Free The Duke's Downfall by Lynn Michaels

when I am passed from one to the other in such a whirl that I scarce remember my name, let alone theirs?”
    “That is the whole idea, you silly gel.” Her ladyship tugged exasperatedly at the silk paisley shawl laid over her shoulders as she sprang to her feet from a velvet settee. “If given sufficient opportunity to think about it and become acquainted, no young person of any sense—either male or female— would ever marry anyone and the population would suffer a serious decline!”
    “A splendid notion!” Betsy tossed the cards in the air, folded her arms, and glared at her grandmother. “It will save the world from future tyrants such as the Duke of Braxton!”
    Like leaves tossed on a feckless wind, the notes penned on the finest velum skittered toward the floor, stirring Boru from his rug with a yap of excitement. He snapped one out of the air, thoroughly mangling it in his great jaws before bringing it to Betsy and plopping it, wet with drool and crumpled beyond redemption, at her feet.
    The dowager fell back on the settee with a groan and a hand over her eyes, but at last, Betsy laughed. Dropping to one knee, she put her arms around Boru and hugged his warm, shaggy neck. He whined and banged his tail happily against one leg of a small table.
    The hand-painted china shepherdess and her flock placed there trembled and tottered precariously toward the edge. The delicate figurines were a particular favorite of her ladyship, and one of the few items the staff had missed on their sweep of the house before her arrival with Betsy and the “beast,” as Boru was called by the servants.
    If Iddings had not, at that moment, appeared in the doorway with Charles’s coat wrapped in tissue and folded in a box, Little Bo-Peep and her sheep would have fallen victim to the Irish wolf. The quick-witted butler scarce had time to toss the package into a chair, lift the hem of his green baize apron, and slide onto his knees to catch them as they toppled off the edge.
    At the thump on the carpet beside her, Betsy drew away from Boru, saw Iddings with a relieved expression on his face and her grandmother’s cherished china flock in his apron. Quickly she snatched them up and dashed them to safety on the mantle. Boru followed her, while Iddings gingerly pinched the ruined note off the floor and disposed of it in the fire.
    When Lady Clymore uncovered her eyes, she saw Betsy warming her hands at the hearth, Boru stretched on the rug, and her majordomo holding a box and waiting in the doorway to be acknowledged. “Yes, Iddings?”
    “The Duke of Braxton’s coat, my lady, sponged and pressed as you requested.”
    “Excellent.” The dowager rose from the settee with her spectacles in hand and moved to her writing table. “I shall just pen a note, then you may send it by footman to the residence of the dowager duchess in Bond Street.”
    While her grandmother seated herself and inked a quill, Betsy lifted her gaze from the fire screen to Iddings. Gratitude shimmered in her eyes as she mouthed the words, “Thank you.” Touched by her kindness and the unexpected acknowledgement, Iddings gave her a bow and a smile, then hastily resumed an impassive countenance as Lady Clymore bent one elbow on the back of her chair.
    “A brief line of thanks from you would be neither untoward nor misconstrued, I think,” she said to her granddaughter.
    The stern look she offered along with the curved goose feather gave Betsy no choice. Reluctantly she moved to the writing table and took the quill and the chair from her grandmother.
    “Keep in mind that you are writing to a duke of the realm.”
    A very learned duke if what Teddy had told her of his oldest brother could be trusted. Smiling, Betsy dipped the quill in a silver well, wrote two flourishing lines in Latin and her name beneath her grandmother’s cramped signature.
    “What does this say?” Lady Clymore snatched the paper from the table and peered at it through her