Ten Things I Hate About the Duke - Loretta Chase Page 0,16
smile that could melt rocks and glaciers, let alone adolescent girls, and said, “How could I forget? Miss Pomfret, your servant.”
A graceful bow, a moment of chitchat with Aunt Julia, then he was gone, disappearing into the crowd and leaving Cassandra so dizzy that the crushing disappointment took some time to settle in.
Minutes later, women began to scream. Turning that way, she saw Lady Thurlow standing stock-still, shrieking, while a goat nibbled on one of the satin roses at the hem of her dress.
Under the balcony, where the band had abruptly stopped playing, the three dukes were doubled up, howling with laughter.
Pandemonium. Attendants running to corral the goat. Women running out of the ballroom. Lady Jersey marching across the room, two other patronesses in her wake.
Aunt Julia shaking her head.
Alice and Cassandra looking at each other.
“It would seem they have not matured during our absence,” Alice said.
“Not in the least.” But what had Cassandra expected, after all the stories she’d heard? Had anybody detected the smallest hint of maturity previously?
“Got it in with a hoist, I expect,” Alice said.
It was the way boys sneaked girls into their rooms at university. The trio had been the talk of Eton before they were dukes, then the talk of Oxford. Now London.
“I should have known,” Cassandra said.
“You wanted to dance with him.”
Cassandra could hardly deny it to her best friend, who knew everything. “One dance, Alice.” One, that was all. She loved to dance. Men rarely asked her. She wasn’t comfortable company. She’d been speaking her mind since she was a child. Not a popular quality, in children or in debutantes. But he—bold and reckless, caring nothing for others’ opinions—he wouldn’t be afraid of her.
“They never ask respectable girls. Too complicated, Ripley says.”
“Complicated! It’s one dance!”
“One dance too many. You’re not a courtesan or a merry widow. That’s all they need to know. Did you fail to notice that none of them asked me, either?”
It was not at all fair. She and Alice were interesting. “It’s stupid.”
“It’s for the best. No happy endings with those three.”
“He has everything—looks, money, rank. What is wrong with him?”
“He’s drunk, for one thing. For another, he’s an idiot. A gorgeous idiot, I grant you.”
“Gorgeous, yes. Oh, Alice, that smile of his—”
“Could launch a thousand ruinations.”
They’d laughed, and Cassandra had told herself to stop hoping he’d change. The unruly boy she’d heard so many wild tales about had only become the unruly adult she heard so many wild tales about. All the same, it took another two years’ worth of Ashmont Incidents to bring her to her senses at last.
Today he’d dragged her into one of his Incidents, and she would be the one to pay. She and her family.
Your behavior reflects . . . on all of us.
She’d traveled out of London without a chaperon and outriders. People would say she’d asked for trouble. They’d say her father, one of Parliament’s leading members, charged with making law for the country, couldn’t control his own daughter.
She could see the satirical prints: Lord deGriffith’s face on a bull wearing a nose ring, with Cassandra leading him. Her father pulling a cart, with Cassandra cracking a whip over him.
That was only the beginning of her family’s humiliation. Within days an accidental encounter with the Duke of Ashmont would be distorted into an assignation. An orgy, for all she knew. They’d have her rolling drunkenly in the heath with him.
Her face was on fire.
Marry me.
There was a sure path to heartbreak and misery.
Misery he’d already brought. If the fever worsened and Keeffe didn’t survive—
“Miss Pomfret.”
The low voice seemed to promise everything. Like the face. So much physical beauty on the outside. So little of value within.
She didn’t pause. “Go to the devil.”
“I realize you’re overwrought—”
“Overwrought?” She stopped and turned to face him. “Your drunken recklessness injured, perhaps fatally, a devoted employee. You’ve terrified a less devoted one into fleeing on the first coach that had room for her. You’ve destroyed my carriage. You’ve set off one of your exciting explosions, whose innocent bystanders, this time, are members of my family. Yes, indeed, I’m an overwrought female—because there’s no cause here, is there, for me to be at all agitated.”
As she spoke, she stalked nearer, until they were practically nose to nose. “I do beg your pardon, duke, for my excessive”—she poked him in the chest, wishing it was the barrel of a pistol, rather than her finger—“reaction”—another, harder, poke—“to these trivial matters.” One last, hard poke. “Stay away from me.” She