Free Love Letters From a Duke by Elizabeth Boyle Page A

chits had enough secrets to keep an entire battalion of Bow Street runners employed with the task of uncovering them.
    And thirdly, Miss Felicity Langley was one dead cool liar, a sharpster you wouldn’t want to meet up against across the green baize without anything less than a hefty pile of coins in front of you and God’s own luck with cards. The chit could bluff her way out of Hell’s gates.
    But most importantly, whatever these three daft girls had up their sleeves to make their way into Society, well, frankly it would never work.
    Like every other responsibility his grandfather had left behind, some part of this travesty was his to fix. And all of a sudden he knew that crying off and leaving Miss Langley wasn’t right. Not until he’d gotten to the bottom of what was amiss in this household.
    If it had been just a nagging sense of duty to the chit, he could have put Gibbens in charge of the entire situation and washed his hands of any guilt he may have felt over the obligation.
    If only it was that, he thought. No, it was all about this minx. This unlikely lady his grandfather had chosen. He still wasn’t utterly convinced this was the same Felicity Langley the old duke had courted.
    She couldn’t be.
    Yet when this Miss Langley looked down at him from her seat in the carriage and asked him in her usual forthright manner, “Are you with us or not?” he suddenly found himself in one of those moments where one’s life teeters on a precipice. For she slanted a wayward glance at him, and in those blinding seconds, he found himself caught by the spark in her eyes, by the tip of her lips.
    Quite honestly, it had taken every bit of military discipline he possessed not to turn tail and run all the way back to Westmoreland to the safety of Bythorne Castle and its high impregnable walls.
    Especially considering that Miss Felicity Langley, the nearly betrothed of the most lofty Duke of Hollindrake, had just sent him—Thatcher the footman—a flirtatious look of invitation that would have made a Lisbon courtesan weep with envy.
    And like a raw recruit, her siren glance disarmed every plan he’d had about her, especially the one about crying off.Instead he found himself nodding and climbing up beside the driver.
    As they drove away, Thatcher realized he was not only in her employ, he was also falling under her unfathomable spell.
     
    “You minx!” Tally whispered across the carriage to her sister.
    “Whatever are you talking about?” Felicity shot back, fully intending to bluff for as long as she could hold out.
    “You just gave that new footman Nanny Jamilla’s look.” Tally sat back in her seat and grinned. “And don’t even deny it.”
    Felicity did anyway. “I did no such thing.”
    “You did something,” Pippin chimed in. “And whatever it was, it worked like a charm.”
    “I did nothing,” Felicity averred.
    Tally snorted. “You used Nanny Jamilla’s look on that poor man and now you’ll have to pay the consequences.”
    “Oh, what is this look?” their cousin asked, leaning forward in her seat in all eagerness.
    “There is no such thing,” Felicity told her.
    “There was something to how you looked at that fella,” Aunt Minty declared, “and I know my fair share of Seven Dials whores who’d pay good money to be able to coax a man like you just did.”
    “Aunt Minty!” Felicity protested, glancing up at the closed hatch that sat between them and the two men above. “Will you keep your voice down? And how many times must I ask—please, no improper statements.”
    “She’s improper?” Tally said, sitting with her arms folded over her chest. “You just used the most dangerous look known to the female race, and you’re worried about Aunt Minty? Felicity, you were flirting with our footman! Oh, what would Nanny Jamilla say? Or better yet, Hollindrake?”
    “Oh, do show me!” Pippin begged. “What is Nanny Jamilla’s look?”
    Tally made a moue, her eyes rolling back in her head, a