This Duke is Mine Read Free Page A

sake,” Georgiana said, her eyes widening. “You really are going to become a duchess. The FF is about to become the BB!”
    “Foolish fiancés are often killed on the battlefield,” Olivia pointed out. “I think the term is ‘cannon fodder.’ ”
    Her sister gave a sudden laugh. “You could at least try to sound sad at the prospect.”
    “I would be sad,” Olivia protested. “I think.”
    “You’d have reason. Not only would you lose the prospect of being ‘Your Grace’d’ for the rest of your life, but our parents would hold hands as they jumped off Battersea Bridge to their watery deaths.”
    “I can’t even imagine what Mama and Papa would do if the goose that promised golden eggs was turned into pâté de foie gras by the French,” Olivia said, a bit sadly.
    “What happens if the FF dies before marrying you?” Georgiana asked. “Legal or not, a betrothal is not a wedding.”
    “I gather these papers make the whole situation a good deal more solid. I’m certain most of the ton believes that he’ll cry off before we get to the altar, given my general lack of beauty, not to mention the fact that I don’t eat enough lettuce.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. You are beautiful,” Georgiana said. “You have the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen. I can’t think why I got plain brown eyes and you have those green ones.” She peered at her. “Pale green. The color of celery, really.”
    “If my hips were like celery, then we’d have something to celebrate.”
    “You’re luscious,” her sister insisted. “Like a sweet, juicy peach.”
    “I don’t mind being a peach,” Olivia said. “Too bad celery is in fashion.”

Two

    In Which We Are Introduced to a Duke

    Littlebourne Manor
    Kent
    Seat of the Duke of Sconce

    A t the precise moment that Olivia and Georgiana were engaged in an agricultural wrangle over the relative merits of peaches and celery, the hero in this particular fairy story was certainly not behaving like the princes in most such tales. He wasn’t on bended knee, nor on a white horse, and he was nowhere near a beanstalk. Instead, he was sitting in his library, working on a knotty mathematical problem: specifically, Lagrange’s four-square theorem. To clarify my point, if this particular duke ever encountered a beanstalk of unusual size, it would doubtless have spurred a leap in early botanical knowledge regarding unusual plant growth—but certainly not a leap up said stalk.
    It should be obvious from the above that the Duke of Sconce was the sort of man repulsed by the very idea of fairy tales. He neither read nor thought about them (let alone believed in them); the notion of playing a role in one would have been preposterous, and he would have rejected outright the notion that he resembled in any fashion the golden-haired, velvet-clad princes generally found in such tales.
    Tarquin Brook-Chatfield, Duke of Sconce—known as Quin to his intimates, who numbered exactly two—was more like the villain in those stories than the hero, and he knew it.
    He couldn’t have said at what age he’d discovered how profoundly he did not resemble a fairy tale prince. He might have been five, or seven, or even ten—but at some point he’d realized that coal-black hair with a shock of white over the forehead was neither customary nor celebrated. Perhaps it was the first time that his cousin Peregrine had called him a decrepit old man (a remark that had led to a regrettable scuffle).
    Yet it wasn’t only his hair that set him apart from other lads. Even at ten years of age, he’d had stern eyes, fiercely cut cheekbones, and a nose that screamed aristocrat . By thirty-two, there were no more laughter lines around his eyes than had been visible twenty years earlier, and for good reason.
    He almost never laughed.
    But Quin did have one major point of resemblance with the hero of The Princess and the Pea , whether he would have acknowledged it or no: his mother was in charge of choosing his