My Last Duchess (The Wildes of Lindow Castle #0.5) - Eloisa James Page 0,3
fine. She’s turned two years old, so her favorite word is ‘no.’”
“She’s your daughter,” Maddie pointed out. “What did you expect? Do tell me that you’ve managed to find a good nanny?”
“Not yet,” Ophelia said.
“I’ll find you one,” her cousin promised.
Ophelia didn’t want a nanny, if the truth be known. Kind people kept recommending nannies: stern, kindly, scholarly, playful . . . So far, she’d managed to find something wrong with each of them.
Peter had died a few weeks before Viola was born, so he’d never met his daughter. In his absence, she and Viola had become as thick as thieves, as her mother put it. If Ophelia hired a nanny, that nanny would know everything about caring for a two-year-old girl. She would know better than Ophelia.
There was an excellent possibility that Ophelia was making all sorts of mistakes that a proper nanny would avoid. She had nursed Viola herself rather than hire a wet nurse, for example, which one matron had told her was certain to lead to an unhealthy relationship with her child.
She had enjoyed every moment of that mistake.
Next to her, Maddie let out a little shriek. “Oh, look! I didn’t know he was coming. I haven’t seen the duke in London for a year . . . No, well over a year.” She turned to Ophelia. “Remember what I told you? There’s only one man in the world who could change my mind.”
“About what?” Ophelia asked absently. Perhaps she would take Viola to the park tomorrow. Her townhouse was only a block from Hyde Park, and Viola loved to visit the duck pond.
But her coachman had said he smelled a winter storm. Bisquet was a country man, and she trusted his nose, even though the only thing she could smell in London was coal smoke.
“You never remember anything I say,” Maddie complained. “You’re as bad as my husband, but you’re my only cousin, and you ought to be more attentive.”
“I’m sorry,” Ophelia said. “What did you tell me?”
“That I plan never to bed a man again in the whole of my life.”
Ophelia nodded. “All right.”
“Aren’t you going to dissuade me?” Maddie opened her pretty blue eyes very wide.
“Why would I? Childbirth is extremely dangerous.”
“My husband has two mistresses,” Maddie said, “so it stands to reason that I should take a lover. Or three.”
“That seems excessive to me.”
“There is one man in London who might change my mind—and it isn’t my husband; I can promise you that.”
“It would be hard to have an affaire with one’s own husband,” Ophelia pointed out.
“I would give my virtue to only one man,” Maddie said, showing her fine flair for drama. She nodded toward the other side of the chamber. “That duke.”
Ophelia couldn’t think of a single duke with whom she would want to share more than a minuet, but she was reconciled to her own shortcomings. The rest of the world experienced fiery passion, but she didn’t. Thankfully, she and Peter had been alike in that.
“I would probably follow him to Paris after a mere nod,” Maddie said dreamily.
“Which duke?” Ophelia asked, but Maddie didn’t hear because she was gawking across the room like a pig herder seeing St. Paul’s for the first time. Ophelia snapped shut her fan, thinking that she probably shouldn’t compare a beddable duke to a cathedral. It seemed vaguely blasphemous.
Maddie blinked and came out of her desirous haze. “Are you going to the retiring room? I shall join you. I didn’t see that darling bag earlier. Oh! It matches your gloves!”
Ophelia smiled. Both her gloves and bag were made of thin, butter-soft leather, sewn with small spangles. The gloves glittered above her wrists, and her bag sparkled from every angle as it moved with her. “Thank you! A gift from my mother-in-law.”
“You’re so lucky,” Maddie began, and broke off the sentence. “He’s just over there!”
“Who?” Ophelia turned her head, but all she saw was a ballroom crowded with people she’d known her entire life.
“The Duke of Lindow, of course,” Maddie said triumphantly, plucking Ophelia’s sleeve and nodding toward the door. “Tell me you wouldn’t have an affaire with him.”
Ophelia wrinkled her nose. “I’ve heard of him, but we’ve never met.” She didn’t bother to look again, because she had no interest in that particular duke, given his unsavory reputation.
Not that it was his fault that his wife ran away with a Prussian.
Maddie was on her toes, peeking over the crowd. “He’s just so beautiful,” she breathed. “It’s cruel what happened to him.”