What I Did For a Duke Read Online Free PDF Page A

dark.”
    He refrained from describing the splinter he’d acquired in an unmentionable place during his exit, as that splinter would become as ubiquitous in Eversea lore as the bloody song about Colin that was still, to this day, sung in pubs and musicales all over England. They would never, never let him forget it.
    “In one boot.” Colin marveled over this.
    “In one boot.”
    Here in the safe warmth and noise of the Pig & Thistle the tables were crowded, the fire was leaping, a group, including Jonathan Redmond, was clustered about the dartboard and damned Redmond was winning again, which reminded him that he could have sworn he’d seen Violet Redmond, of all people, arguing with what appeared to be a sailor down by the docks just the other night, after a ball for the Earl of Ardmay. Obviously he’d been drinking too much; rumor had it she was attending a house party in the country, nowhere near London. He hadn’t mentioned a word of it to anyone. Culpepper and Cooke were hunched over the chessboard and Cooke’s eyebrows as usual looked as frisky and alert as pets. Ian couldn’t help but look around and around, drinking in blessed familiarity, laying his hand flat against the scarred wood table. The previous week’s events seemed like a hellish dream, the sort one had after a heavy dinner and too much bad liquor. It was even possible to laugh about it now.
    “Christ. And you’re still alive?”
    Colin was both clearly impressed and tamping what appeared to be something like envy. It was an exploit worthy of him at his best. Or at his worst. However one viewed it.
    “Why did you do it?”
    “If you mean scale a tree to get to Lady Abigail, I’m shocked you need to ask. Shocked. You’ve seen her!” He waited for Colin to nod in masculine comprehension. “It was the challenge of the thing, you see. And I’d gotten away with it for three nights. And the fourth . . .” He slumped into despair and sighed, and his sigh evolved into a theatrical groan and he dropped his face into his palms. “The fourth would have been a magical thing,” he croaked through his fingers. “You should have felt her skin . . . her bare shoulders . . . oh, God, Colin. So soft.”
    Colin shifted restlessly. He was a married man now. Not a dead man.
    “But the fiancée of the bloody Duke of Falconbridge! Ian, for the love of . . .”
    Ian lifted his head up slowly, suspiciously. His eyes widened when it occurred to him that Colin—of all people!—was actually about to give him a scolding .
    And off he went:
    “ I might be invincible, Ian, but that doesn’t mean you are. You ought to marry and stop all this nonsense.”
    If Ian’s feet hadn’t still been sore he might have succumbed to the urge to kick Colin’s shin under the table. Colin had decided that marriage was his cure for everything, since he was so delighted with the condition. He drove everyone mad with this theory.
    “You can speak of invincibility now , Colin,” is what he said aloud. “You should have liked to have been me, or any of us, that morning, as we waited in London for the news of your . . . of your . . .”
    Death by hanging was how that sentence should have been completed, but they still didn’t speak of it easily. None of them liked to remember a moment in which they’d confronted the notion that Everseas might be something other than invincible after all, since they’d seemed to have gotten away with everything since 1066 or thereabouts.
    Of course they were , as it turned out. Invincible, that was. But this had only been reestablished after a few years had been shaved from everyone’s lives.
    Colin had never shared with his family the whole story of how he’d been rescued from the gallows. He’d rather glossed it over. In truth the woman who was now his wife had been paid to do it for reasons far from noble, but now they were married and happily raising cows and sheep, and he saw no need to invoke hoots and mirth from his