The Painted Lady Read Online Free PDF

aunts’ couch as possible, not when they had Ticket whining between them for a sip of sherry. The wretched little beast should have been called Lickit, Kasey always thought, for that’s all he did when he wasn’t begging for scraps or paying his devotions to the furniture legs or Kasey’s Hessian boots.
    “There, you see?” Aunt Maeve was cooing. “Ticky loves me better.” She was letting him lick her fingers after dabbling them in her glass. Ticket was wagging his sorry excuse for a tail.
    “Ha!” Aunt Mirabel dangled a sugared almond from the side table, and Ticket tore across the sofa—the recently reupholstered-at-great-expense sofa—to her side.
    As far as Kasey could ever tell, Ticket seemed to snarl at both aunts with equal surliness whenever they tried to nudge him away from the furniture when company was present. His Grace might own the house, but not in Ticket’s eyes, and Kasey had the scars to prove it. He’d have given the mutt a ticket to the great furniture showroom in the sky long ago, except that the aunts would have been heartbroken. And they would have turned to coddling their nephews instead.
    Kasey pulled the velvet curtains aside, staring at the darkness rather than the unsavory picture of his aunts cosseting the cur. After a few moments of listening to the munching and slurping, he tried once more to get his aunts’ attention away from the overfed fleabag. “I’ve been hearing ... rumors.”
    Both pairs of eyes were firmly on him now.
    “Oh dear, oh dear.” Aunt Maeve fretted. “We were so hoping you wouldn’t catch wind of that.”
    He opened the window. “Not Ticket, touched in the upper works. Is there anything like that?”
    Both of his aunts looked worried. Aunt Mirabel spoke up first. “If this is about your brother, the lad is a bit ungoverned, I’ll admit, but he is not unhinged.”
    “Goodness yes, the boy is merely sowing his wild oats.”
    Kasey’s brother Jason was twenty, going on seventeen forever, it seemed. He scowled, and Aunt Maeve hurried on. “Nothing a few years won’t cure. You never caused half the talk, Kennard dear, of course, but you were already duke by that age.”
    “And I am sure no one blames you for the incident. His father passing on when the boy was at such a tender age, perhaps, but that cannot be laid at your door either.”
    Whatever mare’s nest Junior had stirred up now, Kasey did not want to hear it. “This has nothing to do with the nodcock.”
    “You cannot mean Charles, can you?” Aunt Maeve asked in horrified tones. After all, Charles Warberry was her nephew, her second sister’s son, no relation to Mirabel at all. “I swear Charles is a most sober gentleman, with never a whisper of any untoward behavior.”
    “No, no. I trust Charles implicitly. A regular rock of respectability. I couldn’t manage the estate and the investments without him.” Kasey shut the window before his aunts could accuse him of letting poor Ticket catch his death. The bloated beast couldn’t catch a rat if it crawled up his pushed-in nose. “Something else.”
    “Well, there was that woman your great-uncle Murray Cartland married, the one who used to forget things, like where she lived and poor Uncle Murray’s name, but I don’t think you could say that is in the family bloodlines. And it was ages ago. I am quite sure there is no other lunacy on my side of the family.”
    Aunt Maeve adjusted her turban. “Well, your mother and I had one second cousin who was decidedly dicked in the nob, but that was after he fell out of the tree. He spoke gibberish, he did, until the day he died, many years later. The family kept it under wraps, naturally, and even managed to find some Magyar countess for him to marry. She never knew he wasn’t speaking English, and they got on famously.”
    “No, I was thinking of something closer.”
    Aunt Mirabel clutched Ticket to her boney breast. “Great Scot, nephew, you cannot be thinking we are touched in the upper