Free When the Duchess Said Yes by Isabella Bradford Page A

she?”
    “Shameless harlot,” Lady Allred said, her nose high with disdain as she sat, purposefully turning the chair and her back to the painting. She sat with practiced care, arranging her silk skirts to cover her feet. “I trust your wife will put an end to that sort of trumpery. That is, if you can ever make yourself sufficiently agreeable to the poor lady that she’ll agree to wed you.”
    Glumly Hawke stared into his mostly empty coffee cup. He longed for more, but if he summoned Giacomo, then he would have to be hospitable and offer refreshment to his mother as well, and he’d no desire to encourage her to stay any longer than was necessary.
    Which, knowing his mother when she’d things to say, could be very long indeed.
    “I know you don’t wish me to linger, Hawkesworth,” she said as if reading his thoughts. “But I heard of yesterday’s debacle with the Wylder girl, and I cannot conceive of how you misplayed your hand so badly. What do you propose to do next? How will you redeem yourself?”
    Hawke frowned and tapped his fingers against theside of the cup, wishing his mother didn’t insist on treating him as if he were still a twelve-year-old sent down from school for bad behavior.
    Little wonder he thought longingly of Bella Collina, so agreeably distant from London.
    “I am meeting with my solicitors later today, Mother,” he said at last, striving to sound businesslike and in control. “Since this marriage is a contract instead of a love match, it seems better to turn the arrangements over to the fellows who execute such things on a regular basis.”
    “Oh, Hawkesworth,” said his mother, wincing as if she’d just smelled an unpleasant rot. “That is preposterous.”
    “I’ve given the situation much thought, Mother,” he said. Not that he’d tell her the real reason for turning to the lawyers: that he didn’t entirely trust himself to be with Lady Elizabeth again. He needed time away from her to cool his passions, or God only knew what kind of insanity he’d commit with her. “I know what I am doing.”
    “No, you do not,” Lady Allred said. “Love match or arrangement, every marriage is a kind of partnership, and not one made by lawyers, either. For people like us, it is also a way to cement important fortunes and families. You must demonstrate an agreeable face to your bride and a willingness for compromise, and you must show the lady at least a smidgeon of wooing.”
    “Oh, yes, a smidgeon,” Hawke said. “I can’t see Father showing you any more than that.”
    Lady Allred smiled serenely, touching a gloved finger to one of the plumes in her hat.
    “You would be surprised what your father showed in the early days of our marriage,” she said. “If he hadn’t, I doubt that you or your sisters would be here now.”
    Hawke gulped, not wishing any further information from his parents’ bedchamber.
    “The wooing part is also being addressed, Mother,” he said. “I’m not the complete dolt you think me.”
    Her gaze narrowed. “I have never once called you a dolt,” she said. “You are unbearably selfish, even for a man, but you are not a dolt.”
    Hawke grumbled, refusing to discuss his doltdom any further. “I have already arranged to send a small token to Lady Elizabeth today, by way of apology and regard.”
    His mother glanced at him suspiciously. “Not flowers, I hope. You are a duke, you know. More is expected from you than mere ephemeral blossoms.”
    Flowers were exactly what Hawke had intended, though he could scarcely admit it now. In desperation he glanced around at the paintings lined up on their easels, and seized the smallest one.
    “I am sending her this,” he said, holding the painting with a flourish for his mother to see, as if he’d planned it all along. “It’s a tempera panel, and more than three hundred years old.”
    The painting was a jewel in its own right, the ancient paint still bright and gleaming as if it were enameled, a prize he’d