How to Catch a Duke by Grace Burrowes (buy e reader TXT) 📕

She was trying to tell him something, but Stephen was still too appalled with himself to parse the subtleties.

“Abigail, I have failed you. I have failed honor itself and banished myself from the land of gentlemanly sensibilities. If there are consequences—”

“I lost one child,” she said, squeezing his fingers. “Despite everything, I wanted my baby, Stephen. I am not a grand lady to be brought low by a common human contretemps. I’d leave York for a time, then come back with a baby in my arms, claiming that a widowed cousin in Cornwall had succumbed to a lung fever and orphaned her husband’s posthumous child. Everybody would know I’d mis-stepped, though nobody would much remark it provided I was a good mother and didn’t repeat the error.”

The carriage rolled along through tree-lined streets, the autumn sunshine slanting from the west. Stephen’s panic gradually subsided to worry and familiar self-loathing.

He would cheerfully, enthusiastically, marry Abigail, but he would not use a baby to entrap her. “When are your courses due to start?”

Abigail sent him an exasperated look. “Is nothing beyond the scope of your curiosity?”

“We are lovers. You’ve seen my knee.” She hadn’t really. Abigail, in fact, seemed to have no particular interest in his knee at all.

“Tuesday, and I am very regular. Put this from your mind, my lord, or I will have to distract you with a few kisses.”

She generously bestowed several protracted, sweet, hot, wonderful kisses on him anyway, then subsided against him for the rest of the journey home. Stephen handed her down, bowed politely to her in the foyer, and watched her waft up the steps until she was gone from sight.

“You’re holding a parasol,” Ned said, sauntering into the foyer from the direction of the clerks’ office. “I’ve had my suspicions about you, your lordship. One hears all manner of rumors regarding your proclivities.”

Stephen shoved the parasol at him. “If Abigail Abbott asked me to carry her reticule, her gloves, her smelling salts, and her muddy boots, I would be honored.”

Ned examined the mechanism on the parasol, as if looking for a trigger device. “That woman has never needed smelling salts in her life. You, on the other hand, look a bit peaky. Knee bothering you?”

“No, actually, but I could use a favor.” Stephen explained that a package would arrive from the apothecary addressed to Ned for discreet delivery to Abigail. “And before you try to pry details out of me, there’s also a new twist to the situation regarding Lord Stapleton, Lord Fleming, and God knows who else.”

Ned, ever one to delight in an intrigue, either took the bait or, for once in his benighted life, showed a little mercy to a fellow mortal and let Stephen change the subject.

“Sounds complicated,” he said. “And if you do not marry Miss Abbott, you are a moron.”

Ned could deliver a setdown as effectively as any duchess, but his comment was accompanied by a gentle, nearly affectionate, shove to Stephen’s chest.

“And why,” Stephen replied, “would a woman like Abigail marry a moron, pray tell?”

“Because she is a lady of singular tastes.” He patted Stephen’s shoulder. “Have a care, Wentworth, or I will have to show you how to properly romance a willing female.”

“It’s not a true wooing.”

Ned snorted, flicked Stephen’s cravat, and strolled off down the corridor.

“It’s not,” Stephen repeated, to nobody in particular. “But it needs to be.”

Abigail’s courses had arrived two days early, which provoked mixed and entirely pointless feelings. She distracted herself by writing out the remainder of Champlain’s letters, organizing them by date.

Today finds me in dreary Auxerre, missing my darling goose desperately.…

I write to my dearest sugarplum from godforsaken Tournus.…

I spend this week pining for you desperately in Chaumont.…

The exercise had brought her no peace and less joy. The damned man had been a philandering, selfish cad, and not much of a lover, come to find out. His geographical descriptions and affectionate effusions struck her as inane, and even insulting. Could he not have used her name? Did he forget to whom he wrote?

What did a Quaker gunsmith’s daughter care for a description of vineyards she would never see or chateaus where the likes of her would never be a guest? Why had Champlain bothered writing to her at all?

“This is the last of the letters?” Stephen asked when Abigail assumed her place beside him in his town coach and passed over the letters. Duncan, Matilda, and His Grace of Walden would take the Walden town coach to the Portmans’ ball, though Her Grace would remain at home in deference to her recent travail.

“That’s all of them,” Abigail said, “and I can’t help but feel that I’m missing an obvious pattern, such as a code or signal. Do you think Champlain could truly have been a spy?”

Stephen tucked the packet into an inside pocket of his cape and took Abigail’s hand. She would rather they weren’t wearing gloves, but then, she would rather they weren’t on their way to a fancy dress ball.

“Champlain lacked the brains or integrity to be a spy,” Stephen said. “He might have undertaken some state-sanctioned snooping out of a lust for excitement, or he might have been used by spies, but he hadn’t the patriotism and nerve for true espionage.”

“You knew him that well?” Abigail agreed with Stephen’s characterization, though she would have added that Champlain had been charming, funny, and more manipulative than an ambitious matchmaker.

“I could have been him,” Stephen said. “Swiving my way across the Continent, more drunk than sober, much affronted when my smallest whim was denied, foolish wagers and broken hearts on every side. Duncan and Jane took me in hand and mitigated disaster. Champlain was an improvement over Stapleton—the son was nowhere near as overtly mean as his father—but that is hardly an endorsement. Witness Champlain’s mendacity toward you.”

Abigail had considered the months of trysting she’d allowed Champlain, and the fact that he hadn’t once brought up the issue of conception.