Page 46 of The Devilish Pleasures of a Duke

“In a manner of speaking.” Alice gathered her gloves and reticule from the table. “His secretary advised me to collect Lady Coralie’s baggage. It seems there’s been a misunderstanding and it was delivered here by error.”

Emma watched Adrian vanish around the corner into the garden. “What sort of misunderstanding?” she asked in a stiff voice, forcing her attention back to Alice.

“Lady Coralie won’t be attending your academy after all, my dear. It appears her uncle has changed his mind about her education. I thought I should see you in person to explain on her behalf, and to pick up her belongings.”

Emma struggled against an ungentle impulse to pluck Alice’s adorable hat from her head by its feather. “She’s changed her mind?” she asked lightly.

Alice sighed with unconvincing regret. “I am sorry if this inconveniences you—I do hope you weren’t counting on her funds?”

Emma managed a shrug of insouciance, rising to her feet. “Of course not. Shall I instruct Hamm to help you out with Lady Coralie’s luggage? I assume you still have not been able to afford a footman yet…”

Alice virtually breathed fire from her nostrils. “I employ two of them, and intend to take on another two soon.”

“Shall I hire a dogcart for the two of you or will you be walking back across town?”

“I have a new vehicle, in fact,” Alice said, standing to stare directly at Emma. “I bought it with—”

A trill of delighted giggles from the garden interrupted Alice’s coup de grace. Emma could not decide whether she appreciated the timely outburst or not. One more word from her nemesis, and she would indeed have been provoked to do something nasty enough to make the morning papers.

As luck would have it, however, the disturbance in the garden, a scandal in the making of its own, absorbed her full attention. Adrian stood poised on the steps of the small summerhouse, his coat slung over one well-built shoulder, his hat at his feet. His grin, although not directed in Emma’s direction, for she doubted he could see her at all, nonetheless, took her off balance. He was a deity with a dozen female admirers at his feet.

Was he posing for Lady Dalrymple’s infamous sketches? Oh, how…how—

“Is that Lord Wolverton?” Alice asked breathlessly from behind her.

Emma drew the drapes tightly together and spun on her heel. “Do you think you should leave your school unattended, Lady Clipstone?” she said crisply. “I for one must return to my duties.”

Alice’s gaze drifted back toward the darkened window. “Indeed,” she murmured. “You have your hands quite full, by the look of him.”

Adrian was not sure himself how he had ended up posing for one of Lady Dalrymple’s sketches. He had merely been waiting outside with Heath, discussing his plans. He did know, however, that he felt quite absurd, especially with Heath watching in amusement from the garden bench. How many times had his friend Dominic made jokes about the outrageous sketch of Heath Boscastle’s manhood that had ended up on the streets and in the salons of London?

Well, Adrian wasn’t removing his pantaloons for any of the females sketching him in the garden. He’d had a deuced hard time refusing Lady Dalrymple at all. No matter what abhorrent violence had defined his professional years, he harbored a strange weakness for sweet old ladies and uncouth little children. His grandmother had spoiled him and his siblings until two weeks before her death. He wondered now whether Lady Dalrymple had reminded him of his beloved nana. Had his grandmama’s eyes twinkled at him with such irresistible wickedness? He suspected they had.

“Do you mind turning at the trunk a little and arching your back?” Lady Dalrymple asked in her quavery, angelic voice, then struck a classical pose to demonstrate.

He frowned down into her pleasant face. “Excuse me?”

“As if you were engaged in some labor that required every ounce of your strength,” she explained with an evasive flutter of her wrist. “Oh, dear. Pretend you’re lifting a heavy load.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Coal. Bricks. Whatever makes those marvelous muscles work.”

He glanced past her to his host, Heath, who, by this point, had covered his offensive grin with his hand. For Adrian, that insult coupled with the startled look on Emma’s face as she stood at the window before hurriedly closing the drapes, warned him he had walked into a very wicked trap indeed.

And here he’d thought Lady Dalrymple to be a sweet, harmless scatterbrain. “Exactly what manner of sketch is it that you have in mind?” he asked, his hand planted on his left hip.

She smiled up at him over her easel. “Hercules,” she murmured. “We have yet to add him to our Deity Collection. You don’t object, do you?”

“Object?” he echoed as Heath slithered farther down the bench in a paroxysm of suppressed laughter. “Well, I’m not entirely sure—what exactly is the Deity Collection, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“All the proceeds go to charity,” Hermia assured him.

“Hercules? He wasn’t a deity, was he?”

“Don’t move,” she muttered. “The light won’t last long as it is, and my knees feel a storm moving in. Hercules became a deity after he died. Could you do me a favor?”

She had that naughty twinkle in her eye again. “That all depends, Lady Dalrymple. What is it?”