Read Online Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 02] by The Duke Next Door - Free Book Online Page A

food the previous day, but the dry toast went down hard, squeezed by the knot of unease in her belly. She picked at it restlessly, the silence of her beautiful bedchamber oppressive on her nerves.
    She hated eating alone.
    Woolton had been an unfriendly place under Tessa’s rule. Any servant of quality had fled from her stepmother’s demands and infrequent salary. Even a scullery maid liked to be paid.
    That left the incompetent and dishonest ones, who resented Tessa openly—and put Deirdre into the same class. Being left with the evil Tessa when her father died, she ought to have become a sweet, compassionate survivor like Phoebe. Well, no disrespect to her cousin,
but Deirdre had long ago decided upon a different solution.
    She built herself a shell of poise and pretty Society manners and flinty, unrelenting determination to get as far away from Lady Tessa as the borders of England would allow.
    Yesterday, she had done just that.
    She closed her eyes against a powerful jolt of missing Papa. How he would have loved to have been there yesterday, to give her away to the man of her dreams, to have seen her in that lovely gown. If only he could have given her away instead of the vicar. She’d chosen Phoebe’s father because he was at least someone’s father, and his tall, silver good looks set off her own golden beauty nicely, but it hadn’t been the same.
    Then she shut that door of memory with force. Papa may have partially gotten her into this mess, but there was no one to help her get out except herself.
    The letter to the solicitors had already been posted. She had only to wait out the months or possibly even mere days until she went from being the Marchioness of Brookhaven to the Duchess of Brookmoor.
    Twenty-seven thousand pounds would go a long way to fixing matters, wouldn’t it?
    STICKLEY AND WOLFE, partners in estate law, sons of more successful fathers, sole handlers of the significant Pickering fortune that was even now slotted to be bestowed upon Deirdre, Lady Brookhaven—as soon as old Duke of Brookmoor cocked up his toes and passed the title on to his nephew, of course—sat in their silent
and somewhat grand office, face-to-face across the two desks their fathers had arranged four decades earlier.
    I wish the blackguard would drink himself in front of the first ale cart to come along.
    Stickley sat perfectly upright, of course, the very model of a proper solicitor, right down to the discreet gold watch fob and spectacles. Alas, the painful fact was that no matter how he squared his shoulders and kept his chin high, he would never approach his partner’s easy masculinity. Unlike Wolfe, he could never carry off sprawling listlessly in the opposite chair as if his spine had melted into the fine leather and would never come away again. Not without looking feminine and pathetic, at any rate, like an abandoned dolly.
    This only made Stickley’s spine stiffer and his indignant sniffs more incensed.
    “Stick,” Wolfe muttered without raising his drowsy lids or even properly opening his lips. “If you don’t quit your damnable sniffing, I’m going to twist your nose from your face and grind it under my heel.”
    “I cannot help it. You stink,” Stickley responded. “You reek of cheap perfume and cheaper gin.”
    The reminder only made Wolfe’s handsome lips curl in recollection. “Actually, I’m fairly sure the perfume was cheaper.” He leered, lost in memories all too apparently lurid.
    Stickley jerked his gaze away to contemplate the far less disturbing bookcases lining one wall. The spines gleamed despite the fact that no one had opened those volumes in his lifelong memory. “Say no more. I wish no accounting of your decadent misadventures!”
    Unfortunately, this time Wolfe took him at his word
and sank back into his hung-over stupor without another word about the shocking but intriguing source of the cheap perfume.
    Which was hardly fair, since it had been Stickley himself who had supplied the