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

“We were dallying, Harmonia, each out to prove something by taking our clothes off and falling into the same bed. We were foolish.” Maybe pathetic was the better word. “We need not be foolish now.”

She took a sip of her tea, the cup rattling as she returned it to the saucer. “What were you trying to prove?”

A fair question. “Perhaps that I could swagger around like all the real courtesy lords who hadn’t been born in the gutter? Perhaps that my knee was useless, but my pizzle was entirely in working order? Nothing of any moment.”

Harmonia set her teacup back on the tray. “I wanted Champlain to notice me. To pay some blasted attention to the wife who loved him. I was so angry, and he was so focused on his next debauch. I might as well have been an aging lapdog for all he recalled where he’d last put me.”

“Take some shortbread,” Stephen said, holding out the plate. “You’ve had a trying time of it.”

She took a piece, had a small nibble, and set it on her plate. That sequence, of following a polite order, never questioning its appropriateness, struck Stephen as some sort of metaphor. Harmonia ought to be throwing the plate against the wall or at the very least delivering a few pointed opinions on the perfidy of her late husband.

Abigail would certainly not be sipping tea and nibbling shortbread simply because convention called for it.

“Andy says I must marry you.” Harmonia’s hands were fisted in her lap. “Stapleton will likely take up the same notion by this time next week. Nicky is your son, he needs a father, and I am a proven breeder.”

“Harmonia, the man who called you that will soon be far, far away. Put the term from your mind.”

“It’s the truth,” she said miserably. “And Her Grace of Walden was brought to bed with another daughter, and you are the heir, and Andy is right.”

“You’ve discussed this with de Beauharnais?”

She pulled an ornately embroidered handkerchief from a skirt pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “Andy isn’t like you lot. He’s not a lord, he’s not fascinated with ever-greater sprees of debauchery, and he’s good with Nicky. I like him and he likes me, and I have never had anybody simply like me before.”

I liked you. As soon as the thought popped into Stephen’s head it was followed by the admission that he’d barely known Harmonia, and the woman he’d slept with all those years ago had barely known him.

“I will not be parted from my son,” Harmonia said, sniffling. “If that means I must marry you and be your duchess, then I will marry you. We can be civil about it. Being a duchess can’t be any worse than being the widowed mother of a marquess.”

Of a marquess’s heir, strictly speaking. And of Stephen’s son.

“Andy was slightly debauched with me,” Stephen said, apropos of nothing in the whole entire world. “I like him. You’re right. He doesn’t put on airs, and he’s a decent man.”

Harmonia peered at him over her handkerchief. “With you?”

“A passing fancy on my part. I’m not sure what motivated his interest in me. We have remained friends.” Why hadn’t Stephen remained friends with Harmonia? Oh, right. Because she’d been hiding his son from him, and he’d been too busy…playing with guns?

“But you’re…I shouldn’t be surprised. Champlain was indiscriminate with his favors. I hadn’t pegged you for that kind. I truly do not want to be married to another profligate rake, my lord.”

“That’s doing it a bit brown, Harmonia. I was never in the exalted league of rakes Champlain occupied.”

“You were dashing,” she said, with no little asperity. “You were charming, and you made more advances not dancing than most men can manage in an entire quadrille.”

“My apologies.” He’s your son. Though that wasn’t quite right. The boy was Harmonia’s son and Stephen’s son—our son. This fact floated in the same sea of unreality that Stephen had been swimming in for the past quarter hour.

“Harmonia, what do you want to do about this situation? You are the child’s mother, and you are clearly devoted to him.” Blindly so? But what small boy didn’t need a blindly devoted parent or two?

She rose to pace, which was surely a measure of considerable upset, for ladies did not pace—though they apparently dallied, stole letters, and cuckolded heirs to the peerage.

Some ladies did, and Abigail paced.

“I want to raise my son,” Harmonia said. “I want to be left in peace to raise Nicky and maybe find a fellow who doesn’t mind about me being so old, and not having much in the way of settlements or a bosom. I want my own house, a little manor somewhere in Kent and not in the freezing bedamned north because it’s convenient to the perishing, rubbishing grouse moors.”

She put a hand to her mouth. “I said bedamned. I am quite vexed. I do apologize. My mama will be overjoyed to have a duchess for a daughter.”

“To summarize, then,” Stephen said, taking up his cane and pushing to his feet, “you do not want me.”

Harmonia’s dread was written in her teary eyes. She dreaded to offend the man who could all but force her to the altar, and she dreaded equally to speak her vows with him.

“What matters,” Stephen said, “is the child. The situation must be resolved with his best interests in mind. I’d like to meet him.”

All the righteous wind dropped from Harmonia’s sails. “I was afraid of that. He’s in the nursery, and Andy is with him. Come along, and don’t think to introduce yourself as his father. This isn’t the time for that. Nicky won’t understand what it means.”

“My dear Harmonia, I barely understand it myself.”

Abigail chose to spend her last London afternoon in Hyde Park, watching the swans glide on the leaf-darkened water. Her ears warned her of Stephen’s approach, so attuned had she become to the cadence of his gait.

“You could not