The Duchess Hunt. Elizabeth Beacon

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СКАЧАТЬ began to wonder anew about that cat-like hearing of his as he sent her a very peculiar look indeed.

      ‘Promise me that you will at least try, Princess,’ he admonished with a sigh after several more minutes of faintly hostile silence on both sides.

      ‘Try to do what?’

      ‘Join us erring and striving human beings for a change and come down out of your ivory tower for the summer. You might be surprised at what you find if you decided to embrace life instead of running away from it.’

      ‘And you might get your ears boxed after all,’ she snapped bitterly, for wasn’t this pot calling kettle black with a vengeance?

      ‘Promise?’ he said relentlessly and she made the mistake of briefly meeting his eyes and seeing genuine concern in the gold-rayed green depths of them before he turned his attention back to the road once again.

      ‘Only if you finally stop calling me Princess,’ she conceded and might have kicked herself for conceding that much if it would have done any good.

      ‘You would miss it if I did,’ he said with a wry smile as if he had suddenly realised how absurd they must look as they quarrelled most of the way round the almost countryside, then back into London again.

      ‘Like I’d miss chickenpox,’ she said darkly.

      ‘I take it all back, Jess, don’t ever change,’ he said with an easy grin and a laugh and she cursed herself for a fool when it felt more exhilarating than half an hour of flirtation with one of his rival rakes.

      ‘Don’t worry, I won’t. So far as I can see there’s very little hope you ever will either.’

      ‘And why should I change?’

      ‘Because marriage ought to do that to a man,’ she horrified herself by coming right out and saying.

      ‘Did I mention marriage?’ he asked, his voice so silkily dangerous she couldn’t fight off a visible shiver.

      ‘Never to me and don’t worry, I have no delusions in that direction,’ she snapped defensively.

      ‘I never thought you had, my dear,’ he said so remotely that it felt as if they were only a pair of strangers who didn’t particularly like each other.

      ‘Which is just as well, considering you would have hated it if I had designs on your ducal coronet,’ she recklessly added.

      ‘Who knows?’ he said vaguely, as if Jessica Pendle and her wayward ideas were a million miles from the focus of his thoughts, whatever that might be.

      ‘I do,’ she persisted disastrously, mainly because she couldn’t let silence fall again now the words were actually out.

      ‘You’re right,’ he admitted after a tense silence during which she had to actually bite her tongue not to make things worse by defending herself even more strongly and denying once more she had the least desire to attract him on any level. ‘In a weak moment I gave in to my grandmother’s edict and seriously considered marriage. It was obviously a moment too long, since I am now host to a gaggle of eligible young ladies and their assorted relatives and friends and will have a house party full of guests to consider when I return home.’

      ‘Hence your invitation to the Pendles, so we can water down the obviousness of a pack of eager young ladies invited by your aunt before you had time to express your second thoughts?’ she made herself say lightly, as if being considered an antidote to other more marriageable females didn’t hurt her in the least.

      ‘No, hence my invitation to the place I probably love most in the world to a family I consider part of my own. You are every bit as lovely as any of the ladies invited by my aunt and ought to know it by now, without having to be reassured at every turn that I will never see you as second-best to any of them,’ he said drily.

      ‘I am not lovely,’ she objected as indignantly as if he’d accused her of being plain as rice pudding.

      ‘Like it or not, you are so, my dear,’ he said with such a knowing smile she felt the edge had been quite taken off the compliment.

      ‘Just because you declare it, therefore it must be so, your Grace?’

      ‘If that’s what it takes to convince you I’m right. Now kindly take that about-to-be-martyred look off your face and behave like the proper young lady society knows you to be, Princess. It might be best if you pretend we just enjoyed a sedate tour round the leafier parts of Mayfair rather than a dashing tour of the outer villages perhaps.’

      ‘Yes, much better—and you’re still wrong,’ she sniped as the dusty streets became familiar and she felt him slip back into cynical Duke of Dettingham persona and out of her reach once again.

      ‘I’m not, you know,’ he murmured as he passed over her reticule and fan when the Pendles’ head footman had finished helping her down from the relatively high carriage seat.

      ‘Not what?’ she replied distractedly, for trying to descend gracefully from even a normal carriage was always a challenge and today she had wanted to land in a heap at his horses’ feet even less than usual.

      ‘Wrong, of course.’ He reminded her of his assertion she was lovely with a look of such molten heat in his gaze that she almost believed him for a moment, until she reminded herself he was an accomplished flirt and very good at making susceptible females believe they were uniquely special to him.

      ‘Hah! Try telling that to your other female guests when next we meet. They would have you declared insane or throw me in the moat.’

      ‘I don’t have a moat,’ he argued as she stood back on the pavement and waited to bid him an acceptably polite farewell.

      ‘They would dig one especially for me.’

      ‘Should I consider that a challenge, I wonder?’ he said with a teasing smile that threatened to leave her in a collapsed heap of compliance in the street.

      ‘No!’ she said a little too shrilly and stepped back as if just looking at him might burn her.

      ‘Pity,’ he said with a taunting grin she recalled seeing all too often when she was a child and he and Rich were about to escape her yet again. ‘I always liked a challenge and so few other females grant me the delight of proving them wrong as often as you do, Princess.’

      ‘Then count me in as just another female,’ she advised with as much of a flounce as she could manage and turned to quit the scene if he refused to play the gentleman and leave her in peace.

      ‘You could never be one of the crowd to me, Princess,’ he assured her outrageously as he finally obliged her and drove off with a careless salute of his driving whip and a flurry of dust from his chariot wheels.

      ‘Infuriating, arrogant, idiot,’ she gritted between her teeth as she stood on the pavement, watching slavishly until he was completely out of sight.

      ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Jessica?’ the butler said blandly, clearly having heard every word, but preserving the fiction that good servants were made of wood and set going every morning by a clock winder.

      ‘Tea, I think, Wellow,’ she said brightly. ‘I stand in need of it after that.’

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