How to Catch a Duke (Rogues to Riches #6) - Grace Burrowes Page 0,35

you both. All’s well and all that, right?”

Stephen saluted with his whip and waited until the phaeton had clattered out of the alley.

“I have never encountered a parasol with a steel handle,” Abigail said. “Where did you say you bought it?”

Damn and blast. “I made it.”

“You made me a parasol?”

“Not precisely. I am experimenting with designs, toying with the notion that a parasol can serve more than one function.”

She pulled on her gloves. “Such as carrying a scent bottle or vinaigrette in the shaft?”

Small scent bottles were typically about the size and shape of a fat cheroot. “Something like that. You did that boy a significant service, Abigail.” She’d hefted the phaeton like it weighed no more than a velvet muff, a feat Stephen could have managed only at peril to his balance.

“He was in the way and nobody save you was on hand to gawk at my outlandish behavior. You made that parasol?”

Stephen stopped the horse short of the end of the alley. High garden walls provided privacy on both sides, and the plane trees had enough leaves left to obscure the gig from any second-story windows.

“I made that parasol. I like adding cleverness to existing designs.” That much was true.

She examined the stitchery around the rim of the parasol. “You sew a very pretty seam, my lord.”

She was paying him a compliment rather than mocking him.

“I could not have lifted that damned phaeton, Abigail.”

“I could not have designed a parasol with any practical uses, my lord. Shall we to the park?”

“In a moment.”

First, he kissed her. Kissed her because she liked his pretty seams and his un-fussy, un-plain parasol, kissed her because she’d helped save a young man from mortification, kissed her because he could not do anything more than kiss her and shouldn’t even be doing that.

“I don’t normally go about impersonating a hostler,” she said when Stephen drew back. “The poor young man seemed utterly helpless. I gather you were not mortified?”

“I am impressed at your generosity of spirit, Abigail.” At her pragmatic disregard for appearances, at her ingenuity when it came to using a cravat to secure wheel and axle.

She kissed him, a ladylike little peck on the cheek that drove him wild. “To the park, my lord. The day is fair and I’ve a mind to show off my new finery. Most worldly of me, but there you have it.”

Stephen gave the reins a shake. “I have just now this moment come upon a new use for the handle of a parasol.”

“What would that be?”

“French letters. A lady ought to be able to carry discreet contraception on her person, nobody the wiser. The handle of the shaft would have to be rectangular, like a pencil box, and the mechanism stout, but what do you think? Would it sell?”

He was improvising, and making a complete hash of matters, as usual.

Abigail made a sound halfway between a sniff and a chortle, then she punched Stephen on the arm and laughed outright, and soon Stephen was laughing with her.

“His lordship doesn’t drive young ladies in the park anymore.” Duncan offered that observation staring down at the empty drive, where not ten minutes past, Stephen had tooled away with Miss Abbott up beside him. They made a handsome couple, though Stephen would have demanded satisfaction if Duncan had rendered that compliment aloud.

“If Stephen wants time alone with Miss Abbott,” Quinn replied, “he’ll observe the proprieties, and that means driving with her in the park in an open vehicle at a decent hour.”

Duncan let the curtain drop. “Because he cannot walk with her in the park. He has nightmares, about being pushed in his Bath chair by unseen hands that shove him over the brink of a precipice.”

Quinn had been unaware of Stephen’s nightmares. Quinn was not, in fact, as well acquainted with Stephen as he should be. A difference in ages was partly responsible—he and Stephen were more than a decade apart—but so too was a difference in temperament.

“Stephen finds London misses insipid,” Quinn said. “They are not complicated enough for him.” Quinn, by contrast, had been awed by fine ladies as a young man. More fool he.

Duncan prowled the length of the library. He had overseen the development of the collection, and had doubtless read every volume on the shelves. Quinn liked books well enough, but only because his duchess enjoyed having him read to her at the end of the day.

“You have it all wrong, Quinn.” Duncan wound up a music box Stephen had made for