Page 1 of His Accidental Duchess

CHAPTER 1

It occurred to Anna, not for the first time, that there was not enough room for three people in the phaeton’s seat. However, since they were so tightly jammed in together, there was no real fear of falling out, despite the horrible driving.

Anna was fairly sure that if she had not been sandwiched between her two friends, she would have gone sailing out onto the wet, gray streets of London quite some time ago.

She could put up with elbows digging into her sides for a while, under those circumstances.

“Here we are, then,” Henry sing-songed, pulling his phaeton to a bouncing stop.

Anna didn’t dare glance back at Beatrice’s maid, who was perched on the back seat. The last time she’d looked, the poor woman was positively green.

It was simpler to go out with her two friends. Henry had his phaeton, and Beatrice had a maid who could chaperone them. Anna could not, of course, afford a personal maid. It wasn’t as if anybody could evertellthat she had done up her own hair.

Beatrice jumped out of the seat first, bouncing down to the ground without any need for assistance. She was short, decidedly round, with a pleasant heart-shaped face and a mass of reddish-gold curls. Moonlight glinted off her spectacles when she glanced up at the phaeton.

“I’ll just pop inside, Anna,” she announced. “I want to see if Emily has read that book I lent her. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Would it matter if I did?” Anna countered.

Beatrice chuckled. “Come along, Phoebe.”

The poor maid stumbled down from the back of the phaeton and went sighing after her mistress.

Anna and Beatrice—the formidable Miss Beatrice Haversham, bluestocking extraordinaire, thank you very much—had been friends since they were children.

At their coming out, at the ages of eighteen and nineteen respectively, they had been determinedly befriended by one Lord Henry Stanley, the second son of some powerful duke, aspiring artist, and Adonis in the making.

Naturally, there’d been a great deal of speculation over which of the ladies Lord Henry would marry. The general sentiment leaned in Anna’s favor, on account of her being pretty and well-bred, but Beatrice was the rich one and was therefore strongly in the running still.

It hardly mattered, because the gossips were wrong and the three remained friends and only friends. Lord Henry was tall, handsome, blond-haired and blue-eyed, but he did not seem interested at all in marriage. He was on the cusp of being declared a Determined Bachelor, apparently.

Of course, that was nowhere near as humiliating for a man, to be declared terminally single, as it was for a woman.

A woman such as Anna.

She moved to slip out of the phaeton and follow Beatrice inside, but Henry reached out and tapped her shoulder.

“Hold on a moment, old girl,” he murmured. “I want a word with you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Old girl? I’m not a dog. Or a horse. I’m sure I’ve heard you call your horse anold girlbefore.”

“Prickly, aren’t we? Listen, Anna, I just wanted to make sure you are alright.”

There was a pause.

“Of course I am,” Anna managed, at last. “Why do you ask?”

Henry narrowed his eyes at her. “Well, we were having a lovely evening at the opera, and suddenly you get a small hole in one of your gloves and you all but lose your mind. You kept talking about going home and fixing it until I thought you’d take off haring through the streets to get back. I know that…” He hesitated, glancing over at the shadowy shape of the manor looming above them. “I know that all of this is tricky. I know times aren’t easy. I am worried about you.”

Her shoulders sagged. She glanced down at her glove. It was the right one, a delightfully soft calfskin glove with golden stitching. She’d caught it on a protruding nail, or something like that, in their opera box, and the tearing sound had made her stomach drop. She could see a fingertip-sized sliver of skin at the base of her thumb.

“Papa bought me these,” she said softly. “For my coming out. I’ve treasured them for years. I can’t afford another pair. We can mend things, but if the hole gets too big, it’ll be harder. I was just conscious of time going by, and the stitches ripping, and the material stretching…” She bit her lip. “I’m sorry. It was silly.”

“It’s not silly,” Henry said emphatically. “I should have been more considerate. What sort of friend am I?”

“An absent-minded one. What’s the matter, too many art lessons? Can you think of nothing but painting these days?”

It was almost a joke between the three of them, Henry’s slavish devotion to his paints and canvases. He intended to be a painter, much to the horror of his wealthy, noble family.

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