Four Dukes and a Devil Read Free

their hostess, the silver-haired Lady Bollinger, skillfully slid up to Susan to say, with a smile on her face but desperation in her eyes, “I had to admit him. He and my husband are friends. I pray you to forgive me. I didn’t send him an invitation, but he is here all the same.”
    “Who’s he?” Susan asked, confused.
    “The Irish Duke,” Lady Bollinger said, the purple plumes in her hair shaking with her agitation.
    “You mean, there is an Irish duke?” Susan said.
    “Of course there is,” Lady Bollinger answered. “You knew that. You told us about him. The Duke of Killeigh. You’ve warned all of us against him.”
    “We’ve attempted to do everything we could to avoid him,” Miss Arabella said. “But he is on a hunt for a wife. Lady Elizabeth had to run from the room last night at Lord and Lady Barrington’s ball or else she would have been forced to take the floor with him.”
    “Run from the room? Away from a duke?” Susan was stunned. That was shocking behavior. Her charges should not behave that way, but then where had she been last night when all this was going on—?
    She’d been having a very sincere and frank talk with Lady Theresa and her Gerald.
    Lady Bollinger flipped open her fan. “You needn’t worry. The girls managed to skirt any of His Grace’s advances quite successfully.” She made a rather nasty laugh. “My husband will be furious the duke is here tonight. He has reconsidered their acquaintance after you explained the Order of Precedence and no longer wishes to speak to him.”
    Susan groped for words, horrified at the rudeness. “But he’s a duke.”
    “And he is also, as you very rightly pointed out, Irish. An Irish duke. Lord Bollinger opined to me yesterday evening that considering the Irish dukes have fomented rebellion since time began, the Crown would be better off without them. I answered that was a very astute opinion and urged him to see what he could do in Parliament.”
    “He would talk to Parliament?” Susan raised a hand to her forehead, trying to make sense of all this. “We must remember,” she said, forcing herself to smile, an expression that actually hurt at this moment, “that Killeigh is still a duke. Irish dukes are important.”
    Lady Bollinger dismissed her words with a wave of her hand. “But not important enough for my daughter. She will not be last for anything.”
    “I don’t want to be last either,” Miss Arabella injected.
    Susan could have buried her face in her hands in frustration. Who would have thought that her clever little speech to convince parents that they needed her services and to pay her handsomely for them would be taken so literally?
    Who would have thought there was an Irish duke in London?
    “Of course, there is nothing we can do about his presence now,” Lady Bollinger opined. “However, I wanted to warn you, Miss Rogers, to be on the alert. The Duke of Killeigh is a handsome man—”
    “ Very handsome,” Miss Arabella echoed.
    “You need to keep our precious little pigeons away from him,” Lady Bollinger finished, giving Miss Arabella a motherly tap on the arm with her fan. “We can’t have his handsome countenance luring them away.”
    “I shall do my best, my lady,” Susan replied, more than overwhelmed at the moment.
    What a devil of a mess.
    She needed to go somewhere to think. She needed to concoct a new story, one that didn’t brand the Irish Duke an Undesirable.
    Lady Bollinger had spied someone she knew who was more important than Susan and gone floating off, fan and purple plumes waving in the air. Miss Arabella was claimed by her next dance partner, a pockmarked baronet’s son who would never be as good a catch as a duke, Irish or not.
    Seeing that all her charges, including Lady Theresa, were on the dance floor with proper partners, Susan moved toward a corridor. She needed a moment of solitude to consider this new twist with the Irish Duke.
    However, she’d not taken more than a few steps