Free Charlotte Louise Dolan by The Substitute Bridegroom Page B

dashed when my mother showed me a portrait of him. He was a rather portly gentleman, complete with lace ruffles and a wig—not at all my idea of an exciting hero.
    “My father was the grandson of a baron, and through blood or marriage we are related to almost half the county, so even those with a high degree of consequence are willing to overlook the taint in our family.”
    She could not resist the impulse to tease her husband, who surely had never missed an opportunity in the last three days to tease her. “We can lay claim to assorted earls and barons and baronets, although in some cases the relationship is rather remote, but we have never had such an illustrious personage as a duke connected to either side of the family.”
    Instead of laughing, he said in an emotionless voice, “Well, if the baby is a girl, you will be intimately connected with a duke.”
    His eyes held no warmth at all, and she shivered. “What are you talking about?”
    He stared at her intently, then finally said, “You were not informed of my cousin’s death?”
    Elizabeth felt as if she would faint and clung to the saddle until the dizziness passed. “When did this happen?”
    “In November. Lady Amelia is increasing. If the baby is a boy, he will be the next duke.”
    “And if it’s a girl, you will be a duke?”
    “Exactly.”
    His voice was harsh, and before she could utter words of condolence, he had spurred his horse into a gallop.
    She did not follow, but watched him ride away from her, knowing that with grief this fresh, sometimes a person simply had to be alone.
    A duke. And she would be a duchess. At first she hoped with all her heart that the child would be a boy, but then she realized what it would mean if the child were a girl—Darius would have to give up soldiering for good.
    Even knowing what it would cost her, she began to pray fervently for a girl-child to be born. She would do anything, even be a duchess, if it meant that Darius would be safe in England instead of facing French guns in Spain. Guilt for her selfishness overwhelmed her, but she could not change the desires of her heart.
     

Chapter 5
     
    “Yes, sir, Gen’ral, anything you say, Gen’ral.”
    The groom’s disrespect was beyond belief. It was only with difficulty that Darius kept his temper in check, but he could not keep from wishing that he had the other man in his regiment for just one week. There would be no insolence left in the groom at the end of that time.
    Biting back the words he wanted to utter, Darius turned abruptly and strode toward the house, which welcomed him with delicious smells of rosemary and plum pudding. It was too bad the people in the house were not equally welcoming.
    The groom’s attitude was a typical example of what the captain had encountered since his arrival. The gardener feigned total deafness around him, the butler treated him as if he were the worst kind of encroaching mushroom, and as for the cook ... the looks she gave him were such that Darius had developed a strong reluctance to eat from any dish that Elizabeth did not also partake of.
    He had interrogated captured French officers who showed less hostility toward him than did these servants. If he had the authority, he’d fire the lot of them. Unfortunately, this was his brother-in-law’s house, and only Nicholas had the right to hire or fire the servants. It would appear that they resented having Darius acting as the master of the household when in fact he was no such thing.
    In addition, the previous day he had accompanied his wife when she distributed baskets of food to the tenants on the home farm and to several of the poorer cottages in the area. Although they had none of them displayed the hostility he was becoming accustomed to at Oakhaven, neither had they gone out of their way to make him feel welcome.
    With a shrug of his shoulders, he now dismissed their behavior as the typical suspicious reaction of country folk to strangers and went in search of