Read Online Four Nights With the Duke by Eloisa James - Free Book Online

that she, Mia, could undertake the repetitive and boring work of estate management. He and her father had always dismissed her airily, calling her books “scribbles.”
    Her scribbles earned more than the Carrington estate did last year, but she hadn’t shared that fact with her father, not since her first book came out and he magnanimously granted her the right to keep her pennies to herself.
    In his words.
    “I wish he hadn’t left,” Charlie said, voicing the obvious. “Mr. Reeve promised to buy a sleigh next winter and pull me over the snow, and he was going to teach me how to invent things.”
    Mia’s arm tightened around him. When her brother died, Sir Richard had promptly tried to retain guardianship of his nephew, on the grounds that Mia’s betrothed was illegitimate and consequently not a man of “substance and worth.” That had come to nothing, mercifully.
    Sir Richard often won his lawsuits—which were legion—but he lost this one. Instead, Edward’s solicitors had promptly launched a counter-suit forslander. Edward may be illegitimate, but he was the son of an earl. What’s more, he was an Oxford professor who had made a fortune perfecting various machines, including a new type of paper-making machine that was used by printers.
    Mia had actually met him in the office of her publisher, when Lucibella Delicosa was visiting London. For a moment she thought wistfully about the heady first days of their romance, when her father and brother were still alive, and she had believed she’d finally met a man she admired.
    Then she shook herself. Ironically, Sir Richard had been proven right: Edward was not a man of “substance and worth,” or he never would have jilted her.
    “You will learn how to invent things on your own,” she told Charlie. “I have to marry someone other than Mr. Reeve. Luckily for us, the duke has offered to step in.” She pressed a kiss on his forehead. “I will not let you go to Sir Richard, Charlie O’Mine.”
    He leaned his head against her shoulder and she wrapped her other arm around him as well. She could feel his bones, thin and birdlike, against her body. He may be on his way to becoming a man, but for now he was still a child, and a frail one.
    “I don’t like being Sir Richard’s ward. He looks at me as if I had three fingers, or two noses.”
    “We needn’t worry about your uncle ever again. You’ll be a duke’s ward. What do you think of that?”
    Charlie looked heartbreakingly uncertain. “I’ve never met a duke. Do you know him well?”
    “Of course I do,” Mia said. “I’ve known His Grace since we were children, which is why he is being generous enough to do us this favor, on the basis of our old friendship.”
    If only that were the truth. “After this marriagebusiness is over, I thought we might take a trip, the two of us. What do you say about making a tour of Bavaria?” Bavaria had always struck her as a most romantic place with castles that she could use as the setting to future heroines’ adventures.
    The sooner she left England after the marriage contract was signed, the sooner Vander could file for divorce on grounds of desertion or annulment on the grounds of non-consummation, whichever he pleased. As she’d explained to him in the letter he hadn’t bothered to read.
    It was rather sad to realize that although she would miss her horse, Lancelot, there was no one and nothing else to keep her in England—not if Charlie was with her. Just at the moment, her life seemed oddly thin.
    “Yes, please!” His voice rose with excitement. “I should like that above all things.”
    “Then that is what we shall do.”
    “I might have trouble walking on board ship.”
    Mia shuddered at the very thought of Charlie on a slippery deck. “We’ll stay in the cabin and find ourselves across the Channel before you know it,” she said, trying to sound gay.
    And failing.
    His slight arms wound around her neck. “It will be all right, Auntie,” he