Ten Things I Hate About the Duke - Loretta Chase Page 0,3

what’s-its.

But no, it was all right now. All for the best. He and Ripley had done what they had to do and . . .

Ashmont shook his head, trying to shake off the image. But all the brandies and sodas failed to wash away the nightmare stuck in his skull: Ripley’s arm upraised when it oughtn’t to have been, a fraction of a heartbeat too late—the same instant Ashmont pulled the trigger.

He’d come within a gnat’s eyelash of killing his best friend.

No thanks to the friend. Bloody idiot. Deloping, of all things.

“More.” Ashmont raised a hand to signal the barmaid. “Another.”

Then he remembered he wasn’t alone.

Not yet.

Humphrey Morris. Other side of the table. The Earl of Bartham’s third son. Known at school as Morris Tertius. Tall fellow. Nearly as tall as Ashmont. But younger. Lankier. Better behaved.

Which explained why he wasn’t one of Ashmont’s best friends. Before. Now was different. Morris had acted as his second when His Bloody Grace the Duke of Blackwood refused, traitorous swine. Another so-called best friend who wasn’t. Bugger the lot of them.

Ashmont cast a bleary gaze at the man sitting opposite, who looked to be loading a pistol.

“Didn’t we already do that?” Ashmont said, his heart sinking. Had he only dreamt the whole ghastly duel?

“Not yet,” Morris said. “You went asleep there for a bit. But before that I said you couldn’t shoot a tankard off the top of the window frame over there without breaking the glass and you said you could and now it’s ten guineas whether you can or can’t. Only first I need to go out.” He jerked his head toward the back of the public house. “Do a piss.” He pushed up clumsily from his seat. “Don’t start without me.”

Ashmont watched him move, like a ship in rough seas, out of the room.

He stared at the table in front of him, where the pistol case lay. He considered the proposed target, to the right of the pub’s entrance.

Easy shot.

“You lying whoreson!” somebody roared. “Say it again and I’ll learn you something you won’t forget.”

“Teach,” Ashmont muttered. “Not learn, you sapskull.”

Nobody heeded the grammar lesson. Somebody shouted back at the sapskull. Then everybody was shouting, banging mugs, scraping chairs over the floor.

The noise set Ashmont’s head vibrating.

“Stow it,” he said. “Stow it, goddamn you all to hell. Stop your bloody row.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He was a duke. When he spoke, people leapt to attention.

Not this lot. Too busy with their— Oh, and now louder shouting, some funny oaths he hadn’t heard before, chairs falling over, and a table. Somebody leapt onto somebody else. A rush to the door— Good. Let ’em go. But they left the door open, and the uproar— Louder and louder. Inside. Outside. Men spilling out of the back rooms.

What were they all doing here at this hour? He flung open the pistol case and grabbed a pistol. Shoving men out of his way, he staggered to the door.

He stomped through it, through the covered entryway, down the steps, and onto the footpath. He cocked the pistol.

Meanwhile

There was a limit, and Cassandra had reached it. Mama had wept for two days, Papa wouldn’t listen to reason, and Hyacinth couldn’t find a reason to blame anybody for anything.

“Papa wants you married,” she’d said last night. “He wants someone protecting you. He doesn’t mean to be harsh. He worries. About both of us. You didn’t see what it was like after I made my debut. The gentlemen would make a crush about me, and it made Mama anxious and Papa angry. And to tell you the truth, I had rather be able to spend time with the other girls, but it isn’t pleasant for them, when men make such a fuss, wanting my attention.”

She’d said, too, that she wasn’t ready to marry anybody, and Cassandra wasn’t to fret about it. She urged Cassandra to visit their ailing former governess in Roehampton. Mrs. Nisbett was preparing to move to Rome, on doctor’s advice. This would be Cassandra’s last chance to see her.

The proposal, for once, met with no parental objections beyond the usual grumbling about her driving herself, and it got Cassandra out of London, at any rate, and into the fresh scenery of the country.

And so this increasingly cloudy June midmorning found her driving her demi-mail phaeton toward Putney Heath. Her maid, Gosney, sat beside her in front, and her tiger, Keeffe, behind in the dickey. For a journey of not seven miles from London, in broad