Read Online Lady Adventuress 01 - His Wayward Duchess by Daphne du Bois - Free Book Online

skills.
    John was fifteen, and away at Eton. He had been growing decidedly studious , to their father’s pleasure. Though it was generally felt among the siblings that he often took himself much too seriously and could usually do with a bit of fun to keep him from growing cobwebs.
    Cassandra shared their parents ’ love of botany and owned a pair of bronze-rimmed reading spectacles, though she hardly ever wore them, for she claimed they made her dizzy.
    Holly came next, and after her Rose, w ho was spirited and adventurous, and engaged to be married to a newly-made Captain of the Navy once he could afford a wife. Holly had always wished she had a bit more of her sister’s fire and zest for life.
    Rose understood about daring , passion and grand love – and Holly didn’t think Rose could ever have found herself in Holly’s shoes. Her manor would have been properly haunted, and her duke inevitably besotted with his new lady.
    Timo thy, the Millforte first-born, was more light-hearted than John, and given to a love of riding and dancing. Despite being two years older than Holly and a year older than Rose, he had always aided and abetted their mischief, and even joined in himself.
    H olly’s younger siblings in particular would adore the mysterious maze that was Pontridge Abbey – she could just picture them leaping from behind shadowed corners and making fun of the ancestral portraits, just as they did in the portrait gallery at home.
    One especially memorable rainy afternoon, when Arabella and Harry were still only infants, the siblings had spent a splendidly diverting afternoon in the family gallery making up marvellous, scandalous and appalling histories for the many ancestors that graced those walls.
    Had their governess caught them at it, they would have received a very thorough talking-to, but she had taken to her bed with a chill, and so their fun had gone unpunished. It was better than playing shades again, which tended to grow dull very quickly, especially when one ran out of silhouettes to make.
    “ Truth be told, we are still unable to walk down one of those passages without having to stifle a giggle over one painting or another,” Holly confided to her husband, unable to keep a wobble of laughter from her voice and a sparkle from her eyes.
    Strathavon looked into her ey es a moment, seemingly lost in reverie, before shaking his head to clear away his musings. “It must have been a very diverting childhood,” he said politely.
    Holly wondered if the duke had ever had such fun in this house. As far as she was concerned, houses were never gloomy in their own right, and anything could be made fun given a healthy imagination for games and a suitably large army of siblings to command.
    She was in the middle of tell ing Strathavon the tale of how poor John had wandered into a prank set by Harry and got chased up a tree by an extremely irate goose when she noticed the astonished look her husband was giving her.
    “How…remarkable”, the duke commented, from an impossible, icy, distance that still hurt Holly every time she was subjected to it. “You seem to have a very boisterous coterie of relations, my dear.”
    He seem ed mildly horrified by the idea.
    “Did you an d your brother never get up to mischief?”
    But he was not in the mood to share even an inch of his memories with her. “No more or less than any other children. Tell me, do you mean to start on the east wing tomorrow?”
    *
    The duke was always catching Holly unawares, before she had even a chance of making herself look somewhat presentable. Holly was in the middle of a short break from the cleaning, looking over lists by the window of her study, when a voice from the doorway startled her.
    “Holly?”
    She turned to find the duke standing behind her, so tantalisingly close, an unreadable look on his face. She wondered why he had come.
    Holly raised a hand awkwardly to her cap, which was a little dishevelled and really terribly