Read Online When the Duchess Said Yes by Isabella Bradford - Free Book Online

a little anger. Well, let him be angry, she thought. She was angry, too, and with far more reason.
    “Have you no reply to His Grace, Lizzie?” her sister prodded gently. “Faith, I’ve never known you to have not a word to say!”
    Lizzie had a great deal to say, so much that she scarcely knew where to begin. But just as she opened her mouth to start, the stranger—or rather, Hawkesworth, her intended husband—spoke first.
    “If you please, Duchess,” he said, smiling winningly at Charlotte. “I have a request to beg, that I might hear Lady Elizabeth’s first words to me alone, so that I shall be able to recall them forever with perfect clarity. It’s selfish of me, I know, but—”
    “How could that be selfish?” exclaimed Charlotte, pressing her palms together with a rapturous sigh. “It’s vastly gallant of you, and I would not dream of denying you. March, you have no objections, do you?”
    “So long as you stay within sight in this garden,” he said, “you may keep from our hearing as far as you please.”
    Brecon chuckled. “What manner of mischief couldthey possibly contrive, with the three of us to serve as vigilant duennas? Besides, they’ll wed soon enough.”
    “I thank you,” Hawkesworth said solemnly. He waited until the three returned to the summerhouse before he turned to Lizzie.
    “Shall we walk together, Lady Elizabeth?” he asked with a pleasant smile as he tightened his hold on her hand.
    “I should rather walk straight into the river than walk with you,” she said with vehemence, not moving from where she stood.
    “I can assure you that I share much the same preferences regarding your company, Lady Elizabeth,” he said firmly. “But I hold my cousins in the highest regard, and I would not disappoint them for the world. For their sake, you will walk, and you will smile, and you will appear to them as if there is no other place in creation you would rather be.”
    “Your cousins, but my sister,” Lizzie said. Where was the sweet romance she’d dreamed of over all those long months? Where was the courtly lover she’d imagined? She took a deep breath to steady herself, then another. “None of them must ever know that we have met before.”
    “No,” he said curtly. “Why the devil would there be any use in them knowing that?”
    “Then walk.” She pulled her hand free of his, tucking it into the crook of his arm instead. She smiled up at him, the picture of adoration. “Make a better show of it for them, sir. It shouldn’t be difficult, considering your gift for being false.”
    He lurched forward, dragging her along with him. “Hah, that is rare to hear from your lips,” he said. “Who is the duplicitous creature who led me into the bushes at Ranelagh like any other common jade?”
    She gasped, outraged. “You would dare call me duplicitous?Consider, sir, that you had come to Ranelagh for the express purpose of meeting your intended bride—a meeting that you, sir, had already avoided repeatedly—and yet you were so easily misled to dally with another and abandon your true lady?”
    His eyes widened with equal outrage, his hair tossing around his face in the breeze. At Ranelagh she’d thought his eyes were brown, but now, in the sunlight, she could see they’d blue in them, too, an unusual combination that, in other circumstances, she would have found most intriguing.
    “You make little sense, Lady Elizabeth,” he said. “You would fault me for dallying with you, because it meant that at the same time I was being unfaithful to you?”
    She scowled, struggling to make sense of her own tangled argument. It was not easy, and having his thoroughly handsome self so close beside her did not make it any easier to think.
    The last time she’d seen him, he’d been dressed like the night, all in dark velvet. Now, with his scarlet silk waistcoat and his linen shirtsleeves billowing about his arms, he seemed more a kind of avenging angel, though she wasn’t sure what