She was an ordinary girl, just like any other girl. No doubt on her way somewhere for Christmastide. No reason existed to give her a second look, let alone a second thought.
They were crammed into the only two unoccupied places, corner seats against the side of the carriage and opposite each other. At first, he kept his eyes glued to the window, searching for any sign someone had realized he had absconded. But his luck held and the carriage rolled away from the coaching inn with no one running after it.
When he finally looked away from the window, the girl held a book inches from her eyes, obscuring her face completely. But within a few minutes, a sound erupted from behind the book.
Golden, warm, pure. Joyous. The most remarkable sound he had ever heard. He needed several seconds to recognize it as laughter.
She loosed her remarkable laugh again, and he noted how it invaded her whole being, sweeping down her legs to make her boots dance and stamp while also rolling up her torso so she shook and swayed with her cackles and guffaws.
For the next hour, she turned pages eagerly, punctuating her reading with that glorious laugh. She rarely let the book dip, but when she did, he spied waves of dark brown hair under her bonnet. Quirking, intelligent brows. Large, dark brown eyes to match her hair. A pert, little nose. Pink cheeks. But her mouth stayed hidden behind the book.
It was maddening.
And his curiosity—rarely stirred by a human being, let alone a female—was getting the better of him.
What was she? A young woman, not a girl. Given her worn clothing and scuffed boots, she might be a gentlewoman who had fallen into distressed circumstances. But there was no possibility she was nobility. She was unchaperoned on a stage coach, for one. And there was her laugh. Any young lady of thetonwould have had that laugh schooled out of her long ago.
And what could she be reading that was at once so amusing and so absorbing? The book was old, the cover stained, the spine faded to illegibility.
Kittredge maneuvered an arm inside his old hunting coat and found his spectacles. No, the blasted things were no help deciphering the title of the volume. He tucked the spectacles away and scratched at the beard he’d grown over the last six weeks.
As he had every autumn since leaving Cambridge, he’d decamped at the beginning of November to the wilds of Hampshire on a hunting trip with Dagenham and Bevel. Of course, most of the days had been spent sipping whisky and reading books in the hunting box when it rained. But one couldn’t claim one had to leave London just so one could read in peace. Or at least Dagenham said one couldn’t say that, and Kittredge always deferred to Dagenham in terms of what passed for acceptable.
But where was Dagenham when you needed him? Because Kittredge was wondering if he might interrupt the woman’s reading and ask the name of the book.
But they had had no introduction.
Was it proper for a man to ask a woman outside the circle of his acquaintance what she was reading whilst aboard a stage coach?
He didn’t know.
He had no idea.
He’d never been on a stage coach before.
Riding on a stage coach was not something a duke did.
Unless, of course, the duke was running away from a dozenyoung ladies lying in wait, armed with mistletoe, ready to force the Duke of Kittredge through the gauntlet known as a Christmas house party in order to find out for themselves if His Grace really was the arsehole everybody said he was.
But this was his Christmas gift to all those unmarried daughters of earls and viscounts. He was escaping before reaching the estate of the Marquess of Merrifield and consequently sparing everyone a great deal of pain and trouble.
Because he had come to the only possible determination a long time ago.
The Duke of Kittredge was, without question, a complete arsehole.
Oh,gobbledygump.
Franny couldn’t stop herself from laughing at the jest book she had bought from the odds-and-ends stall. The jokes were sofunnyand would be sure to earn her some smiles from her far-too-serious little brother.
But she must be such a nuisance to the other passengers. Lady LeClere had told Franny often enough that her laughter was vulgar. And the handsome man across from her with the dirty clothes and the scraggly beard was glowering at her and the woman next to Franny prodded her with every giggle.
Just as her neighbor’s sharpened elbow stabbed her ribs for what must be the twelftieth time, a wonderful idea also struck Franny. A not unusual occurrence since magnificent notions smote her all the time.
I’ll buy everybody in the coach a Christmas nibble to apologize for my annoying outbursts.
She had thought to purchase biscuits or sweets at the next stop, but it turned out the coaching inn didn’t sell those things. What might divide up nicely? She saw a tray of steaming meat pies come out of the kitchen, and her stomach growled.
“Oh, a dozen of those splendazzling pies, please, each wrapped up, please. Oh, please, as quickly as you can. Thank you, that’s lovely.”
