The Duke's Undoing (Three Rogues and Their Ladies) by G.G. Vandagriff Page A

fairly well established rake, and her reformation of me would be a triumph.”
    “What I don’t understand,” Lady Clarice said, “is why you’re bothering with this.”
    “Oh, didn’t I say? One of her former fiancés, Waterford, challenged me to a duel. Sent his man around this morning. We’re to meet tomorrow on the Hammersmith Common at dawn. Swords, I think. I intend only to pink him, but I am certain that will enrage him further. Elise will definitely be in danger, and it will be my duty to defend her since I will have contributed to that danger. As you saw last night, Waterford is determined to rescue her from me.”
    “Lord Waterford is excessively unstable,” Aunt Clarice said. “It would be far better if you dragged him before a magistrate and put him in Bedlam.”
    “I intended to do just that this morning. However, the man has gone to ground. No sign of him anywhere. But he will be on Hammersmith Common in the morning. ”
    “Well, I don’t want anything untoward going on in my house. I shall advise my niece to lock her door. But I must say, for whatever reason, it is good of you to stand guard over her. And I shall stand guard over you!”
    “Have you some notepaper then? I shall write out the engagement notice, and one of the servants can take it down to the Morning Post .”
    After he had done this, the duke had a queer feeling not just in his head but throughout his body. Seeking the black leather wingbacked chair in Elise’s aunt’s library, he wondered if he were sickening for something.
    Belatedly, he remembered the disembodied voice in the park and at the opera. Had it somehow been Beynon speaking? He had certainly never come this close to matrimony in his five and thirty years. Elise was an innocent, and already he didn’t think he could look Beynon in the eye. But for the presence of Chessingden, he would have come perilously close to ravishing his adjutant’s Sunshine there in the garden. It was going to be exceedingly difficult to refrain from his normal practice of deceit and seduction, for he really had no idea how to carry on a respectable courtship. When he had staged that comic opera proposal, Ruisdell had been surprised to feel a magnetic pull of attraction combined with his desire to protect Miss Edwards. He wasn’t used to associating with guileless innocents.
    But he had only to remember his comrade’s laughing eyes when he described their playing Red Indians in the woods or meeting clandestinely at night to do nothing more than play jackstraws in their tree house, to swear to himself that Elise would not be tarnished at his hands. This game he had elected to play had all the elements of a farce or ridiculous melodrama. It obviously appealed to Elise. He remembered that Beynon had confided after a full-bodied laugh that she actually wrote and published novels under the pseudonym of “A Gentlewoman.” Standing, he searched the library shelves. There was plenty of poetry, a smattering of ancient sermons, and ah . . . yes. The Peculiar Happenings at Stanhope Down , by A Gentlewoman. Paging through it, he settled on a paragraph near the beginning.
    Lady Claire was unfashionably robust in all matters of health. She rode to hounds as hard as any man, was a skilled archer, and had even been known to sea bathe. Under no circumstance had she ever felt the least like swooning, even when her brother, Adam, showed her the frog he had dissected. The appearance of a ghostly apparition in her bedroom was not something to which she was accustomed, however. “Get out of my bedchamber at once!” she pronounced firmly, pointing to the door. Did ghosts use doors?
    He liked Lady Claire already. But the duke didn’t belong in a storybook life and could not let Elise Edwards try to put him there. He had been roughly nurtured for a dukedom by a tutor who believed strongly in corporal punishment. Until Beynon, he had never known an intimate friendship. Refusing to act like an aged spinster, he