Free How to Dance With a Duke by Manda Collins

she looked in the moonlight and the way his eyes kept straying to her mouth.
    Unfortunately, Miss Hurston was currently scowling in the moonlight, her delectable mouth pursed in annoyance.
    “I’m sure I never asked for your permission, Your Grace,” she said, drawing back from him, her arms folding across her chest in the universal posture of affronted females everywhere. “I was simply sharing my plans with you. If you do not agree with them…”
    Of course he didn’t bloody agree with them, he thought, grateful for the military training that had taught him to keep his mouth shut when needed.
    “It isn’t that I disagree with your plan,” he began, though he did disagree with her plan. “It simply seems unnecessary to go to such an extreme to achieve your goal.”
    But the damage was done. Whatever rapport they’d achieved earlier had vanished in the time it took him to utter an oath.
    “Thank you very much for your advice, Your Grace,” she said, rising from the bench. “I’m afraid I have to get back to my cousins now.”
    Her curtsy was perfectly executed. Her expression was serene. But he knew he’d seriously harmed his cause. If he were to convince her to help him search for clues to Will’s disappearance, he would need to woo her back to his side.
    Odd choice of word, that.
    He rose carefully from the bench, the muscles in his leg throbbing, momentarily erasing his thoughts of anything but the red-hot sting of pain. When he could breathe again, his thoughts returned to Miss Hurston.
    Cecily.
    Surely there was no harm in thinking of her by her given name.
    He would have to find some means of dissuading Cecily from her ridiculous plan. Marriages of convenience might be de rigueur for the ton , but he knew from his brother’s marriage that being leg-shackled to someone for whom you felt no affection was soul-crushing. Certainly nothing like the true partnership and genuine love he’d witnessed between his parents.
    She might be well versed in Latin and Greek and probably a whole host of other languages, but in this matter, Cecily was woefully ignorant.
    He’d simply have to teach her the error of her ways.
    It was, he thought, relying on his walking stick the whole way to the French doors, a lesson he was very much looking forward to.
    *   *   *
    Cecily was finishing up a cup of tea in the breakfast room the next morning when she felt the skin on the back of her neck prickle. Turning, she saw a dark figure looming in the doorway.
    She couldn’t help it.
    She jumped.
    Then felt foolish when the dark shadow resolved itself into a very ordinary-looking man of middle years.
    “I did not mean to startle you, my dear,” Lord Geoffrey Brighton, her father’s oldest friend, said, his eyebrows raised. “Never say you’ve started believing that curse nonsense. I thought you were too sensible for that.”
    A confirmed bachelor, Lord Geoffrey had run tame in their house for as long as Cecily could remember. And though his hair was turning a bit silvery at the temples, he still looked just as he always had. Comfortable, mussed. He had been a steadfast supporter of Lord Hurston’s expeditions to Egypt from the beginning, investing his own fortune heavily in the acquisition and transport of various antiquities back to England. And he had made a tidy profit selling those goods that the Egyptian Club did not always find to be of particularly significant historical value.
    And unlike the other members of the club, who had not even bothered to call on her father after that first awful week, Lord Geoffrey was a constant presence in Hurston House. He had even been on hand to calm Lord Hurston a time or two after he had suffered one of the terrible convulsions that still seemed to strike out of nowhere. It had brought Cecily to tears to see her father’s oldest friend at his side, speaking to him in a low, patient voice that was surprising in such a robust man.
    “Please don’t you bring up the curse too,”