Too Wilde to Wed (The Wildes of Lindow Castle, #2)(49)

They all looked up as he entered. Ophelia smiled and caught Artie when her welcoming wave toppled her from the rail. Viola hopped off the bed, came over to him, and put an arm around his waist.

As she was Ophelia’s daughter from her first marriage, Viola wasn’t really his sister. But from the moment he’d met her fourteen years before, a painfully shy child, she’d been his special girl. She had walked into the nursery holding her mother’s hand, her mouth somewhere between vulnerable and just plain terrified.

“Viola,” he said, giving her a squeeze and a kiss. “You’re what . . . sixteen now? Is that possible?”

Betsy, the oldest of his sisters, pranced over. She had turned into one of those women so beautiful they blind a man—and she knew it. Every swish of her hips said, Watch me.

North bent down and gave her a kiss as well. “I understand that you have mowed down every man in London, forced them onto their knees, and tossed them out the door.”

“That’s right,” Joan shouted from the bed. “She chews them up and spits them out.”

“You are disgusting!” Betsy told her little sister, tossing her curls again.

“No lady should marry in her first Season, and possibly not in her second either,” their aunt observed.

“I can’t get up to greet the conquering hero,” Joan said, blowing him a kiss. “I’m busy making you a present.”

“Good afternoon, shortcake,” he said, going over to the bed and dropping a kiss on her cheek. Then he saw what she was doing and an involuntary groan came to his lips.

“Miss Gray—Willa’s friend Lavinia—did it with Alaric’s prints,” Joan told him. She was busily cutting around the outline of an aristocrat with a snarling expression of disdain and a wig so high it grazed the ceiling. “I bought five in a stationer’s shop last week, and we already had some.”

“I donated mine,” Betsy said, adding impishly, “I’m the only one who owned the naughty one.”

He didn’t curse, but it was a near thing.

“Just as well it’s being cut to pieces,” Aunt Knowe said, sounding unusually severe. “That print is almost as bad as my knitting. Does anyone know how I could have ended up with a hole in the middle?” She held up a ragged scrap.

Viola sat down beside her. “I’ll fix it, Aunt Knowe,” she said in her sweet way.

The duchess’s bed was covered with snippets of paper. One discarded fragment showed Diana kneeling, presumably at North’s feet. He picked it up. A memory of her kneeling before him on the boat seat flashed into his head, sending a streak of pure heat down his body.

“What do you plan to do with those versions of me?” he asked, poking around in the mess and rescuing three more images of Diana.

“I oughtn’t to ruin the surprise, but I’m making you a memory box,” Joan said. She spread six or seven versions of him like a fan. “I’m going to glue them onto the lid of a box so you don’t forget the year when all of England thought you were the devil’s brother.”

“Just like that pantomime we saw at Haymarket last year,” Betsy cried. Then she sang, “I can bark like a dog, I can grunt like a hog!”

“No one would want to hear you singing onstage,” Joan said with dampening emphasis.

Ophelia came over and kissed North’s cheek. “Good afternoon, dear.” Artie was on her hip, blissfully sucking her thumb.

“Good afternoon, Duchess,” he said, and tapped Artie’s nose. “Where’s your accomplice, Godfrey?”

“Leo,” Artie said, the word muffled by her thumb.

“After the stables, Godfrey wanted to stay with Leo,” his stepmother explained, “so they went to his bedchamber. Leo said he’s going to teach Godfrey to tie a neckcloth, but I think he was joking.”

“I need shoes,” North said, abruptly remembering why he had come into this bower of femininity.

“None of our shoes will fit you,” Betsy said with a giggle. She was practicing the steps of a country dance, sashaying forward and backward to music only she heard.

“I threw Diana’s shoes into the water,” North said, keeping it simple.

But nothing was simple with six women in the room. “That was very naughty of you!” Joan exclaimed, and even quiet Viola said, “You oughtn’t to have done it, North, because she doesn’t have any others.”

When the recriminations had died down, his stepmother said, “Who has shoes that might fit Diana?”

“Not I,” said Joan. “There’s a reason you all call me ‘shortcake,’ and Diana is delightfully tall.”

“Not as tall as I am,” Lady Knowe said. “My shoes will never fit Diana, though I will echo the rest and say that you shouldn’t have done it, North.” His aunt’s feet were as ungainly as her hands, another unenviable inheritance that came with being the duke’s twin. Not that the size of her feet ever seemed to bother her.

“Diana isn’t as tall as she used to be when she wore high wigs,” Betsy said. “Oh, I envied her so much. Parisian wigs! And now look, she lets Artie suck her hair, which is disgusting.”

“Shoes,” North ordered. “I left the poor woman barefoot.”

After that, everyone but Joan ran off. Ophelia put Artie down and began rummaging through a trunk that appeared to hold nothing but shoes.