Ten Things I Hate About the Duke - Loretta Chase Page 0,127
wanted to weep.
“Ashmont.”
He went on reading.
“Lucius.”
He turned and looked at her. “I didn’t understand what you were about,” he said. “I asked Mrs. Roake, because somebody had mentioned the book at the club meeting, and it seemed important to the ladies. She told me I was more likely to have it in my library than to find it in a bookshop, since it was rather old and not read much these days.”
“It was well regarded in the author’s time,” Cassandra said. “But after she died, her husband wrote an honest memoir of her life, and it wasn’t a proper life, and so people turned against her.”
“The sort of thing she writes about.”
“Yes.” She looked up at him. “You read this to understand me better?”
“You. The other ladies. You were so sincere and determined. About what you were doing. I was all at sea.”
“We don’t agree with her on all counts,” she said. “But who else has captured our position, our education, the world we live in, so aptly?”
“Don’t know. I’ve only read this one. A few times, to understand, because it’s not my usual thing. No murders, for instance. No cutthroats or brigands or star-crossed lovers or even a servant pretending to be a mummy.”
She pressed her cheek against his arm. “I didn’t think it was possible to love you more. It’s easy enough to go about knocking people down and defending honor and all that. But to read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—I could swoon, and I never swoon.”
He smiled down at her, the glacier-melting smile. But he saw her now, truly saw her, as no other man did or probably ever would. He’d taken pains to see her truly.
“You mustn’t make me weep,” she said. “I did that once, a few weeks ago, and that’s enough for the decade.”
“Don’t want to make you swoon or weep. What I was hoping was, enough of this, and you’d be climbing all over me, and the second bedding could go a trifle less cautiously than the last.”
“I see.” And she did see. The moon and the stars and the Milky Way. Everything she’d dreamt and hoped and more. “Read on.”
“Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.”
He said, “That was one that knocked me on my beam-ends. What? I said. What? No. What?”
She couldn’t wait. She reached for him. “Come,” she said. “Put away the book. I’m going to climb all over you.”
“But there’s more.”
“I know. But you’ve made the most extraordinary sacrifice for me, and I must express my feelings.”
“Does this mean I get a point?”
“Yes. All the points.”
“Truly? Already? No, you’re making it too easy.”
She studied his face. He was serious. “Very well. One point.”
“That’s more like it. Later we can talk about the points you owe me. For my clever impersonation of a drunk, for instance, to create a diversion. And disposing of a villain, though he wasn’t much of a villain. But your mother did all the heavy work there. My contribution was paltry. Maybe only half a point.”
She threw back the bedclothes and clambered into his lap. His rod came to attention. She smiled. “Can we count later?”
He threw down the book and wrapped his arms about her. “Good idea.”
She loved him then, as she’d always done. She’d never stop. And neither, she was absolutely certain, would he.
Author’s Notes
FOXE’S MORNING SPECTACLE is a fictional publication, which first appeared in Silk Is for Seduction. The Court Journal Gazette of the Fashionable World is not.
RIPLEY AND OLYMPIA AND OTHERS. A Duke in Shining Armor tells their story, and introduces some of the secondary characters featured in Ten Things I Hate About the Duke. Lady Bartham first appears in Dukes Prefer Blondes. The street child Jonesy makes his first appearance in Scandal Wears Satin, where Sophy Noirot christens him Fenwick, cleans him up, and gives him a job. He reappears in Vixen in Velvet. In Dukes Prefer Blondes we learn he was previously known as Jonesy, the name he goes by in A Duke in Shining Armor. Since the latter, like Ten Things I Hate About the Duke, takes place two years earlier than the Dressmakers series, I use his