The Duke's Holiday by Maggie Fenton

Author:Maggie Fenton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Margaret Foxe
Published: 2014-05-06T23:00:00+00:00

THOMAS NEWCOMB was one of the few of the Duke’s servants who actually liked his employer, one of the fewer still who was not afraid of him. Newcomb was an ex-boxer who could well take care of himself, if it came to falling out of the Duke’s favor. However, Newcomb knew that this was highly unlikely for two reasons: a) the Duke rather liked him, and b) the Duke was, beneath his cold, remote exterior, a bit soft-in-the-heart. Newcomb’s own position attested to this.

After a precipitous end to his boxing career, he’d fallen on hard times and into bad company. The Duke had caught him out in a swindle at Tattersall’s, where Newcomb had been successfully selling rum goods to the young bucks. Instead of giving him over to the constable, the Duke had offered him a job. He said he’d liked Newcomb’s eye for horseflesh, but Newcomb knew the Duke need not have done what he did. Most of his class would have had Hiram drawn and quartered or transported to some tropical colony. The Duke had seen something in Thomas Newcomb that not even Thomas Newcomb, who had given up on himself long before, had seen at the time.

The Duke had saved him.

It was high time he returned the favor.

It had been clear to Newcomb for a long time that the Duke was slightly … er, off. Those of His Grace’s station called him ‘aloof’ and ‘eccentric’, but as far as Newcomb could tell, those were fancy words for ‘unhappy’ and ‘cracked’. For all of the Duke’s power and money, Newcomb didn’t envy the man. The Duke conducted his life as if walking a very thin tightrope above a very deep chasm. Newcomb had never encountered such a stuffed-shirted, self-flaggelating, thoroughly miserable geezer in all of his years.

Newcomb’s opinion of his employer happened to coincide with the Viscount Marlowe’s own assessment: what the Duke needed was a good roll in the hay. And Newcomb, whose take on the married state was rather different than the Viscount’s (Newcomb had recently wed Nora, the love of his life), went a step further in his opinions. The Duke needed a wife.

Not that frosty ice-princess the Duke had contracted to make his duchess. But a real woman, who’d give the Duke a merry chase and knock some life back into him. The Duke was a well-made, well-set-up bloke, and every bit as red-blooded as the next fellow. It just needed the right bit of skirt to make the Duke realize he wasn’t made out of granite.

This was an opinion Newcomb had harbored for years. He’d watched and waited for the Duke to finally meet his match, but he’d watched and waited in vain. Until now. Newcomb had known the moment he’d seen the Duke look at Miss Honeywell that first day, when His Grace had been on his arse in the mud. His certainty had been reinforced when he’d come across them pulling out each other’s hair in the library, their clothes suspiciously disordered.

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