Page 67 of The English Duke
“I was a fool, Gran, but he was so persuasive. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
There was nothing else to do but to wake up and face this newest catastrophe, whatever it was.
Slowly, Susan sat up, rearranging her pillow behind her.
Josephine was seated at the side of her bed, weeping.
“I didn’t mean to, Gran. It was a terrible mistake. A terrible mistake. Now I don’t know what to do. What will happen if I’m with child?”
Now she was definitely wide-awake.
“What are you talking about, child?”
“The duke. He seduced me.”
Hopefully, Amy would be bringing her strong black tea shortly, the better to cope with this situation.
“You had better begin at the beginning, Josephine,” she said, feeling a sense of dread probably not out of proportion to the circumstances.
Josephine’s eyes were red, her hair askew. Her cheeks were flushed and there was a mark on her face Susan remembered from her days of being kissed senseless by her night-bearded husband.
In short, her granddaughter looked as if she’d been engaged in pursuits designed to better occur after marriage than before it.
She wasn’t a fool. She knew quite well that couples occasionally made it to the bridal bed before the minister said the vows. On a few shocking occasions, the bride was even pregnant before the ceremony.
She had her suspicions about Josephine. The girl seemed a little more knowledgeable than she should have been. Plus, she didn’t hesitate in trying to charm every man she saw, from the stablemaster to any number of shopkeepers who visited Griffin House.
At the moment, however, it didn’t matter how much she’d flirted. If the story she was telling was true, they had an enormous problem on their hands.
Had the duke truly seduced her?
“Go to your room,” she said now.
For the past several years, ever since coming to live at Griffin House, she’d watched Josephine carefully. If she had a choice between a falsehood or the truth, all things being equal, her granddaughter sometimes chose to lie.
Had she lied about this?
“What are you going to do, Gran?” Josephine asked.
She didn’t know. Dear heavens, she didn’t know.
“Go to your room right now. I will think on it.”
“What if I’m with child?”
“Shouldn’t you have considered that earlier, Josephine?”
The girl smiled, an expression out of place for this moment and her earlier tears. She wasn’t entirely certain she believed her granddaughter, but she had to act on the information regardless.
She watched as Josephine left the room. When Amy arrived with her tray, Susan swung her feet over the side of the bed and addressed her maid.
“We have a problem, Amy. A problem I hadn’t anticipated, but I think it’s going to change everything.”
Jordan had a blinding headache on waking, but that was often the result of taking Dr. Reynolds’s elixir. The concoction might ease the pain in his leg, but it left him with wild dreams and a morning headache mimicking the worst hangover he’d ever had. He was also nauseated but that symptom eased once he had something to eat.
Something else was wrong. Not pain, exactly, because his leg always felt better after taking the elixir. This was a sensation almost like a mental itch, reminding him of something he needed to remember, a feeling that things weren’t right.
He’d never experienced it before, but then he’d never seen blood on his sheets, either. It corresponded to a memory cloaked in a grayish white shroud. His dream lover had been a virgin.
