Duke Ever After (Dukes' Club Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the old days of London Town.
    Rosamund plunked herself down in the silk-cushioned chair and stared at her maid’s face reflected near her own in the mirror.
    “Well,” she explained, “I was swimming and I quite literally bumped into him!”
    Maeve stared for a moment then guffawed. “Were you nude?”
    Rosamund gave a daring smile. “Aren’t I always when swimming?”
    Maeve hid a cheeky smile of her own and began stroking the brush down Rosamund’s long locks. Then she gave a knowing glance. “Was he ?”
    “Oh my!” A sigh of appreciate escaped her lips. Just the very thought caused her cheeks to burn. “Yes!”
    “From what I know, the Duke of Aston is a young gentleman. A handsome gentleman. A scandalous gentleman.”
    Rosamund clapped her hands together, trying to put the thought of a naked Duke of Aston from her thoughts. Such contemplations would make her flustered and incapable of continuing this important conversation. “I was hoping you would know something.”
    “Not much mind you,” Maeve warned. “He was abroad much of the time I was in London. But there was a great scandal about him and his father. The two hated each other and refused to be in the same room together. Apparently, because the young heir had gotten a girl pregnant on one of his early trips to Africa.”
    That gave her pause. “A pregnancy?”
    Maeve nodded as she continued to brush Rosamund’s hair. “Yes. No one talks of it openly, but there are whispers that he has a bastard child somewhere and that he goes to visit often.”
    Well, it shouldn’t shock her she supposed. When one was as worldly as a man like Aston then there were bound to be children out of wedlock. . . Her own notorious grandmother had two children born on the wrong side of the blanket so to speak. Everyone knew and yet they’d been accepted into the family as cousins.
    “What else?” she asked, feeling the more information she armed herself with, the better.
    “He engaged in piracy, so they say.”
    Rosamund twisted in her chair. “What?”
    Maeve held the brush to the side and remained quite calm. “Oh, yes. He sailed under the pirate flag in the Caribbean and he’s acted as a privateer boarding French merchant ships during the war.”
    “But. . . But he’s a duke,” Rosamund protested.
    “A bored duke apparently who will seek adventure wherever he may.”
    How could he then, a man so engaged in notorious exploits, be bothered by her station? Why had he run off so quickly and so determinedly?
    And why was she thinking of even seeing him again? A pirate? Och. She was mad herself to consider tracking him down and insisting he, at least, be her friend. A rake was one thing, but if he’d been a pirate? My, he must have been absolutely brutal. A cutlass-wielding fellow who made people walk the plank!
    “My lady?”
    “Hmmm?”
    “You’ve gone dreamy eyed.”
    “I was distracted.”
    If truth be known, she was dangerously close to fantasizing about a sea journey and a pirate boarding her own ship. Clearly, she’d been reading too many silly novels.
    “Has he ever married or has there been an engagement?” she asked, trying to pull herself up out of the immorality into which she was so clearly eager to sink.
    “No marriage and I’ve heard of no engagement.” Maeve leaned forward and said with a conspiratorial though unnecessary whisper, “One of the rumors is that he will never wed and the title will pass to a distant cousin. But this is just idle speculation. He’s a young man and has decades to marry and sire an heir.”
    “Never wed?” she scoffed. “How preposterous. As a duke, that’s his first expected thing. . . To get another duke.”
    “He seems to dislike the expectations put upon him. He meets none of them as far as I’m aware.”
    Rosamund looked to the window, gazing out to the towering snow-touched bens. “I wonder what happened to make him so.”
    “Don’t you think he might just be a bit of a bad one?”
    She