The Duchess Hunt. Elizabeth Beacon

hence my invitation to the place I probably love most in the world to a family I consider part of my own. You are every bit as lovely as any of the ladies invited by my aunt and ought to know it by now, without having to be reassured at every turn that I will never see you as second-best to any of them,’ he said drily.

      ‘I am not lovely,’ she objected as indignantly as if he’d accused her of being plain as rice pudding.

      ‘Like it or not, you are so, my dear,’ he said with such a knowing smile she felt the edge had been quite taken off the compliment.

      ‘Just because you declare it, therefore it must be so, your Grace?’

      ‘If that’s what it takes to convince you I’m right. Now kindly take that about-to-be-martyred look off your face and behave like the proper young lady society knows you to be, Princess. It might be best if you pretend we just enjoyed a sedate tour round the leafier parts of Mayfair rather than a dashing tour of the outer villages perhaps.’

      ‘Yes, much better—and you’re still wrong,’ she sniped as the dusty streets became familiar and she felt him slip back into cynical Duke of Dettingham persona and out of her reach once again.

      ‘I’m not, you know,’ he murmured as he passed over her reticule and fan when the Pendles’ head footman had finished helping her down from the relatively high carriage seat.

      ‘Not what?’ she replied distractedly, for trying to descend gracefully from even a normal carriage was always a challenge and today she had wanted to land in a heap at his horses’ feet even less than usual.

      ‘Wrong, of course.’ He reminded her of his assertion she was lovely with a look of such molten heat in his gaze that she almost believed him for a moment, until she reminded herself he was an accomplished flirt and very good at making susceptible females believe they were uniquely special to him.

      ‘Hah! Try telling that to your other female guests when next we meet. They would have you declared insane or throw me in the moat.’

      ‘I don’t have a moat,’ he argued as she stood back on the pavement and waited to bid him an acceptably polite farewell.

      ‘They would dig one especially for me.’

      ‘Should I consider that a challenge, I wonder?’ he said with a teasing smile that threatened to leave her in a collapsed heap of compliance in the street.

      ‘No!’ she said a little too shrilly and stepped back as if just looking at him might burn her.

      ‘Pity,’ he said with a taunting grin she recalled seeing all too often when she was a child and he and Rich were about to escape her yet again. ‘I always liked a challenge and so few other females grant me the delight of proving them wrong as often as you do, Princess.’

      ‘Then count me in as just another female,’ she advised with as much of a flounce as she could manage and turned to quit the scene if he refused to play the gentleman and leave her in peace.

      ‘You could never be one of the crowd to me, Princess,’ he assured her outrageously as he finally obliged her and drove off with a careless salute of his driving whip and a flurry of dust from his chariot wheels.

      ‘Infuriating, arrogant, idiot,’ she gritted between her teeth as she stood on the pavement, watching slavishly until he was completely out of sight.

      ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Jessica?’ the butler said blandly, clearly having heard every word, but preserving the fiction that good servants were made of wood and set going every morning by a clock winder.

      ‘Tea, I think, Wellow,’ she said brightly. ‘I stand in need of it after that.’

      ‘What lady would not,’ Wellow allowed himself to answer as he followed her into the hall.

      Two weeks later Jessica decided that not even tea would cure this disastrous situation. Her father and mother had cried off at the last minute and she was about to reach Ashburton New Place to face the ducal summons alone. The carriage slowed to take the entrance to Jack’s mansion and she fought a cowardly impulse to order her father’s coachman to return to Winberry Hall instead.

      Despite their oddly unforgettable encounters back in London, Jack would treat her with his usual absent-minded courtesy, then forget her, she reassured herself uneasily. All she had to do was limp about his glorious stately pile looking serene and untroubled for the next two weeks while he took his pick of the finest belles of the ton, then she could go home and get on with her life. Resigning herself to a fortnight of pretence, Jessica leant forwards for her first glimpse of Ashburton’s famous deer park as the coach finally swung through the imposing gates and there could be no turning back.

      ‘Her ladyship said I was to remind you to be polite to the duke,’ her mother’s ancient and formidable dresser informed her sternly as the coach slowed again.

      ‘I’m not such a fool as to show his Grace up in a bad light while he’s entertaining guests, Martha.’

      ‘Your mother wouldn’t want you hurt, Miss Jessica,’ Martha said earnestly.

      Then why had Lady Pendle been so insistent Jessica accept this invitation without her support? She must know the beauties invited for this fortnight would have their claws honed ready for the scramble to grab Jack’s strawberry leaves.

      ‘You can depend upon it, all is well, my love, despite all this panic from Rowena’s husband,’ her mama had told Jessica when a note was delivered by an exhausted groom as she and Jessica were finally packed and ready to leave. ‘Rowena is as healthy as a horse, despite Sir Linstock fussing over her as if she might break, but she never would attend to her sums and has very likely got the date of her last courses wrong. I said she looked large for just over seven months last time we visited, did I not? Linstock and your papa will be quite useless until we’re certain your sister is out of danger, so I must go and help the poor girl endure her confinement without having to worry about them as well as herself and the babe.’

      Lady Pendle paused and considered the general idiocy of gentlemen when confronted with childbirth, gave a heavy sigh and shook her head. ‘You must take Martha with you and Lady Henry will chaperon you at Ashburton, my love. Your godmother will be sorely in need of your help with so many giddy young misses in the house,’ her mother said.

      Lady Pendle clearly thought Lady Henry Seaborne faced an unenviable task keeping so many deadly rivals from scratching each other’s eyes out in their scramble to become Jack’s duchess. So how could Jess refuse to come here in Martha’s sternly respectable company when her godmother had always given her loving support to her goddaughter whenever she needed it?

      ‘His Grace and I are little more than nodding acquaintances nowadays, Martha, and I am only here to assist my godmother,’ Jessica said now. ‘Clearly I shall be far too busy to lounge about on sofas looking elegant, so you will not be required to dress me up like some aged ingénue. I suggest you regard this visit as something of a holiday and enjoy the comforts of Ashburton while you are here.’

      ‘That I shall not, Miss Jessica. Lady Henry and your mama would never allow you to be less elegantly dressed than the rest of the company, even if the rest of us was prepared to let you make a spectacle of yourself,’ Martha told her as if the very idea was preposterous.

      ‘I am three and twenty and quite on the shelf, not some hopeful little miss of seventeen or eighteen,’ Jessica countered lightly, but hoped there was enough steel in her voice to make it clear she considered that to be that.

      She recalled what it was like to be that young and artless and shuddered. At seventeen she had still dreamt young girls’ dreams, even if she had put an embargo on any fancies about Jack. She had been cured of them quickly enough after overhearing a handsome and impecunious lieutenant who had sworn to her only the night before that she was the light and purpose of his life confide in his brother, the village curate, how her small fortune from her great-aunt would buy him preference and a commission. She could still hear every one of his cruel words now …

      ‘Without her