Dair Devil by Lucinda Brant

Author:Lucinda Brant [Brant, Lucinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

TREAT, HAMPSHIRE: THE ROXTON DUCAL SEAT

JULY 1777

D AIR CAME OVER THE RISE of manicured lawn and strolled down to the jetty that jutted out into the lake, and where bobbed several moored skiffs. The sun was high in a bright blue sky, with no clouds and no breeze. It was the perfect weather for a swim. Not for the first time did he gaze enviously out across the fresh blue water of a lake stocked with fish and dotted with islands. How he wished to strip, dive in and cool off. But such longing was quickly overtaken by dread. He squared his shoulders, drew back on his cheroot, and ignored the heat under his stock. He also ignored the woman at his back, who had followed him from the Duchess’s summer pavilion.

He had found her there, alone with her needlework. She was waiting for her young mistress to return from her swim. A basket by a squat table had been emptied of its afternoon tea contents and was laid out on a linen table cloth. The silver teapot on its pedestal and the necessary attendant tea things he knew had come courtesy of the Elizabethan dower house up on the hill. The Duchess of Kinross was due home any day; so the housekeeper had told him when he had arrived unannounced on the doorstep the night before, with his valet and his portmanteaux.

He had just spent a trying fortnight at Fitzstuart Hall in Buckinghamshire, his family seat. He meant to stay only a week, but felt obliged to remain because his widowed sister Lady Mary and her daughter Theodora arrived the day before he was to depart. They were so happy to see him he could not, in good conscience, offend them by not extending his stay. Besides, he was genuinely fond of Mary and his tomboy niece. Teddy begged her Uncle Dair to take her riding and hawking, anything to keep them outdoors, so she could escape her well-intentioned mother’s attempts to fashion her into a young lady. He could not refuse her, and it gave him the excuse he needed to avoid the indoors, too.

But staying on meant enduring more of his mother’s overly dramatic lamentations about his brother’s socially unacceptable and disastrous (in her eyes) elopement. Never mind Charles was a traitor to king and country, that was as nothing compared to the unsuitability of his choice of bride. Dair made no comment. What was the use when there was only her point of view? He was also required to lend a sympathetic ear to his sister’s predicament. Mary vented her humiliation at the terms under which she was now forced to live, courtesy of her late husband’s despicable will, and the man (Mary called him a fiend and a monster) who was charged with administering the estate until its heir, Sir John Cavendish, reached his majority.

When Dair ventured to point out she was extremely fortunate not to be evicted from a house and lands to which

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