Wedding of the Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

assumed a dignified air in response. “I shall have Groves send for the carriage,” she answered, and donned her hat.
    “But you just came back from the village,” Eugenia cried. “Where are you going now?”
    “I may have inadvertently injured an old friend of our family,” she answered as she secured her straw boater in place with her hat pin and pulled a few tendrils of her hair from beneath the brim to frame her face. “I must go at once to express my deep distress and concern.”
    She ignored Geoff’s skeptical snort as she started for the door.
    W ill made a rueful grimace as his valet rubbed a camphor-scented liniment over his swollen knee. “In situations like this, Aman, I believe I would prefer a stiff whisky and soda to one of your concoctions.”
    The Egyptian servant, who’d treated him for everything from scorpion stings to blackwater fever during the past half-dozen years, corked the bottle of liniment and returned it to the big leather suitcase from which he had extracted it a few minutes earlier. “Indeed, sir?” he murmured in an unflappable fashion worthy of any British valet. “It is a good thing, then, that I asked your housekeeper, Mrs. Gudgeon, to fetch a bottle of whisky and a siphon.”
    Will smiled. “I’m deuced glad I saved your life that night in Cairo.”
    “I am of a similar opinion, Your Grace.” Aman fetched an ottoman from one corner of the study and lifted Will’s outstretched leg onto its padded surface. He then eased the hem of Will’s trouser back down over his swollen knee to his ankle, and gave the hem a tug to smooth out any wrinkles in the fabric, and straightened with a satisfied nod. “It would be best, sir, if you did not put any weight on it for a day or two.”
    Will moved his leg a bit on the footstool, already restless. “I feel like an old man with the gout,” he muttered.
    Aman retrieved Will’s dispatch case from the open suitcase on the floor and held it up in an inquiring fashion. “Perhaps you would wish to write letters while you are indisposed, sir?”
    “I’m not indisposed, and you know how I hate writing letters.”
    Aman had all the placid, fatalistic calm offered by his heritage. He shrugged. “If you prefer to read, sir, I would be happy to bring a book from your library.”
    Will eyed the Moroccan leather case in his valet’s hands and sighed. He did have writing to do, he supposed.
    Not for the purpose he’d come home, of course. When a man wanted to ask a member of his former fiancée’s family for a loan, a letter just wouldn’t do. But he did have other things to write. A summary of the artifacts they’d discovered during the past season, a speech to the Archaeological Society presenting the latest findings, that article he’d promised the Times , a letter to Sir Edmund in Scotland—he reached for the dispatch case and gave in to the inevitable.
    “I’ll need a quill and ink, and something to write on,” he told Aman, and gestured to an elaborate Chinese cabinet in one corner of the study. “If memory serves, my father kept a lap desk in there.”
    Aman retrieved it and the necessary stationery supplies, placing them on the table beside Will’s chair. “If there is nothing else you require, sir, I will begin unpacking your things. Shall you dress for dinner?” He didn’t blink at Will’s sound of derision. “Is that not the custom in Britain, Your Grace?”
    “It is, and a damned silly one, too, especially since I’m dining alone.” He imagined himself in dinner jacket and tie at one end of Sunderland House’s formal dining table, surrounded by gilt-framed paintings and heavy damask draperies, flanked by two long rows of empty chairs, eating from Limoges plates and drinking wine from a crystal goblet, just as he had been forced to do whenever his parents had been in residence. Will could vividly remember the old man sitting at one end of the table in all his ducal glory, and his mother at the other end, staring