How to Catch a Duke, Grace Burrowes [short books to read .txt] 📗

Abigail frowned on violence, true enough, but Stephen frowned on nasty little men who raised their sons to be nasty, if charming, philanderers.

“He’d do it too,” Quinn said, sounding almost cheerful as he took the place at Stephen’s right and tugged Hercules’s leash from Stephen’s hand. “On the off chance that my brother required assistance, I’d happily serve. I frown on abusing the privileges of the peerage, but just the once, my duchess might overlook it. Duncan?”

“Pounding one aging windbag flat will hardly take three of us,” Duncan said from Stephen’s left, “but of course, I am ever available to my family when the law itself can’t be relied upon to keep the wheels of justice turning smoothly and in the correct direction.”

Marriage had agreed with Duncan, marriage to Matilda, anyway.

“His Grace of Walden,” Stephen said, “is sponsoring a bill to reform the use of child labor in the mines. You will vociferously support that measure and any other that His Grace tells you to support. A man who can look at his six-year-old grandson and commend children of the same age to twelve-hour shifts at hard labor is sorely in need of guidance.”

And a job crawling on his hands and knees through endless darkness in the mines.

Stapleton nodded. “What of you?” he asked, gaze narrowing at Stephen. “I’ll support Walden’s damned bills and offer Miss Abbott handsome reparation. Tell me what I must do to ensure you leave me and mine in peace, and let’s be done with it.”

“From you, I want nothing. I act only as the agent of those I care about. Keep them happy, and you have nothing to fear from me. I’m off to find Miss Abbott.” He bowed, such as he was able to bow, and left Stapleton to Quinn, Duncan, and Hercules’s tender mercies.

“I loved him,” Lady Champlain said, as she led Abigail down a carpeted corridor. “I was an idiot. Were you an idiot too?”

Abigail did not want to exchange feminine confidences with the widow of the man who’d betrayed her. Her ladyship seemed so wan and weary, though, that to snap out some acerbic rejoinder would have been churlish.

Champlain had been Harmonia’s husband, and she had loved him. Both facts had doubtless caused her ladyship sadness. With some relief, Abigail realized that she had not loved Champlain. She’d been infatuated, smitten, enthralled, swept off her feet by the attentions of a dashing, worldly charmer who had made her feel feminine and desired.

She had not loved Champlain, but she did love Stephen Wentworth.

“I was easy to infatuate,” Abigail said. “I knew nothing of men, I was lonely, and my father had long since stopped expecting me to get up to any mischief. I had become invisible, and at nearly six feet tall.”

“While I am invisible at little over five.” Lady Champlain stopped outside a door on the third floor. “I love that sound.”

A child laughed merrily in the next room, and a man’s softer tones sounded patiently amused.

“The letters, if you please,” Abigail said, as a vast emptiness welled in the region of her heart. “I am here only to retrieve the letters.”

Her ladyship pushed open the door and stopped a few steps into the room. A large oval rug covered most of the floor, and upon the rug sat a small dark-haired boy and a handsome man of about thirty years.

“My two favorite fellows,” her ladyship said, “and you are up to mischief, I see.”

The man got to his feet easily. “A lad is never too young to try his hand at painting. We were making birds. Canaries, because they are yellow,” he said with mock gravity, “and bluebirds, because they are blue.”

“I made a green bird,” the boy said. “When you swirl the paints together they make a new color.” He cocked his head and turned a blue-eyed gaze on Abigail. “You are very tall, miss. Are you the queen?”

“Manners, child,” the man murmured, taking the boy’s hand and pulling him to his feet. “Lady Champlain, might you introduce us?”

Abigail endured the introductions, too drained by the events of the day to muster much curiosity even about the gorgeous Mr. Endymion de Beauharnais.

“If you’ll wait here,” Lady Champlain said, disappearing through an open door near the windows.

“Would you care to paint with us?” the boy asked. “I like making new colors. I could paint a kite to look like birds, and the other birds might try to make friends with it. I want to make a kite that’s big enough to lift me into the air. Don’t tell Mama. She would worry. She worries if I merely climb a tree, so I forget to tell her when I’ve been climbing trees in the garden.”

“The views from high in a tree are marvelous, aren’t they?” Abigail asked. “And nobody knows you’re there, because they don’t think to look up.”

The child grinned at that notion and scrambled back to the carpet. “I shall paint a tree, and I will put a little tree house in it, and all the children will want to play in the garden with the tree house. Not even pirates or bandits will be able to find us in our tree house.”

“So imaginative,” Abigail said softly, and that smile would turn heads when the boy grew older.

Mr. de Beauharnais was looking at her oddly and holding out a plain white handkerchief. “Are you well, miss?”

Abigail nodded, surprised to feel a hot tear sliding down her cheek. “The day has been taxing.” And that little boy is so very, very dear.

“You tangled with Stapleton. He has worn her ladyship down to a shadow, but I am determined…Suffice it to say, she has allies. I hope you do too.”

Abigail touched the handkerchief to her cheek. The scent was plain lavender, the cloth an unremarkable linen with no embroidery, and yet, the gesture had been kind.

“Lord Stephen Wentworth is among my acquaintances, and he speaks”—she cast around for the right word—“fondly of you.”

“I speak of him with equal affection.” The moment