Tall, Duke, and Dangerous (Hazards of Dukes #2) - Megan Frampton Page 0,30

if I am to—” But she hadn’t said anything to anybody about traipsing about London. Not now, not that she was a lady.

“If you are to—?” Jane prompted.

They were in Ana Maria’s bedroom, the two of them discussing just what, precisely, one wore to a gentleman’s home when said gentleman would be wearing the aforementioned shirtsleeves.

But that wasn’t a response.

The problem with people who’d known you since you were young is that they knew you. Ana Maria had never said anything about her conflicted—one might say “oxymoronic”—feelings about Nash, but that was probably because she hadn’t had to. Jane had likely figured it out long before Ana Maria had begun to catalogue his kindness, his fierce protectiveness, and those strong arms.

Swooning is not allowed, she reminded herself sternly.

“If I am to visit the fabric places I wish to go to.” She spoke as though it were entirely reasonable that a young lady, a daughter of one duke, the cousin to another, would want to frequent fabric merchants. Some, shockingly, even from countries other than England.

Not for the first time, Ana Maria wished that she could have stayed in her previous role as servant. It was a ludicrous wish, and she did not miss a bit of the actual work—she wasn’t a self-sacrificing idiot—but she did miss the freedom associated with being someone nobody thought much of.

Why couldn’t she have been the daughter of a country squire, the cousin of another country squire?

Though those ladies were likely even more constrained, given that they knew far fewer people and didn’t have the luxury of a bustling city like London to travel around in.

Fine. She would begrudgingly accept who she was, but that didn’t mean she had to accept its limitations.

Which made her think about just those limitations—things like not spending time alone with a gentleman when one was an unmarried lady. Not acting on one’s impulses either. Impulses such as kissing said gentleman when one had the . . . impulse to do so.

He was the perfect candidate for kissing, even if one discounted the fact that he was extraordinarily handsome. He would never speak about it, since he didn’t speak in general, and he was exceedingly loyal, and would never do anything to damage her reputation.

Not that she was necessarily going to kiss him. But if the impulse occurred to her—which, of course it was going to occur to her given how swoony she was about his entire form—she might indeed act on it.

“Why haven’t you hired a chaperone? That would solve the problem and you wouldn’t need to bother the duke,” Jane asked in a reasonable tone. “And why do you need to go to those places, anyway?”

A chaperone was the obvious solution. But even without the allure of Nash, she did not want to hire someone to be her shadow, not when she was so determined to be who she wanted to be on her own. She was twenty-eight, not eighteen. Other women her age, less fortunate women, were deemed spinsters, and therefore not required to answer to anybody.

Ana Maria had been expecting both of Jane’s questions, though she had thought it might be Thaddeus who asked first. But Thaddeus was in over his head with being the duke, and he’d spoken only a few words to her since reminding her—as though she needed reminding, she reminded herself of it all the time—that Nash was not to be thought of in that way.

“I’ve been thinking about what I would like to do.” She held her hand up as Jane’s mouth opened to ask the inevitable questions. “I would like to help people such as Miss Octavia in their decorating needs.”

When she said it aloud like that, it sounded ridiculous. And small. And meaningless.

But she knew for herself how crucial it was to surround oneself with things and colors and items that brought pleasure. Her mood had improved dramatically as soon as she’d redecorated the small salon, and she was already itching to tear everything apart in her bedroom.

So she couldn’t let her own, or anybody else’s doubts, subsume her.

If she couldn’t do something as ridiculous and small and meaningless as control her surroundings, what was the point of being a lady of privilege in the first place? If she couldn’t then share her abilities with others who just needed a respite from the drab browns and grays of their world, then she might as well just give up and accept Lord “I Won’t Do Anything for Myself” Brunley.

“That’s an