My Last Duchess (The Wildes Of Lindow Castle #0.5) - Eloisa James Page 0,100

and now she lay in a patch of sunlight, her cheeks pink and her chest still heaving.

“I like our house,” he said, picking up a few strands of silky hair and curling them around his finger. “I like this bed. I’m sorry we’re leaving for Edinburgh.”

“I’m not sorry,” Philippa said, squinting at him. “You’re driving our poor butler out of his mind. I know you were an astonishingly competent majordomo, Jonas, but you can’t expect the poor man to ascend to your heights.”

“All I asked was that the silver be thoroughly polished on a regular basis.”

Philippa closed her eyes. “I cannot imagine how you did all that you claim a butler should manage in one day, and neither can poor Ribble. At this rate, you will know all there is to know about medicine in six months rather than a year.”

“Did you see that your father sent another letter?” he inquired.

She nodded. “He has launched into a ferocious battle with a benighted professor from Cambridge who had the temerity to disagree with his reconstruction of Napoleon’s first campaign.”

“I like your father,” Wick said. “He is a model of perseverance.”

“He’s too rigid,” Philippa said. “He will never accept that anyone else is right, even about the trivial details.”

Wick grinned down at her. “And yet . . . here I am.”

“Well, that’s true,” Philippa said. “He did change his mind about you. And I still smile every time I think about his insisting that I go to the village merely to return that silly book. It was very unlike him to participate in your charade.”

“What you should smile about is the image of me practicing that horse business,” Wick said. “I could have been at your side a full two days earlier had it not been for the hours and hours I lost, sweeping the knife boy up before me in the saddle.”

“Oh dear,” Philippa said sleepily. “I hope you didn’t drop him.”

“Often,” Wick said. “But he didn’t break anything. I came to you the moment I felt reasonably certain that I wouldn’t drop you.” He touched her nose lightly. “You are the most precious thing in the world to me.”

The corner of her mouth quirked, and she whispered, “Love you,” then she was asleep.

Wick lay beside her, watching as the sunlight shifted across the bed, making stripes over the bare skin of his exquisite wife. The doctor side of him cataloged the tiny swell in her stomach, and the way she dropped asleep at any time of the day. The man side of him noticed that her bosom was even more enthralling than it had been when they married, three months ago.

And the child side . . . the small boy inside, who was never quite sure of his place in life . . . That small boy had vanished.

He belonged here, next to a woman whom he loved more than life itself.

Though how that happened he didn’t know. In fact, he didn’t really understand his own luck until years later when his eldest daughter Clara grew old enough to discover fairy tales. Then, with stories of knights, dragons, lovely maidens, and magic beans swirling through the house, Wick realized who he was. Not an illegitimate son of a grand duke. Not the best doctor in the country. He was the stable boy who won the princess.

The stories never said much about the stable boy’s birth. They just said that the princess was as beautiful as the sun and the moon.

But most importantly, those stories all end the same way.

They lived happily ever after.

About the Author

ELOISA JAMES is a New York Times bestselling author and professor of English literature who lives with her family in New York, but can sometimes be found in Paris or Italy. She is the mother of two and, in a particularly delicious irony for a romance writer, is married to a genuine Italian knight.

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By Eloisa James

My Last Duchess

Say Yes to the Duke

Say No to the Duke

Born to Be Wilde

Too Wilde to Wed

Wilde in Love

Seven Minutes in Heaven

A Gentleman Never Tells (a novella)

My American Duchess

Four Nights with the Duke

Three Weeks with Lady X

Once Upon a Tower

As You Wish

With This Kiss (a novella in three parts)

Seduced by a Pirate (a novella)

The Ugly Duchess

The Duke Is Mine

Winning the Wallflower (a novella)

A Fool Again (a novella)

When Beauty Tamed the Beast

Storming the Castle (a novella)

A Kiss at Midnight

A Duke of Her Own

This Duchess of Mine

When the Duke Returns

Duchess by Night

An Affair Before Christmas

Desperate Duchesses

Pleasure for Pleasure

The Taming of the Duke

Kiss Me, Annabel

Much Ado About You

Your Wicked Ways

A Wild Pursuit

Fool for Love

Duchess in Love

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

my last duchess. Copyright © 2020 by Eloisa James, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-303635-2

Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-303634-5

Cover design by Amy Halperin

Cover illustration by Anna Kmet

Cover photographs © Lee Avison/Arcangel; © Sutham/Shutterstock

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HarperCollins is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States of America and other countries.

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