HOW TO DITCH A DUKE
JULY
MAY MCGOLDRICK
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
LADY TAYLOR FLEMING stood with her maid a few yards off from the stranded coach-and-four. The hard downpours had eased to a miserable, drenching rain, and water had long ago soaked through her boots. She was chilled to the bone. From the sound of the teeth chattering next to her, Taylor knew her maid wasn’t faring any better. She took the satchel, allowing the older woman to warm her hands.
A thick grey cloud had been chasing them since she and her family left the Lowlands. The accident could not have happened at a worse place, for the chance of help arriving anytime soon was unlikely. She’d traveled this road a hundred times, and she knew there wasn’t a crofter or a village for miles. They were stuck.
They’d needed to leave Edinburgh. Sporadic outbreaks of violence had followed the social protest assemblies earlier in the week, and the clashes had spooked her father. The weavers’ guilds and other reform groups had been shutting down business in cities from Manchester to Glasgow to Edinburgh to Aberdeen, and the authorities were retaliating everywhere with military force to suppress the voices of protesters. When a pitched battle had spread to a hospital surgery near the university, killing a doctor, it had been the last straw.
Their escape had hardly been an easy one, but the sodden road going west toward the family hunting lodge had been a nightmare ever since they left the coach road at Montrose. Then, nearly an hour ago, a rear wheel slid into the ditch. They’d been fortunate the carriage didn’t turn over, but the wretched thing was sunk in the mud up to the axle.
So now, they were marooned on an isolated road in the Highlands.
“Lift the blasted thing. Put your backs into it.”
The querulous voice was getting on everyone’s nerves. The men
“Lighten the load, you fools!”
The trunks and other luggage were sitting in a pile, having been unloaded immediately after the accident. Taylor seethed as her father continued to berate the men.
“Lay a whip to those horses. This is no Sunday ride in the park. Show them who is master.”
Her skin burned with irritation. Incessant harassment was the earl’s standard response whenever things didn’t go as he wished. As the only daughter, Taylor had been on the receiving end of his carping for as long as she could remember. Since her mother’s death seven years ago, however, she’d learned that the secret to dealing with him was to keep her distance when she could manage it and pay no heed to him when she couldn’t. Of course, her aptitude when it came to investing and managing their money played in her favor too. So long as she took care of her father’s and brother’s expenses and didn’t bother them about their exorbitant spending, a fragile peace was maintained.
“Blast you all! We don’t want to be out here all day.”
The men’s faces were streaked and spattered with mud, and their clothes were soaked and filthy. They continued to push as the driver pressed his tired team. The horses snorted and pulled, and the carriage groaned and rocked dangerously, but a moment later the contraption settled back where it was. They were getting nowhere.
They needed help.
Just then, one of valets, a slight, middle-aged man, slipped and went down, sliding into the roadside ditch.
“Get up, man. Come out of there this instant, or you’ll feel my cane.”
