The Duchess Hunt. Elizabeth Beacon

me and he knows it,’ Jessica said as if she agreed.

      ‘You defend him, yet you two were at daggers’ drawn within half a minute of setting eyes on each other as usual, were you not?’ Persephone asked.

      ‘We always bring out the worst in each other,’ Jessica admitted. ‘Since his Grace must be on his best behaviour for the next two weeks if he’s going to find himself an amenable bride, I probably should not have come.’

      ‘Much better if he found one who wasn’t going to agree with his every word, if you ask me. He’s not the sort of man who will be content within a marriage of convenience for long,’ Persephone replied with a look Jessica didn’t trust one bit.

      She shuddered at the idea of Persephone contriving devious ways to throw her at Jack’s head and even had qualms about him being forced to be brutally honest with her. Jack Seaborne was a fair and honourable man, under his arrogant, infuriating confidence that he was lord of all he surveyed even when he was away from his wide domain. Having to make it clear to a lady he’d known for so long that he wouldn’t be making her an offer would pain him nearly as much as it would her.

      ‘You would have thought his parents’ marriage would have given the deluded idiot a hint there is more to married life than finding a wife in much the same way he’d go about mating his racehorses,’ her friend went on in a voice too low to reach Lady Henry’s ears now she was consulting Hughes about when to serve dinner and the possibility of his Grace being home in time to eat it at a reasonable hour. Even sunny-tempered Lady Henry Seaborne would have indulged in the vapours or a storm of shocked maternal outrage if she’d heard such unsuitable remarks on the lips of her eldest unwed daughter.

      ‘I don’t recall them very well from staying with you at Seaborne House when we were young, but I do recall gossip that the late duke and duchess fought like cat and dog. Perhaps Jack’s intent on finding a more peaceable wife,’ Jessica said, hoping her air of lightly amused indifference would convince Persephone he was welcome to such a milk-and-water creature as far as she was concerned.

      ‘Which only proves my point, don’t you think?’

      ‘I might, if I only knew what it was.’

      ‘That arranged marriages are insipid at best and Jack is the last man who should consider making one. He has such a passionate, headlong temperament under that haughty indifference he shows the world and would be bored with such an empty-headed automaton of a wife before the marriage feast was over, let alone their bride visits.’

      ‘His Grace is also a wealthy and tolerably handsome nobleman, who would be hard pressed to find a lady who saw past that to the man himself. If they were still alive, no doubt his parents would have found a rich and lovely noblewoman who would understand his life, then contrived to throw them together long ago,’ Jessica argued.

      ‘Not they,’ Persephone denied with an emphatic shake of her head. ‘They would pick rival candidates and make Jack’s life a misery until he ran off with a farmer’s pretty daughter to prove he wasn’t going to be dictated to.’

      ‘Then since he can please himself who to marry, no doubt he’ll choose himself a conformable and agreeable wife he can be comfortable with.’

      ‘Such a pallid creature would never suit him,’ her friend said stubbornly and Jessica couldn’t help picturing Jack living with a female who forever agreed with every word he said and shuddered at the very idea.

      Considering the vitality and impatience Jack Seaborne had struggled to contain ever since she first laid eyes on him, Jessica thought her friend was right. After such a stormy childhood, maybe it should be no surprise if he chose serenity over ungovernable passion in his own marriage, but it sounded so very dull.

      ‘Whatever we think, his Grace will go his own way—he always does,’ she said with a shrug and tried not to think of how she would feel if the Duke found himself a wife of character as well as beauty. Glad, she told herself stoically and did her best to look serenely content with her own lot in life.