharper stab of longing, and a whiff of danger. This trip was becoming more and more complicated. He really wasn’t certain how he was going to get through the rest of it.

Seven
    The main road to Portsmouth took them through Winchester, and as they stayed the night in that town, Kawena had the chance to go out and look at the cathedral early the next morning. She’d been urged to do so by the innkeeper, who’d told her that it was very ancient, built in the reign of some long-ago king.
    As she stood before the towering edifice, gazing up at spires that seemed to reach the sky, an old man in priest’s garb paused beside her. “There’s been a church here since six forty-two,” he said.
    â€œSix forty-two what?” she asked.
    â€œThe year six forty-two.”
    Kawena worked out the mathematics of this in her head. Lord