An Unlikely Duchess Read Online Free Page A

mama in the kingdom who happened to have a marriageable daughter between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five gazing at him with tense hope and blatant admiration; all those daughters sighing collective hurricanes and whipping up collective tornadoes with fluttering eyelashes.
    Yes, he was sick of being a duke.
    He could hear now from the inflection of her voice that the female in the next room was displeased about something. Her poor companion, whoever he or she might be, was being given an earful of wrath. Perhaps after all there was something to be said for being alone.
    Except that he would not be alone for long. He was within one day of meeting his future wife. A young lady he had never set eyes on and about whom he knew nothing except her name and the fact that she was the granddaughter of one of his maternal grandfather’s friends.
    He really did not want to be going there. He really did not want to be getting married, especially to a complete stranger. He did not want to be setting up his nursery yet. He wanted to live a little, as Angie had put it to him. He would have liked just a little adventure in his life before he settled finally into the life he had been brought up to.
    What he ought to have done, he realized now when it was altogether too late, was tell Grandpapa that he would meet the girl somewhere—at some carefully organized house party, perhaps—before deciding whether to offer for her. But he had not done so, and so there was no point in teasing his mind with belated wisdom.
    That female’s voice had moved up a notch in pitch. And it was a poor male who was at the receiving end of the tirade. He had just laughed—unwisely, in Milford’s judgment. The female would not like that.
    The duke chuckled without amusement at his big toes. He supposed that his final and very overdue grasp at adventure and independence had been a rather pathetic one. He had decided to make the journey into Northamptonshire a slow one and a lone one. Rather than travel with his valet and his baggage and all the pomp that a ducal journey always involved, he had decided quite on the spur of the moment to send Henry on half a day ahead of himself and to make his own journey by curricle, unaccompanied. And he had dropped those nine cumbersome titles, including the ducal one, and kept only the one he had been born with.
    He was traveling as Mr. Paul Villiers.
    The Duke of Mitford jumped suddenly and sat bolt upright on the edge of his bed. A great crashing and smashing had happened in the adjoining room. The pitcher, at a guess, bad been hurled with great force against the wall that adjoined his room and smashed in the process. He wondered irrelevantly if it had been filled with water. It had apparently missed that poor unfortunate male’s head or the sound would have been dulled.
    He had made one interesting discovery, anyway. Mr. Paul Villiers was a far less impressive gentleman than the Duke of Mitford. He had not been treated with utter contempt on his journey. He was, after all, a gentleman and he had money. But he had been treated with the next best thing. There was this room, for example, in which he was fitted to spend the night. Whoever had had the idea of covering the walls with wallpaper of such a bilious green? He was quite sure that it must be the smallest and shabbiest room in the inn. Indeed, it could not be much smaller without the bed filling the whole of it.
    As the Duke of Mitford he would doubtless have left the inn quite unaware that there was such a chamber within its walls.
    Some adventure indeed! The duke smiled ruefully and wiggled his toes again on the floor.
    Was he really of so little worth without his titles? It was a sobering thought. His appearance was unimposing, of course. He was not a tall man—and that, he admitted, was a euphemistic way of saying that he was short. And he was slight in build, though years of careful training and exercise had developed that body to its fullest potential. He was