Free Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 02] by The Duke Next Door Page A

battle, but perhaps not just yet.

    In the end, she found herself wandering the gallery, peering beneath the skirted tables and whispering allegedly cat-attracting noises. The hallway ran the front of the house, with inset windows looking out over the very best of London’s houses perched along the street below.
    Pausing in one of the window embrasures, Deirdre gazed out at the city she’d expected to own outright by now. Here she was, the Marchioness of Brookhaven, gripping the bars of her cage and staring out like the most forsaken Bedlamite.
    Activity on the street below caught her attention. Three men approached the door to Brook House. They moved with the lithe bodies and easy steps of youth. After a moment, she recognized a certain gaudily striped waistcoat.
    Ah, her worshipful faction had arrived. The waistcoat would be Cotter, the gray jacket would be Saunders and the dark blue … that would be Baskin.
    The fact that she’d been wed only the day before seemed not to give any of the three pause—and why would it? It had been obvious to the world that hers had been a marriage of convenience. Why would life not go on as usual, with gentlemen callers abounding?
    They were only a bunch of bored boys, anyway, with no real prospects of inheriting anything worthwhile and no real mission in life to occupy them. Flirting was their favorite pastime and, really, their only skill. Why should a little wedding ceremony slow them down a bit?
    Cotter and Saunders enjoyed her company well enough, but she would guess that it was Baskin who couldn’t stay away.
    Baskin was the failed son of a renowned poet. Deirdre
spared a moment of sympathy for what it must have been like to grow up in the shadow of great expectations—among the artistic elite of Hampstead yet—but that pity evaporated like dew in the morning as she recalled the long hours of tedious verse he had subjected her to in the past.
    Heaven help her, she almost wished Fortescue would let them in. Even Baskin’s dreadfully overwrought penning of passionate devotion would be a relief from the tension and boredom she feared would constitute the rest of her life.
    Or perhaps not. Baskin would insist on reading them aloud to her, until her eyes glazed over and her arse went numb. It was with mixed regret and relief that she watched them amble away, dejection in every step.
    She turned from the view. Right. It wasn’t as if she’d truly wanted to see any of them. After all, those days of attentive flirtation and sparkling conversation were over.
    The opposite wall of the gallery hosted great lifesized paintings of every member of the Marbrook family—apparently reaching back into the days when men thought they had the panache to carry off the wearing of slashed doublets and tights.
    Marbrook men did tend toward the satisfyingly muscular thigh, didn’t they?
    Were his lordship’s thighs so well-strapped? He was tall and long of leg, and his trousers were well-fitted—though not so tightly as that fop Cotter’s—so she knew that his buttocks were hard and his stomach flat, and it looked as though he might well have all the requisite family history for truly handsome thighs as well … .

    She came to the most modern paintings to see two young men at the last. Lord Raphael and Lord Calder Marbrook, the engraved plates said.
    Calder had not had his portrait painted since then, but he had apparently commissioned one of Melinda. She sat regally posed in an elegant chair, wearing a lace gown that was so stylishly advanced that Deirdre would not be ashamed to wear it tomorrow. Of course, but the young, beautiful Marchioness of Brookhaven had sparked the fashions, not followed them, hadn’t she?
    Deirdre knew she herself was beautiful in a bold, golden fashion, but Melinda had been something altogether rare and lovely. So slender as to approach frailty—except that on her it merely seemed exquisite and otherworldly—Melinda’s dark hair and mist-pale complexion gave her