Say No to the Duke (The Wildes of Lindow Castle #4) - Eloisa James Page 0,50

back to himself with a jolt, realizing that the party was looking at him expectantly. “Yes?”

“Thaddeus is going to escort Lady Knowe and myself to the auction house so we can spy around the premises,” the duchess told him. “We don’t think that Lady Boadicea should be seen in the vicinity, so the two of you must wait for us to return. If she is seen in our company, they might suspect who she is tomorrow when we return.”

If he were Thaddeus, he wouldn’t leave his fiancée in the care of another man.

But he wasn’t Thaddeus, and Thaddeus seemed perfectly agreeable about the prospect of losing the company of his supposed beloved.

“He doesn’t want to marry me anymore,” Betsy said a few minutes later, after the party left. She didn’t sound disappointed.

“You could have been a duchess,” Jeremy said. “Actually, you probably will still be a duchess, because Thaddeus’s mother wants you, even if Thaddeus doesn’t. You’re going to be permitted, if not goaded into, all the pranks that she wasn’t allowed as a child.”

“No one will goad me into anything,” Betsy said, finishing her last bite of crumpet. “Where shall we go, by the way? Not that I don’t enjoy your company, but I hate sitting in front of crumbly plates. It’s so depressing.”

“I would suggest a visit to St. Bartholomew’s,” the hostess suggested, appearing with Betsy’s pelisse over her arm. “Your Ladyship will find it pleasing. It has a turreted bell tower and an ancient crypt, and dates to the 1600s.”

Jeremy kept his utter disinterest in turreted bell towers to himself, took the pelisse from the woman, and helped Betsy put it on. “Do you suppose your future mother-in-law thought about the fact that she’d left you unchaperoned?” he asked.

“Should she have?” Betsy asked, looking up at him.

“Certainly not,” Jeremy said. “I’m as safe as a toothless dog and they know it.”

A smile glimmered in the depths of Betsy’s eyes.

He wasn’t . . . and she knew it. For a moment the air between them sang with a promise of purely earthly delights. The kind that keep a man and woman in their room for hours, contemplating an effort to rise and then collapsing back into bed.

There were reasons why young women weren’t allowed to spend time alone with men unless betrothed or married.

“I like her for it,” Betsy said, unexpectedly. “There are many who expect me to be as immoral as my mother. That prospect didn’t even cross her mind, did it?”

“No,” Jeremy said. “The duchess has come to an orderly conclusion about you and her son, and she can’t conceive that you might prefer another man.”

There was a funny little silence after that.

“Shall we tour St. Bartholomew’s?” he asked.

“Yes,” Betsy replied, taking his arm. On the doorstep she paused and pulled up the hood of her pelisse.

The snowfall was thicker than it seemed from the teahouse windows. Through a veil of white, the town looked bleak and dark. Wilmslow was an old town, with narrow streets that wove back and forth, cobbles curving around a massive oak tree.

“You are certain that you don’t wish to return to the teahouse?” he asked Betsy. “We could ask to have the plates cleared. We could start over with fresh crumpets and tea.”

“I’m sorry to drag you through the snow,” she said, “but I couldn’t take another moment. Did you notice the hostess staring at me from the side of the room?”

“It did occur to me that she might have collected a print or two of the Wildes,” Jeremy admitted cautiously.

“If I marry Thaddeus, she will begin collecting prints of duchesses,” Betsy said, wrinkling her nose.

“Perhaps I am being obtuse, but how are you injured if she wastes her money on prints of you posing in a ballroom?”

“You haven’t made a study of Wilde prints, obviously.”

“True.”

“The stationers pry and investigate in order to create different prints that will tempt their customers. They often make up the subjects from whole cloth. I’ve been shown in dalliance with Lord Merland, for example—and he’s married! More to the point, I scarcely know the man.”

“Unpleasant,” Jeremy acknowledged.

“They are often disagreeable,” Betsy said. “My mother, you see. You know about the Prussian, don’t you?”

Jeremy blinked at her.

“My mother’s lover,” Betsy said, scowling at him. “Golden hair, good teeth, looked just like—” She bit the sentence off.

“Looked like?”

She looked up at him. “I shan’t finish that sentence, and I hope you will forget I ever said anything.”

“Looked like your sister Joan,” Jeremy said, realizing. “You mentioned