Free Dukes to the Left of Me, Princes to the Right by Kieran Kramer Page A

neck.
    Natasha jutted her chin at her. “What’s your answer?”
    Poppy flinched. “I’m afraid I forgot the question.”
    She’d been thinking of Drummond, after all, and before that, all she’d heard had been the word wretched being used to describe Sergei. It had been like a knife through her heart.
    “I asked if you will accept the great honor of serving as one of my attendants. You will be privileged to hold my gown and adjust my tiara, a gift of the czar himself. The ball shall be the event of the Season. But now you’re too busy preparing for your wedding. What a shame.”
    Natasha raised her shoulders the tiniest fraction and let them fall.
    “Oh, yes, I’ll be much too busy preparing for my wedding,” Poppy assured her. If she didn’t play the happy bride-to-be, the princess would report it all over Town, and then every suitor she’d ever had would call her a fraud. “And I wouldn’t be a very good attendant, I’m afraid.”
    “Why is that?”
    “I don’t want to blend in, as much as you believe I need to.” Now she let her shoulders rise and fall a fraction of an inch. “I plan to attend the event at the side of my future husband. I shall waltz with him and perhaps even kiss him in front of all the company.”
    Oh, God. She didn’t want Drummond. And she wasn’t a hoyden. Why had she said all that?
    Natasha gave her a glittering smile. “Good luck with your duke, Lady Poppy. Rumor has it he has no heart, but that’s neither here nor there.”
    Poppy tried to be grateful for the remark. She’d been reared to think the best of people, so there was the slightest chance it had been made with friendly concern.
    But she doubted it. If the princess felt anything like she did now, she was hoping Poppy would trip over her hem and fall down. Poppy was wishing the very same for Natasha.
    But the princess strode smoothly out the front door, down the steps—her corgis’ ears like little flags—and was swept up by a footman into her carriage, which went rollicking away with much yapping from its interior and at an unnecessarily high speed.
    When Poppy turned back to the drawing room and sank into her seat, she couldn’t help releasing a wistful sigh. A royal from Russia had come to visit this morning. And not just any royal. Sergei’s sister.
    How exciting such an event would have been even a day ago. But now that she’d met Natasha, Poppy was the opposite of excited, which was unfortunate. She’d had such hopes they’d be good friends.
    Even more lowering was the fact that she was trapped in an engagement to the wrong man and he was to come to dinner tonight. Her temples grew damp at the thought. She had no idea what she’d say to him. She was beside herself that he’d interfered in her life without her permission.
    She stood and looked at herself in the mirror. “If he’s not going to play fair, then I shan’t, either,” she told herself out loud.
    If he could be like a vampire or a snake, she’d be like a spider in a web, and she’d wrap him up in a little threaded ball at the soonest opportunity. Or perhaps she’d be more like a governess and torture him with boring lectures so that he’d fall asleep, whereupon she’d write nasty things on his forehead, words like GO AWAY, RUDE MAN .
    She strode out of the drawing room to Papa’s library and then to her bedchamber, where she lay on her quilt and searched through a text on agricultural tools, vowing to find the perfect tedious lecture.
    But as she was reading about chaff cutters, dibbers, and flails, she fell asleep.

CHAPTER 11

    When Nicholas knocked on the door at 17 Clifford Street at precisely seven o’clock, he was rather irritated and deflated, having waited all day to see if Groop would contact him to tell him Operation Pink Lady would be his.
    He hadn’t. And it wasn’t.
    Which was why he was scowling when the door was opened by the butler.
    “Good evening, Your Grace. I am Kettle, at your service. Do come in.”
    With