Free Desperate Duchesses by Eloisa James Page A

fit.
    “You wil look like a fairy princess at the bal ,” Brigitte said with great satisfaction. “Al the princes wil bow at your feet.”
    It seemed to Roberta that Vil iers was not the sort to bow at the feet of an innocent fairy princess, but how could she complain? He wouldn’t genuflect at the feet of the fleshy crocodile dressed in gold paint either; she was certain of that. She would have to study him closely in order to decide precisely how to pitch her courtship.
    By the time Roberta made it out of her bedchamber it was late in the afternoon. Her father’s house was large, but Beaumont House was far larger. Within the turn of a corridor, she was lost.
    Part of the problem was that she wasn’t concentrating on finding her way. Perhaps Jemma was right. An innocent dress was like a suit of armor, insuring that no one would remember that the Mad Marquess lived with his courtesan, which meant that she, Roberta, had lived in close proximity with that same woman. On the whole, Roberta felt that her friendships with her father’s companions had been interesting. But obviously, one might not wish to trumpet those acquaintances around a bal room.
    She had climbed another flight of stairs, and was wandering down a sun-lit corridor lined with closed doors, which she thought might be taking her back to the central part of the house, when she heard a patter of feet.
    He burst around the corner going as fast as only a smal boy can go.
    Roberta guessed immediately that this was Damon’s son, and decided there was no cal to halt him. So she moved aside so that he could use the rest of the corridor as a race course, if he wished. But he skidded to a stop next to her.
    Pop went his thumb into his mouth.
    Roberta shuddered inwardly. She had had very little contact with children in her life, but she’d seen thumb-sucking in church. The very fact that someone would want to suck on a saliva-covered digit was disgusting.
    He was staring up at her, so she smiled. He wasn’t a terrible-looking child, just tousled. It seemed that no one had brushed his hair. Of course, there was no nanny.
    “Feel free to continue running,” she advised him.
    He just stared. And sucked.
    So she continued to walk. He walked right along beside her.
    “What’s your name?” she asked, trying to be friendly.
    “Teddy,” he said. In order to answer he took his thumb out with a “pop.”
    Roberta shuddered again. Enough polite conversation.
    But a moment later he dropped the thumb of his own volition and said, “Whatcha doing?”
    “Walking,” she said.
    “It’s running, I am,” he said.
    “I am running,” she corrected him. Perhaps that was a bit harsh, but after life with her father she had very little sympathy for inverted syntax, poetic or otherwise.
    “Right,” he said. At least he didn’t start sucking again. But he suddenly waxed eloquent. “Don’t have a nanny.”
    “I don’t have a nanny,” she repeated.
    “Right. The nanny, her name was Peg—”
    “The nanny’s name was Peg.”
    “Yes, her name was Peg and her brother was sent to Bridewel Prison because he stole a sow and her piglets and then he stole a butter churn and put the piglets in it.”
    He paused, but Roberta had no comment about the butter churn or the piglets, and his sentence was reasonably grammatical.
    So they continued like that down the hal and around the curve, with Roberta occasional y interjecting a grammatical comment, and Teddy tel ing her at length about various criminal deeds. Some of his stories were rather involved and, had Roberta not had a great deal of experience in decoding cryptic literature, might have been misinterpreted.
    “Do I understand you to say,” she said some time later, “that the housemaid with the beard, whose name is Carper, is married to a wild bog-trotting croggie, whatever that is, but she has a child by a Captain Longshanks?”
    Teddy corrected her. Apparently Carper had a mustache as wel , and the signal point of his