Read Online The Duke's Dilemma by Nadine Miller - Free Book Online

is it you ask, sir?” she queried, twisting her hair into a coil and securing it at the back of her neck with her few remaining pins.
    The duke couldn’t tear his gaze from her luxuriant brown hair. Now that he knew how it looked tumbling like a lustrous, satin waterfall down her back, he found himself contemplating it fanned out across a pillow. His pillow.
    He pulled himself up short. What was he thinking? Except for her glorious hair and the keen intelligence in her bright blue eyes, this was a plain-as-porridge spinster who was far more likely to give a man a tongue lashing than a sweet kiss-me-hello. Besides which, she was a commoner— too far beneath him to consider for a wife and too prim and prissy to be mistress to any man.
    He must have attics-to-let to rise at dawn to clash verbal swords with this vinegary antidote when five milk-and-honey misses waited at the manor house to hang on his every word. Still, he had to admit he found an excitement in the challenge she offered—an excitement that had been noticeably lacking in his life of late.
    “Please be good enough to tell me what forfeit you demand,” she said when he failed to answer her question. “I cannot waste the entire morning you know. Mr. Rankin is organizing a picnic and has promised to take me rowing on the lake whilst the duke entertains his bevy of pretties. I should not wish to miss that, above all.”
    Edgar again. Hell and damnation! The fellow was becoming a nuisance. The duke swallowed his frustration. Changing tactics, he favored Miss Haliburton with a smile, the like of which his current mistress, Lady Caroline Crawley, had more than once declared could melt her bones at twenty paces. It appeared to have the opposite effect on the shrewish Miss Haliburton; she simply drew herself up straighter in the saddle and continued to stare at him with unconcealed impatience.
    ” I ask that we dispense with the tedious formalities, ma’am, and address each other by our given names,” he said in a sugary tone that sounded false even to his own ears. “Is that beyond reason?”
    She cocked her head to the right while she considered his request, looking more than ever like the country sparrow he had named her. “It really is improper—but then everything about someone like you is unthinkable for someone like me. So I suppose that, relatively speaking, your request could be considered within bounds.” She frowned. “You already know my name, but how am I to call you by your Christian name when I have never heard it?”
    “My name is Jared.” He had intended to give her a false one in case she had occasion to hear the Duke of Montford’s given name, but at the last moment, he couldn’t bring himself to do so. She had a strangely husky little voice with a faint West Country accent, and he felt an undeniable compulsion to hear his name on her lips.
    “ Jared . It suits you. It has a wicked ring to it.”
    He laughed. “You see me as wicked? How so, Emily?”
    “Dark and wicked and mysterious—quite unlike anyone I have ever before known.”
    “Except the duke, since we are peas in a pod.”
    “That cold fish!” Emily shook her head.” You are nothing alike. But speaking of the duke, are you not taking a great chance riding on his land? He strikes me as a man who would deal harshly with anyone who crossed him.”
    Jared leaned forward to stroke the restless stallion behind his twitching right ear. “I have always ridden Brynhaven as if it were my own. The duke cannot object to what he does not know—and the tenants are my friends; they pretend they do not see me when I pass.”
    Emily cocked her head again, her eyes thoughtful. “You are very bold, sir, as well as extraordinarily well spoken for the base born fellow you claim to be.”
    “As are you for the simple country woman you claim to be.”
    “I never purported to be a farmer’s daughter. My father was a noted Oxford scholar who chose to pursue his research in the quiet