Aunt Pearl chuckled. “Now you sound like your father defending you to your mother when you were a girl getting into all manner of scrapes.”
Papa had always been Addy’s champion. He spoiled her, and she knew it. Papa hadn’t wanted to send her away to finishing school. Mama had demanded it. And while Papa doted upon Addy, it was Mama who ruled him.
“I’m still high-spirited,” Addy said. “Nothing has changed.”
“Much to your mother’s dismay,” Aunt Pearl said fondly. “Although I must say, you know I have boundless tolerance for your adventures, dear.”
Ah, here was the reprimand Addy had been awaiting.
She winced. “Of course you do, and that is why you are my favorite aunt.”
“I’m also your only aunt,” Aunt Pearl shrewdly pointed out with raised brows. “I do find it rather poor that you lied to us all.”
“I prefer to think of it as a necessity rather than a lie,” Addie hedged. “If Mama or Papa or you had known that I was surprising Lila and Letty with my visit, I have no doubt they would have opposed the trip.”
“Hmm,” Aunt Pearl said, compressing her lips and regarding Addy in the way she had when Addy had been a naughty child who had played yet another trick upon someone in the household.
“What was I to have done?” Addie asked. “The duke refuses to allow Lila and Letty to visit me in New York City. I had no choice but to come to them.”
“But youdidn’tcome to them, my dear.” Aunt Pearl shook her head, looking august, tender, and disapproving all at once in the way that only she truly could. “They’re not even in residence.”
Addie huffed out a breath. “And believe me, I never would have come here if I had known that. Why, it’s soon Christmas, and now we’re to be stranded in the snow with the Duke of Arse-ingham.”
Aunt Pearl issued a long-suffering sigh. “You really ought not to call him that, my dear.”
“He’ll never know.”
Dandy chose that moment to leap from Addy’s lap and have a bout of animated running about the chamber. Her paws flew across the threadbare Axminster, taking her toward the closed door.
“Dandy, no,” Addy called.
But Dandy ignored her as usual, sliding into the door and then scrambling about to race the length of the room a second time before running back to the door again. Dandy tended to have random bursts, and it was best to simply let her run until she collapsed on her side, her mouth hanging slack and her tongue lolling.
“I do think His Grace may discover her presence in your room sooner or later,” Aunt Pearl observed.
Addy crossed her arms over her chest. “Let him find her, then. I won’t allow him to send her to the stables. She’s too delicate for that. She requires warmth and love and baths.”
As if to prove Addy’s point, Dandy returned to the fireplace and lay on her side, her stomach toward the heat of the flames.
Aunt Pearl sighed. “Oh, my dear girl. I have a feeling you and the duke are going to be at daggers drawn.”
Addy glanced down at Dandy, thinking the little brindle French bulldog quite the most lovable dog in all the world. Far more lovable than the Duke of Marchingham could ever dream of being.
“We already are.”
There was,quite suddenly, a great bit of commotion in the room above Lion’s study. Thumps and a scrambling sound followed by athwack, then more rhythmic bumps. He cocked his head toward the tumult, listening. It sounded almost as if someone were racing about the chamber.
He frowned at the report from his steward that he had been halfheartedly perusing.
Was someonerunningupstairs?
The notion was preposterous. And yet, as he listened, there was no denying what he was hearing. But who would do such an unseemly thing?
The moment the question occurred to him, Lion had his answer.
Miss Adelia Fox. No one else would be so daring, so outrageous, so insufferably uncouth.
He settled his pen in his inkwell and stood. Was the woman mad? Why would she be running about her bedroom and slamming into doors? Had she not already tortured him enough with her unexpected presence here at Marchingham Hall? Now she was rendering it altogether impossible for him to concentrate.
