Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 03] Read Online Free

him this year.
    Graham reluctantly made his way to his father’s magnificently masculine study. It was a dismal place at any time, for every wall housed a menagerie of glassy-eyed, stuffed and mounted death.
    During the day the room was depressing. At night Graham harkened back to his boyhood, when nothing but the threat of his father’s heavy hand could make him step foot into the darkened, fire-lit hall of gleaming, vengeful gazes reflecting the flames of the hatred he’d imagined in their eyes.
    Even now, a man grown, he hesitated outside thedoor, then took a deep breath and pushed it open, smiling at the young, rather exhausted-looking man waiting within. After all, the duke was not there. There was no need to brace himself.
    He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Chapter Two
    The tale went thusly—
    On the edge of the veldt, on the dark continent of Africa, man was a soft, fragile creature out of place in a harsh, wild environment. Intelligent men moved carefully and usually lived. Stupid men, on the other hand, tended to die. Badly.
    In a hunting camp in the African country of Kenya, a sun-darkened physician pushed open the canvas flap of the largest tent and stepped wearily into the circle of light created by a large central fire and several standing torches.
    Three burly Englishmen awaited him outside. “How is the duke?” “Will he live?” “Bloody hell, man, speak up!”
    The doctor sighed as he straightened. “I fear that the injuries His Grace suffered during the trampling by the bull elephant were too serious. He is no more.”
    After a moment of stunned silence—and it was a long moment, for the three eldest sons of the Duke of Edencourt were not the quickest of men—one of the younger ones looked to the eldest, awe in his face. “You’re the duke now.”
    The eldest, but alas, least intelligent of the brothers drew slowly to his greatest height. “I am the duke now. I’ll take on the estate and the title—but not until I’ve avenged my father and destroyed that killer elephant!” He raised his fist into the air. “That bull elephant must die!”
    The second eldest brother, only slightly less thick-headed and nearly as drunk, nodded emphatically. “A battle to the death!”
    The Kenyan guide, an experienced man of the savannah, moved to divert catastrophe. “Your Grace, my lords, this elephant is very dangerous. We should flee his territory and take your father’s body back—”
    “
Flee?
” The third brother, who had until now been fostering the glimmerings of a similar thought, raised his hackles at such cowardly phrasing. “By God, man, the sons of Edencourt flee nothing!” He joined his brothers, raising his rifle high. “To the death it is!”
    Alas, and so it was.
    BACK IN THE grim death-decorated study of the late Duke of Edencourt, his youngest son fancied that the eyes that surrounded him and the young, round-faced solicitor took on a feral gleam of satisfaction.
    “All of them?” Graham leaned back in his chair—his father’s chair, had he but noticed—and ran one hand weakly over his face. “But of course. They were indivisible to the end. Good God. Death by self-inflicted stupidity.”
    The man, Mr. Abbott, nodded. “Just so. The guidetried to save them but only he and two of his men escaped with their lives.”
    “There was nothing he could have done.” Graham waved his hand. “He couldn’t have stopped them. No one ever has.” He shook his head, still too shocked to feel anything like grief. At least, he hoped that was the case.
    He’d never felt close to his father or brothers, for they were another breed of men entirely from him. Alternately ganged up on or ignored when he was young, he’d learned over time that the best way to deal with his family was to avoid them as much as possible.
    When he’d gained something of reputation as a lady-killer in adulthood, he’d been offered a grudging sort of respect, for the chest beaters ever relished a hunt, any