Julia Quinn - The Lost Duke of Wyndham

“I swear to you,” he said, “before Mrs. Broadmouse-”

“Stop this!” the dowager yelled, grabbing hold of his other arm. “Get on your feet!”

Jack gazed up at Grace and smiled. “Was there ever a proposal so beleaguered?”

She smiled back, even as tears threatened to spill from her eyes.

“You are supposed to marry Amelia!” Lord Crowland growled.

And then there was Amelia…poking her head around her father’s shoulder. “I won’t have him,” she announced, rather matter-of-fact. She caught Jack’s eye and smiled.

The dowager gasped. “You would refuse my grandson?”

“This grandson,” Amelia clarified.

Jack tore his eyes off Grace for just long enough to grin approvingly at Amelia. She grinned back, motioning with her head toward Grace, telling him in no uncertain terms to get back to the matter at hand.

“Grace,” Jack said, rubbing her hands softly with his. “My knee is beginning to hurt.”

She started to laugh.

“Say yes, Grace,” Amelia said.

“Listen to Amelia,” Jack said.

“What the devil am I going to do with you?” Lord Crowland said. To Amelia, that was, not that she seemed to care.

“I love you, Grace,” Jack said.

She was grinning now. It seemed her whole body was grinning, as if she’d been enveloped in a happiness that would not let go. And then she said it. Right in front of everyone.

“I love you, too.”

He felt all the happiness in the world swirling into him, straight to his heart. “Grace Catriona Eversleigh,” he said again, “will you marry me?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

He stood. “I’m going to kiss her now,” he called out.

And he did. Right in front of the dowager, in front of Amelia and her father, even in front of Mrs. Broadmouse.

He kissed her. And then he kissed her some more. He was kissing her when the dowager departed in an angry huff, and he was kissing her when Lord Crowland dragged Amelia away, muttering something about delicate sensibilities.

He kissed her, and he kissed her, and he would have kept kissing her except that he realized that Mrs. Broadmouse was still standing in the doorway, staring at them with a rather benign expression.

Jack grinned at her. “A spot of privacy, if you don’t mind?”

She sighed and toddled away, but before she shut the door, they heard her say-

“I do like a good love story.”

My dearest Amelia-

Can it only have been three weeks since I last wrote? It feels as if I have gathered at least a year of news. The children continue to thrive. Arthur is so studious! Jack declares himself boggled, but his delight is evident. We visited the Happy Hare earlier this week to discuss plans for the village fair with Harry Gladdish, and Jack complained to no end about how difficult it has been to find a new tutor now that Arthur has exhausted the last.

Harry was not fooled. Jack was proud as puff.

We were delighted to-

“Mama!”

Grace looked up from her correspondence. Her third child (and only daughter) was standing in the doorway, looking much aggrieved.

“What is it, Mary?” she asked.

“John was-”

“Just strolling by,” John said, sliding along the polished floor until he came to a stop next to Mary.

“John!” Mary howled.

John looked at Grace with utter innocence. “I barely touched her.”

Grace fought the urge to close her eyes and groan. John was only ten, but already he possessed his father’s lethal charm.

“Mama,” Mary said. “I was walking to the conservatory when-”

“What Mary means to say,” John cut in, “is that I was walking to the orangery when she bumped into me and-”

“No!” Mary protested. “That is not what I meant to say.” She turned to her mother in obvious distress. “Mama!”

“John, let your sister finish,” Grace said, almost automatically. It was a sentence she uttered several times a day.

John smiled at her. Meltingly. Good gracious, Grace thought, it would not be long before she’d be beating the girls away with a stick.

“Mother,” he said, in exactly the same tone Jack used when he was trying to charm his way out of a tight spot, “I would not dream of interrupting her.”

“You just did!” Mary retorted.

John held up his hands, as if to say-Poor dear.

Grace turned to Mary with what she hoped was visible compassion. “You were saying, Mary?”

“He smashed an orange into my sheet music!”

Grace turned to her son. “John, is this-”

“No,” he said quickly.

Grace gave him a dubious stare. It did not escape her that she had not finished her question before he answered. She supposed she ought not read too much into it. John, is this true? was another of the sentences she seemed to spend a great deal of time repeating.

“Mother,” he said, his green eyes profoundly solemn, “upon my honor I swear to you that I did not smash an orange-”

“You lie,” Mary seethed.

“She crushed the orange.”

“After you put it under my foot!”

And then came a new voice: “Grace!”

Grace smiled with delight. Jack could now sort the children out.

“Grace,” he said, turning sideways so that he might slip by them and into the room. “I need you to-”

“Jack!” she cut in.

He looked at her, and then behind him. “What did I do?”

She motioned to the children. “Did you not notice them?”

He quirked a smile-the very same one his son had tried to use on her a few moments earlier. “Of course I noticed them,” he said. “Did you not notice me stepping around them?” He turned to the children. “Haven’t we taught you that it is rude to block the doorway?”

It was a good thing she hadn’t been to the orangery herself, Grace thought, because she would have peened him with one. As it was, she was beginning to think she ought to keep a store of small, round, easily throwable objects in her desk drawer.

“Jack,” she said, with what she thought was amazing patience, “would you be so kind as to settle their dispute?”

He shrugged. “They’ll work it out.”

“Jack,” she sighed.

“It’s not your fault you had no siblings,” he told her. “You have no experience in intrafamilial squabbles. Trust me, it all works out in the end. I predict we shall manage to get all four to adulthood with at least fifteen of their major limbs intact.”

Grace leveled a stare. “You, on the other hand, are in supreme danger of-”

“Children!” Jack cut in. “Listen to your mother.”

“She didn’t say anything,” John pointed out.

“Right,” Jack said. He frowned for a moment. “John, leave your sister alone. Mary, next time don’t step on the orange.”

“But-”

“I’m done here,” he announced.

And amazingly, they went on their way.

“That wasn’t too difficult,” he said. He stepped into the room. “I have some papers for you.”

Grace immediately set aside her correspondence and took the documents he held forth.

“They arrived this afternoon from my solicitor,” Jack explained.

She read the first paragraph. “About the Ennigsly building in Lincoln?”

“That’s what I was expecting,” he confirmed.

She nodded and then gave the document a thorough perusal. After a dozen years of marriage, they had fallen into an easy routine. Jack conducted all of his business affairs face-to-face, and when correspondence arrived, Grace was his reader.

It was almost amusing. It had taken Jack a year or so to find his footing, but he’d turned into a marvelous steward of the dukedom. His mind was razor sharp, and his judgment was such that Grace could not believe he’d not been trained in land management. The tenants adored him, the servants worshipped him (especially once the dowager was banished to the far side of the estate), and London society had positively fallen at his feet. It had helped, of course, that Thomas made it clear that he believed Jack was the rightful Duke of Wyndham, but still, Grace did not think herself biased to believe that Jack’s charm and wit had something to do with it as well.

The only thing it seemed he could not do was read.

When he first told her, she had not believed him. Oh, she believed that he believed it. But surely he’d had poor teachers. Surely there had been some gross negligence on someone’s part. A man of Jack’s intelligence and education did not reach adulthood illiterate.

And so she’d sat with him. Tried her best. And he put up with it. In retrospect, she couldn’t believe that he had not exploded with frustration. It was, perhaps, the oddest imaginable show of love-he’d let her try, again and again, to teach him to read. With a smile on his face, even.

But in the end she’d given up. She still did not understand what he meant when he told her the letters “danced,” but she believed him when he insisted that all he ever got from a printed page was a headache.

“Everything is in order,” she said now, handing the documents back to Jack. He had discussed the matter with her the week prior, after all of the decisions had been made. He always did that. So that she would know precisely what she was looking for.

“Are you writing to Amelia?” he asked.

She nodded. “I can’t decide if I should tell her about John’s escapade in the church belfry.”

“Oh, do. They shall get a good laugh.”

“But it makes him seem such a ruffian.”

“He is a ruffian.”

She felt herself deflate. “I know. But he’s sweet.”

Jack chuckled and kissed her, once, on the forehead. “He’s just like me.”

“I know.”

“You needn’t sound so despairing.” He smiled then, that unbelievably devilish thing of his. It still got her, every time, just the way he wanted it to.