Free Desperate Duchesses by Eloisa James Page B

story was that she had more facial hair than the captain.
    To Roberta, the more interesting point was the wild bog-trotting croggie.
    Teddy admitted that he couldn’t describe Carper’s husband, but launched into a tale of Carper’s sister, who bought an ointment entitled the Tomb of Venus, which gave her a terrible swel ing.
    “A dire name. She should have chosen something more propitious.”
    After she had explained the meaning of dire and propitious , and final y, tomb, Teddy said that the swel ing was al in front, and Carper said that it was an il -prepared medicine and that Dr. Jackson’s worm powder would have been better.
    Final y she saw the great winding stair leading down the central core of the house, so she told Teddy to run off to his nursery.
    He blinked up at her and then popped his thumb back in his mouth.
    “You’re too old for that,” she told him. “Why, you must be ten years old at the very least.”
    “Six,” he said around his thumb.
    “It’s a disgusting habit,” she said. “There are those who take worm powder and rub it in children’s thumbs and after that they never put them in their mouths again.”
    He narrowed his eyes.
    “Shoo,” she said. “Or I’l tel your father about worm powder.”
    He ran.

Chapter 6
    “A n intimate family supper,” Jemma said with obvious satisfaction. “How I missed this while in Paris!”
    She was sitting at the head of the table, looking as enticing as a French bird of paradise and not at al like a good huswife. Damon grinned at her. “Domesticity is a new affectation for you.”
    She wrinkled her nose at him. “Beaumont, do you find that age is reconciling you to domesticity? You used to dine at home very rarely.”
    Beaumont was playing the majestic duke with particular fervor this evening; Damon couldn’t blame him after the scene this afternoon.
    “I shal , of course, make every effort to domesticate myself now that you have returned from Paris,” the duke said. His teeth closed around a bite of partridge with an audible snap.
    Damon hadn’t spent much time around feuding marital couples, but he judged the best thing to do was change the subject. Jemma beat him to it.
    “I suggest we exert ourselves to make a plan for Roberta’s marriage,” she said, throwing her new ward a smile.
    Damon didn’t see much need for a plan. Lady Roberta was wearing one of the most unattractive gowns Damon had ever seen, but she herself was utterly delicious. Beautiful, even given that gown. What made her devastating, though, was not her looks, but the mixture of naïveté and wit in her eyes.
    “After al ,” Jemma said, warming up to her subject. “She has thrown me a chal enge. Beaumont—”
    But her voice cut off and Damon saw that Beaumont had put down his fork and had picked up a sheaf of paper handed to him by a footman.
    “My deepest apologies,” he said. “I must answer this dispatch immediately. If you wil forgive me, Your Grace, I wil read it now, since this is such an informal family meal.” There was only the slightest chil of irony in his tone.
    “A chal enge doesn’t quite cover it,” Damon said, throwing himself into the silence that bil owed down the table from Jemma’s seat.
    “Am I such an antidote?” Roberta asked.
    “You’l do,” he said, grinning at her. “The problem is Vil iers.”
    “Surely the Duke of Vil iers hasn’t married since January?”
    “Oh no,” Jemma said, dropping her wifely glare, presumably because her husband wasn’t paying the slightest attention.
    “Vil iers is not married.”
    “Then?” Roberta asked.
    “Unmarriageable,” Damon said. She was a lovely little scrap, for al she’d fal en in love with the wrong man. “He’s a devil with women: beds them, leaves them.”
    “But surely—”
    “The problem is not that he’s strewn a few children around the place,” Jemma said. “Which he has. It’s that he got at least one of those children on a gentlewoman and stil didn’t marry