Free Kasey Michaels by Indiscreet

in a strange, definitely to be avoided way. “But I’d really rather you came with me now, just for a few moments,” he said. “Otherwise, I might forget the letter, and it could be lost.”
    “Really, Nephew,” Lady Gwendolyn scolded, “if the gel don’t want to go, she don’t want to go.”
    Sophie smiled demurely at Gwendolyn but the duke kept his arm held out, so that she longed to slap it away with her serviette.
    Isadora clapped her hands together like a schoolmistress calling her students to order. “Now do you see, Lady Gwendolyn? Miss Winstead is proving to us right now that she has no real grasp of proper social behavior.” She turned to Sophie and explained. “Lud, my dear, His Grace is your social superior as well as your sponsor while you are here in Town with us. He has very politely asked your accompaniment on a small errand. You, as his inferior as well as his guest, must be amenable to such requests, eager to please, and polite at all times. Isn’t that right, Selbourne?”
    The duke turned and bowed in his betrothed’s direction. “I couldn’t have conveyed that conclusion better myself, my dear lady. Thank you so much for leaping into the breach and saying it for me.”
    Sophie damped down the impulse to roll her eyes in disbelief at both Isadora Waverley’s blind stupidity and His Grace’s veiled sarcasm—which obviously had flown straight over his fiancée’s head. Instead, she merely got to her feet, took Bramwell’s arm, and left the room with all the cheer one might show walking the plank.
    “We’ll have to work on that,” Sophie heard Isadora informing Lady Gwendolyn consideringly as the duke’s long strides had her all but skipping along beside him in order to keep up. “From sunny to sullen in a heartbeat, my lady. Lud, that’s so like young girls today, poor thing! But she’ll learn. I have every confidence in my own abilities—oh, and in yours as well, of course.”
    Once they were out of the drawing room and headed down the stairs to his grace’s ground-floor study, Sophie looked up at the duke, saying, “That was very neat, Your Grace.”
    “Hardly. But effective enough, for all it was clumsy.”
    “I meant your veiled insult to Miss Waverley, not the cowhanded way you all but ordered me out of the room,” she pointed out, made slightly breathless by trying to match his pace on the stairs. “Tell me, please. How uncomfortable is it, being led around by the nose?”
    “If that question means that you’ve belatedly become concerned for my poor, gullible aunt, I suggest you ask her yourself. And Miss Waverley as well, now that you’ve got her believing you’re nothing more than a brainless ninny eager to sit at her feet and drink in all her great knowledge.”
    He stopped for a moment at the bottom of the stairs and glared down at her. He was really quite good at glaring, as if he’d had considerable practice. And there were those interesting lines around the outside corners of his eyes, crinkles as it were, as if he’d spent a lot of time squinting into the sun. Hadn’t Uncle Cesse said something about his only son trying to disgrace him by going off to the Royal Navy? Yes, that was it. Bramwell Seaton had spent years looking out over the ocean, his eyes on distant horizons. Strange how he couldn’t see clearly now.
    Sophie deliberately teased him again as they turned toward the back of the house, pouting as best she could as she skipped along beside him. “You’re really quite angry, aren’t you?” she asked, knowing she was only pointing out the obvious. “But it’s not to worry. I doubt Miss Waverley has the slightest idea that yours was only a hastily made-up fib meant to get me alone with you. And I find it all quite flattering, if unnecessary. After all, we’re living under the same roof. Getting me alone, day or night—anytime at all—could hardly be more convenient, yes?”
    He put his hand at the small of her back and all but pushed her