Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 03] Read Online Free Page A

hunt. Still, the truce was always wary and short-lived on either side.
    “Your Grace, I must inform you—”
    Graham’s world stopped abruptly, then began to spin again with a nauseating new tilt to its axis.
    Your Grace
.
    He swallowed, but his throat was too dry. Reeling, he staggered to his feet and stumbled across the room where his father’s—no, now his!—whiskey decanter glimmered like amber salvation.
    Graham tossed back one for the dry throat and another one to take away the taste of the first one. He poured yet another, just to look at. Then he turned back to Abbott.
    “I’m the Duke of Edencourt.”
    Abbott nodded. “Yes, Your Grace, you are.”
    Graham moved to reseat himself in his father’s chair, then recoiled and found himself one with less weighty history. “I’m the Duke of Edencourt,” he informed his glass of whiskey. Oh, hell, it was already empty.
    Abbott took it away. “Your Grace—”
    “Oy! I was drinking that!”
    Abbott threw it across the room, where it shattered in the fireplace. Graham blinked, realizing for the first time that Abbott wasn’t just weary. The man was tight-lipped with fury and disgust!
    “Your Grace, my family has served yours as solicitors and men of business for five generations. Your grandfather never managed to pay us on time or completely, and your father never paid us at all. The advice I am about to offer you is the first and last you’ll ever get from an Abbott, so listen closely.”
    Graham drew back, eyes focusing at last. “I’m listening.”
    Abbott straightened, his eyes snapping in his mild face. “Waste no time in assuming your responsibilities. Your estate is in ruins and your lands lie fallow. Your people are suffering and your debt is overwhelming. For God’s sake, man, if there is not a great influx of cash to Edencourt as soon as possible, there won’t be anything left to save! The only recourse left to you is to find a rich wife and find her quickly, before it is too late. There is less than a month left of the Season. I suggest you charm her quickly and well.”
    With that, Abbott turned on his heel and strode from the study and from Eden House. Graham watched him, dimly aware through his reverberating shock that withAbbott went any hope he had of getting help with the vast and ailing estate of Edencourt.
    Which he had never bothered to learn a single thing about.
    He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cool glass of the window. “I’m so thoroughly buggered.”
    HOW COULD EDEN House, already empty, now seem emptier? Graham strolled the halls restlessly in the dark. Room after room, grandly shabby, had an eerie echo of desertion never noticed before. Had the mere expectation of its owner’s return populated the rooms with life? Or had Graham’s own distaste for his family kept him from feeling alone? Better alone than with them?
    He was certainly alone now. The emptiness of the house, his house now, was merely a manifestation of the emptiness of his entire life. A man didn’t become a duke every day. Yet here he was, promoted beyond the bounds of his wildest dreams, had he ever bothered to dream at all, and there was no one to tell.
    Except Sophie, of course. The thought comforted him. Sophie would listen to the awful story of his father’s and brothers’ end and she would see the ludicrous waste of it. Sophie would say something tart and sensible and it would be just the thing he’d been thinking at that moment. As always, he would instantly feel less alone. However, she was the only one. An entire life spent in play and only one good playfellow to show for it.
    He paused in his mother’s room, a gracious chamber that had been spared the hard usage of a house full of men. The silk bed hangings were a deep rose beneath the dust, and the furniture was dainty and elegant, though Graham remembered that it had also belonged to his grandmother in her day.
    Upon the dressing table was a box, an inlaid case that held a