The Courtesan's Wager Read Online Free PDF Page A

upon the sofa farthest from the fire, which was only right as he was the youngest of the litter, “wouldn’t she? She gives every appearance of being eager to marry a duke and as she is cousin to Louisa, well, it would make for cozy holidays in the country.”
    “Cozy for whom?” Cranleigh said abruptly, running his hands though his dark blond hair.
    “Why, for Louisa, I should think,” Josiah mused lazily.
    “If you don’t think Blakes will manage Louisa’s coziness, you know nothing of either women or men, Jos,” Cranleigh said a bit sharply, “which is hardly surprising, is it?”
    Jos, as he was called among his familial intimates, took immediate offense, which was only proper and certainly the appropriate response.
    “I am just back from Paris, Cranleigh!” Jos said.
    “And hauled back like a squealing pig, as I understand it,” Cranleigh rejoined, stretching his muscular legs out toward the fire. As the second born, he had a quite comfortable position by the fire. It was not a particularly chilly day, but one did not throw aside precedence merely on a technicality of that sort. “You weren’t there long enough to lift a single skirt, I’d wager.”
    “I was there a full week!”
    To which Cranleigh raised both brows fractionally and quirked his mouth almost invisibly. It was almost certain that Cranleigh’s responses in general would be invisible to all but family. He was a most contained sort of man, much like the duke, actually.
    “At least someone was made to squeal,” George said, winking at Cranleigh.
    “Get buggered,” Jos said, scowling.
    “Experience of that, have you?” George said, turning the knife.
    Jos jumped to his feet and said, “You face down that Indian and see what you find yourself doing!”
    “A valid point,” Iveston said, putting an end to it. “How did they find you? I never did hear the details.”
    “I have no idea,” Jos said, walking over to the window and staring sullenly out of it. “Having a good drunk, a giggling wench on my lap, and then we’re surrounded by savages, wench gone, bottle gone, Paris,” he sighed, “gone. I should never have gone with Dalby, it was because of him that they came.”
    “And you wouldn’t have gone without him,” Cranleigh said. “Hardly any fun in drinking and wenching alone.”
    Which would have sounded absurd to anyone outside of the room, certainly to anyone in London. They had discussed it once and reached the only possible conclusion they could: the duchess and her Boston upbringing had soiled them all. They could find fun only in small and carefully measured doses. It was most inconvenient as the ton did not practice frivolity in that particular fashion.
    “Did you actually know about them, before you found yourself face-to-face with them?” George asked.
    It was a likely question as none of them had heard even the slightest rumor that the Earl Dalby had blood relatives who were American Indians of the Iroquois variety.
    “Not even a whisper,” Jos said, which sounded almost as if he took it as a personal betrayal from his longtime friend, Dalby, which was a position of some merit as everyone in the ton knew everyone else’s ancestry back to the Tudors, if not before.
    “The duchess knew,” Blakes said, entering the room with the same self-congratulatory expression he’d been wearing since his marriage to Louisa, which was most excessively annoying.
    “Done rutting for the day?” Cranleigh murmured.
    “I certainly hope not,” Blakes replied pleasantly, which set the room to chuckling.
    “But whatever do you mean?” Jos said. “Mother can’t have known. She never said a word, in all these years.”
    “Not about that, no,” Blakes said, “but she knew and has known. I know it for a fact.”
    “She told you that?” George said.
    It was somewhat remarkable, what it did to five full-grown men to think that their mother had kept something from them with apparent ease for almost thirty years. It was