The Duke's Price: Book 18 in Wayward Dukes' Alliance by Jude Knight & Wayward Dukes

Author:Jude Knight & Wayward Dukes [Knight, Jude & Dukes, Wayward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titchfield Press
Published: 2025-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Ruth was exhausted, and sore all over. Between moonrise and sunset some sixteen hours later, they had travelled from Toulouse to Carcassonne, stopping only to change horses and attend to the needs of their bodies, Walter and De-Ath taking it in turns to drive.

They used different names at each stop, hoping to throw Garcia off their trail. Bella and De-Ath thoroughly enjoyed inventing them, each trying to top the other with more and more ridiculous suggestions.

Exchanging stories had entertained them for most of the journey. De-Ath and Walter had an inexhaustible store of tales. Bella had had some hair-raising adventures as a child causing as many problems for invaders as possible. Ruth, by contrast, had led a calm and uninteresting life, apart from one incident in her youth, when her first position had ended with her and her pupils having to make a wild escape.

But that adventure was not fully hers to share, and even that had led to six years of peaceful village living. She could, however, and did share the adventures of the Redepennings, the family she had come to regard as her own.

She spoke of Rede, the Earl of Chirbury, his years as a trapper in Canada, and his romance with Ruth’s first pupil and almost sister, Anne. Also, his cousin Alex, and his desperate escape from villains with his now wife, Ella. Both of them injured and weak, they had sent Alex’s manservant to draw off the pursuers and had ridden in comfort from Cheshire to London on a canal boat.

Alex’s sister Susan had fallen in love with her husband when they pursued her daughter and a French spy up the Great North Road. Dear Mia, married to Alex’s brother Jules, had faced off and defeated a kidnapper who was trying to steal her stepson, and a group of French spies who had made a prisoner of her husband. And who could have expected that the love Kitty, Anne’s sister, had for a gamekeeper would led to an all-out battle for control of a village in the far north of England?

It helped to pass the time, even with repeats as one driver replaced another, saying, “Get Miss Henwood to tell you about…” or “You won’t believe what her Highness said about…”

Even so, in the last couple of hours they had run out of stories, or perhaps just out of energy. Surely, at the speed they had been going, they had left Garcia far behind and could afford to stop for the night at Carcassonne?

Ruth heaved a sigh of relief as they turned into the stable yard of an inn.

“He might just be going to change horses,” Bella said gloomily, referring to De-Ath, who was driving.

But when the carriage stopped and De-Ath opened the door, he said, “I’ll take a couple of rooms for the night, but we’ll be on our way first thing in the morning. I don’t want to give Garcia time to catch up.”

The inn was a bit rougher than last night’s place. “We will eat in the ladies’ room,” he instructed the innkeeper.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.