The Duke's Undoing (Three Rogues and Their Ladies) Read Online Free Page B

paused again, shaking his head while raising his walking stick and examining it absently. “She came into room in time to see it. Turned and left in a twinkling. Followed her. Vanished. No sign of her.”
    “And it was after this house party that she gave the viscount a month to think things over? I call that wise in a woman. Most unusual. Too wise to fall for my normal line of chatter, don’t you think?” He grinned at George. “I would have to make some kind of extraordinary effort to escape detection as a mere seducer. I must confess that any attempt to make out Miss Edwards’s character seems premature.”
    “One’s got to feel for her,” George continued, as though the duke hadn’t spoken. “Been friends with the Archer gel all her life.” The marquis gave a little sigh and dusted a bit of snuff from his protruding midsection.
    Ruisdell could see his friend was genuinely affected, which surprised and intrigued him further. A bluff and hearty creature, his friend rarely gave any female more than the coarsest consideration.
    A movement caught his eye somewhat further down the path. There he saw a woman dressed in a black and white striped muslin, her figure thinner than he liked, walking with a short person, presumably her maid. Her posture and easy movement declared her to be a graceful young woman, but she had a black veil draped over her bonnet as though she were a widow. The cursed war!
    Arriving at the fountain, she seated herself carefully on the edge of a bench. Her posture was absolutely correct. Her head was in profile to him.
    The duke could see nothing of her face and was at a loss as to why he was even interested in her, except that she exuded a hint of loveliness overlaid by tragedy. She manifested this so artfully that he wondered if she were playing a role. In his opinion, women did that quite often, though they did not seem to realize it. He blamed it on the novels they read.
    She appeared to be staring with fixed concentration at a particularly lovely ancient and twisted old cypress, its branches stretching parallel to the ground for a great distance. Seized with an urge he had not known since his fighting days on the Peninsula, he dropped to a bench beside the path, saying to the marquis, “Get along with you, George. Need to rest the old limb. I’ll meet you at White’s for luncheon in an hour or so.”
    “Right-oh.” His friend walked jauntily on, passing the fountain without a glance at Ruisdell’s mystery woman.
    Once Somerset was out of sight, the duke took a small sketch pad out of his inside breast pocket and a piece of charcoal wrapped in a handkerchief. He had loved sketching as a child and had had a superb drawing master at Eton. In the evenings on the Peninsula, he had set himself apart from his men and transferred the horrors of what he’d seen from his mind onto paper. He suspected it was the only thing that kept him sane as he led his men to their death, day after day. He wondered if all generals carried the bloodied bodies of their dead troops in their minds forever.
    Since returning, he had found that everyone in the War Office agreed that the fighting on the Peninsula was the most brutal the Western Hemisphere had yet seen. Always excepting the campaign of Attila the Hun.
    Now he was watching someone he suspected was also seeing things in a former sphere of life. Perhaps she was offering fresh griefs to the branches and trunk of that sturdy tree that had lived hundreds of years longer than either of them. It probably predated everything built here in the West End. If that was indeed what she was doing in her air of tragedy, it was a good idea she had. Nothing like something that had lived that long to put ephemeral things into perspective. And nothing was as ephemeral as the illusion man called love.
    With quick, eager hands, he transferred her image onto his small sketchpad, willing her not to move. She stayed perfectly still until his sketch was finished. Not wanting