Page 46 of A Duke for Adela
“Since you were holding this lovely young lady’s hand, and smiling like a hyena as we walked in, I assume this is your Adela,” Octavian said, now taking Adela’s hand with gentle care and bowing politely over it. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Swift.”
“The pleasure is all mine, Captain Thorne.”
Julius did the same. “You are even lovelier than our brother described. He said you were the prettiest lady in all of London and he was in raptures over you.”
Adela shook her head and laughed. “Thank you, Lord Thorne. But I hardly think your brother was so effusive. He is the sort to take great care in what he writes down.”
Octavian nodded. “We read between the lines. He is marrying you, so you have to be someone very special to him.”
Julius motioned to the exhibition hall. “He said he met you here. This place is his labor of love. It must have swelled his heart with pride to know how much you appreciated all his hard work.”
Adela nodded. “What he has done here is undeniably brilliant.”
“He did this for our father,” Octavian said, his voice laced with emotion. “He was a great man and we all loved him dearly.”
Adela nodded. “It shows. And I look forward to helping him out here.”
Ambrose took her hand again. “Adela has some excellent ideas we’ll put in place after the honeymoon. Julius, we’ll be gone for at least a month. Do you think you can stay on and manage this place while we are away?”
His brother nodded. “Yes, for certain.”
“I intend to stay on, as well,” Octavian said. “I’m due to give my report to the House of Lords, so I will help out whenever I am not stuck there or at the Admiralty offices.”
One of Ambrose’s clerks knocked at his open door. “Your Grace, Dr. Nordberg has arrived.”
Ambrose winked at Adela. “Excellent, show him up here.”
The young clerk cleared his throat. “And two acquaintances of Miss Swift’s are in the library asking after her. They said to tell her…um, Syd and Gory are here.”
“Show them up here as well,” he said with a grin. “They can join us for our private luncheon before the lecture starts.”
Julius shook his head. “Gory? Dare I ask? What does she look like? I shudder to think.”
“She’s lovely,” Adela insisted. “Gregoria is her real name. While Sydney and I enjoy studying ancient dead things to piece together historical records, Gregoria’s interests tend more toward the medical aspects of human life. Her greatest wish is to become a doctor, but her family will never allow it. So she tries to learn as much as she can on her own.”
“Would her ‘learning’ happen to involve stealing cadavers?” Julius asked with a shudder. “Is this how she earned her pet name?”
Adela shook her head. “No, nothing so gruesome. She is quite brilliant when it comes to ancient medicines and forensic analysis. We call her Gory merely because her name is Gregoria. And I am almost certain she hasn’t stolen any cadavers.”
“Almostcertain?” Octavian laughed. “Lunch should be interesting.”
Ambrose asked his young clerk to also fetch Marigold from the Hall of Planets and bring her to the private dining room.
“At once, Your Grace,” he said with a nod and hurried off.
Dr. Nordberg was a distinguished looking older gentleman of Danish descent who clearly had an eye for the ladies, Ambrose realized as he watched the man’s eyes widen and wickedly gleam when introduced to Adela and her friends.
Even his brothers eyed the young ladies with more than a little curiosity, for they were quite pretty if one looked beyond the mops of hair haphazardly pinned up and the unfashionable clothes they wore. Sydney’s hair was blonde bordering on ginger and Gory’s hair was a blend of chestnut and red. They were of medium height, although Sydney was the tallest among them while Gory was about the same size as Adela.
Compared to the Thorne men, they all were small.
Adela made the introductions.
Ambrose exchanged amused glances with his brothers, for Adela’s friends were studying them as though they were fossilized exhibits. He and his brothers were big men and resembled each other quite a bit with all of them having dark hair and gray eyes. However, this is where the resemblance ended. Julius had the more boyish face while Octavian had a brutish face, still handsome, but in a rougher way.
He wasn’t sure where he fell, probably somewhere between his two brothers.
It struck him as hilarious that Adela and her friends were discreetly attempting to analyze their bone structures. Never mind that they were Thornes, sons of the former duke, and all of them wealthy in their own right. These ladies were not thinking of marriage, but of dissection…he had better feed them before they got ideas.
