Free My American Duchess by Eloisa James

so much to ensure her well-being—that she experienced true panic.
    She started to say something— You don’t really mean that! —but stopped herself. He did mean it. He’d met Bess only a handful of times, but he’d clearly made up his mind.
    “My aunt is very dear to me,” she said forcefully.
    Her tone of voice obviously sank in.
    “She’s very colorful,” Cedric offered. “It’s just that colorful can be so exhausting in large doses. All that poetic fervor . . . not very good ton.”
    “My aunt is the very best ‘ton,’” she said, rattling the word off as if she hadn’t had to ask their butler what it meant. “Her decency and kindness are infinitely more meaningful than any pedigree.”
    “I do realize that your aunt is representative of the best people to be found in America,” Cedric said hastily.
    Her fiancé could be a real dunderhead sometimes, Merry thought. But wasn’t every man like that on occasion?
    She was glumly certain that she knew the answer to that. Her uncle Thaddeus had an alarming propensity toward belligerence for the sake of it; he and Bertie had been hens of the same color. Indeed, either of them would have challenged any man who labeled him a hen.
    Her aunt was always pulling Uncle Thaddeus away just before he could throw down the gauntlet. It was part of marriage, putting up with men and soothing over their foolish quarrels.
    Merry saw the duke again about an hour later in the foyer, after she had finally persuaded Cedric to leave. His Grace bowed so stiffly that her aunt bridled visibly, and announced in the carriage that Merry’s future brother-in-law didn’t appear to be a nice man.
    “I apologize for being overly forthright about a family member,” Bess told Cedric, “but there’s no reason for His Grace to be ill-mannered. I cannot like it. Is he always like that?”
    Cedric was lying back in the corner of the carriage, his legs stretched out between them. “Have you heard of Jaquet-Droz’s automaton?” he inquired, by way of response.
    Merry’s uncle had been drowsing in his corner, buthe opened his eyes at this. Like her father, Thaddeus was an inventor, and there was no well-known machine that he hadn’t investigated. “Made entirely of bits of wire and the like, and yet it can write with ink and a quill pen.”
    “My brother’s just like that,” Cedric said. “A man of wire and brass. Except I think I’d compare him to John Dee’s wooden beetle. The beetle could actually fly, you know.” He chuckled to himself.
    If Merry hadn’t already realized it, she’d know it now. Cedric liked his brother about as much as the devil likes holy water: to wit, not at all.
    “I don’t know about auto-men,” Bess said, “but the duke was not very nice, considering that he was meeting his future relatives.”
    Merry bit back an instinct to defend His Grace. The duke wasn’t mechanical or unfeeling, as Cedric had implied. Indeed, Merry had the idea that he was all raw flame underneath his chilly exterior.
    What would have happened to her if there had been such a breach in the family that her uncle and aunt had refused to open their home to an orphan after her father died? The tension between Cedric and his brother was unacceptable, if only for the sake of the children she hoped to have.
    “You won’t see much of him,” Cedric reassured her aunt. “He departs tomorrow—apparently he’s planning to spend upwards of three weeks mucking about in a slate mine he’s bought in Wales.”
    That was just as well. Out on the balcony, she had responded to the duke in an entirely inappropriate way, and it was even worse when they talked of his parents’ death. This was the best of all solutions.
    In the next three weeks, she would grow closer and fallmore in love with her fiancé. By the time the duke reappeared in London, she would be able to greet him without a trace of self-consciousness.
    That balcony foolishness would be forgotten, and they could forge a