Read Online Leslie Lafoy by The Dukes Proposal - Free Book Online

know him well enough to call him by his given name.
    Ian cocked a brow and forced himself to quickly look away. “I would think,” he offered cautiously, “that you’d be a very graceful dancer.”
    “You’re not looking close enough, Your Grace.”
    Well, since she’d invited him to stare … He looked again. “I see nothing but perfection, Lady Fiona.”
    She sighed and kicked off one of her mules, tossing it into the grass between them. Other than it being small, it was an ordinary-looking thing, the sort of shoe that a lot of women wore around the house during the day. Sometimes they even wore them to evening events as well, but those tended to be fancier, to have metal threads and pearls and …
    She tossed her other shoe down beside the first one. The difference between them was immediately obvious, but he frowned and leaned forward for a better look anyway. If pressed for a judgment, he’d guess that the sole of the one shoe was a good five to seven centimeters thicker than the other.
    He glanced at her feet. She stood there, her hems still raised, one foot planted firmly in the grass, the sole of the other barely brushing the tips of the green blades. He sat back, studying the shape of her foot. There being nothing wrong with it that he could determine by merely looking, he concluded that the problem was most likely in the length of either the lower or upper leg bones. Nodding and pinching his chin between his thumb and forefinger, he said, “I see.”
    She didn’t reply, simply stepped forward on her shorter leg to slip her foot into the thin-soled shoe. Ian quickly looked up, noting that her expression wasn’t the least bit pained by the movement.
    “Is it the result of an accident?” he asked as she put on the thicker-soled mule.
    “I’ve been told,” she answered, sitting down beside him, “that I was born this way.”
    “I gather that it doesn’t pain you in a physical sense.”
    “Not at all.” She chuckled softly. “Which is not to say, of course, that the childhood tumbles I took as a result of it, didn’t hurt. Looking back, I can see that I was really lucky not to have broken my neck a time or two.”
    Given what she’d told him this morning of the circumstances of her birth and early years, it was a certainty that she hadn’t been taken to a physician when a medical intervention might have corrected the problem. How long had she limped before someone had thought to differ the thickness of the soles of her shoes? he wondered.
    “If you see the defect as cause for withdrawing your marriage proposal, I would understand completely.”
    He looked over at her, stunned. “I beg your pardon?”
    “When I came to live with Drayton and Caroline, they took me to see a well-respected doctor. He said that there was nothing to be done to fix the length of my leg and that I should accept the possibility that any children I might have could be born with the same deformity.”
    “What a kind man.”
    “He was just being honest,” she countered with a shrug. “But that aside, I can understand how you might be repulsed by the idea of our children being born deformed. If you want to rescind—”
    “No,” he declared, stunned anew. Did she really think that he could be that shallow? “My proposal stands.”
    “Well, if you should change your mind in the next few days, I—”
    “I’m not going to change my mind, Lady Fiona.”
    She nodded—in what looked to him like sad resignation—and gazed off across the garden. “With the soles of my shoes being as they are, walking is easy enough. But dancing requires me to step backward, and despite the efforts of the best dancing masters in England…”
    She shrugged her delicate shoulders. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve toppled over, the number of times I’ve twisted my ankles in trying to learn. And there comes a point when you have to accept that the end result simply isn’t worth suffering the process of achieving