The Temptation of the Night Jasmine Read Online Free PDF Page B

Robert—’
    ‘Of course, I remember him! I may have lost my looks, but I still have my wits. So, you’ve come home at last, have you? Took you long enough.’
    ‘Had I known I would receive such a gracious welcome, I would have come sooner.’
    ‘Hogwash,’ the duchess snorted. She gestured imperiously with her cane. ‘Don’t stand there gawking! Help me out of this thing!’
    The footmen stood, impassive, holding their gilded poles, as Lieutenant Fluellen rushed into attendance.
    ‘Wouldn’t a wheeled chair have sufficed?’ enquired the prodigal duke blandly.
    The dowager paused with her hand on Lieutenant Fluellen’s arm, one leg extended over the side. ‘And break my neck on the stairs? You only wish, my boy! I used to have these lot’ – she waved a dismissive hand at the footmen – ‘carrying me around, but I didn’t want them to get too familiar. Gave them ideas above their station.’
    Robert’s mind boggled at the notion of the blank-faced footmen being stirred to uncontrollable passion by the dowager’s wrinkled face and grasshopper arms.
    Tommy simply looked stunned, although that could, in part, have been because the dowager had landed on his foot in passing.
    ‘Ah, these old legs aren’t what they once were,’ mused the dowager, wiggling a red-heeled shoe. ‘In my day I could out-dance half the men in London. Outrun them, too.’ She emitted a short bark of laughter. ‘Except when I wanted to be caught, that is. Those were the days.’ She shook her cane in the face of a practically paralytic Tommy. ‘Who’s this young sprig and what is he doing in my hall?’
    Robert very nobly refrained from pointing out that it was, in fact, his hall. ‘May I present Tommy Fluellen, late of His Majesty’s service?’
    ‘Welsh?’ demanded the duchess.
    ‘With the leek to prove it,’ Tommy replied cheerfully.
    The dowager regarded him thoughtfully. ‘There was a Welsh princess married into the family in the twelfth century. Angharad, they called her. I doubt you are related.’
    The dowager duchess turned her gimlet gaze on the duke, for an inspection that went from his bare head straight down to the mud on the toes of his boots.
    ‘You do have the Lansdowne look about you,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘At least you would, if you weren’t burnt brown as a savage. What were you thinking, boy?’
    ‘Not of my complexion.’
    ‘Hmph. That’s clear enough. Still, you look more of a Lansdowne than Charlotte.’ The dowager jerked her head in Charlotte’s direction by way of acknowledgment. ‘ She favours her mother’s people.’
    Charlotte was well aware of that. She had heard it often enough over the years she had lived under her grandmother’s care. The dowager duchess had never forgiven Charlotte’s father, the future Duke of Dovedale, for running off with a humble vicar’s daughter.
    It hadn’t mattered one whit to the duchess that the vicar had been the grandson of an earl or that Charlotte’s mother had been undeniably a gentleman’s daughter. The duchess had had her heart set on a grand match for her only son, the sort of match that could be counted in guineas and acres and influence in Parliament.
    They had been happy, though, even in exile. Or perhaps they were happy because they were in exile. When she tried very hard, Charlotte could remember a golden age before she had come to Girdings, when she and her father and mother had lived together in a little house in Surrey, a quaint little two-storied house with dormer windows and ivy growing over the walls and a stone sundial in the garden that professed only to count the happy hours.
    The duchess had never forgiven them for being happy, either.
    Ignoring the duchess, Robert bent his head towards Charlotte. ‘I regret I never had the honour of meeting your mother.’
    ‘ She was not a Lansdowne,’ the duchess sniffed.
    Robert cocked an eyebrow at the duchess. ‘If everyone were a Lansdowne, where would be the distinction in