Accidental Duchess

Chapter 2

She squealed, a shudder running through her. “Please, God, please,
don’t let there be spiders. Please. I’m already at my wit’s end here.”

She upended her portmanteau and stood on it. Shuddering, her teeth
clenched, she shoved her arm through cobwebs and pawed at the outside
latch. The door sprang open, and she and her portmanteau tumbled into a
vast basement.

“Augh!” Rachael batted at the webs floating about her face.
After another shudder, she managed to straighten and dust herself off.

Leaving her portmanteau behind, she tiptoed toward the stairs. Halfway
up them, she muttered, “Why am I tip-toeing? I’ve already made enough
noise to wake the dead.”

At the top, she opened the door and found herself in a vacuous kitchen,
lined by counters, a soapstone sink, and the biggest stove she’d ever seen.

Teeth chattering--only a lack of wind accounted for the marginal difference
between the inside and outside temperatures--she reached for the lamp above the stove, lit it, and counted the ovens. Four.

My word! The owner must entertain on a very grand scale to justify purchasing such a wondrous thing. She ran a loving hand across the dusty black enamel, and then cautiously made her way across the kitchen.

In the long echoing hallway, her gaze swung left and right and her muscles tensed, ready to bolt.
Swatting the fine fibers still clinging to her face, she called, “Hello!
Anyone home?”

The bigger-than-expected townhouse remained blessedly silent.

Moving forward, she discovered the rooms she’d spied from the outside
were, as she suspected, a reception parlor and study. She called out again,
praying no one would answer.

All remained quiet. Since recent events had taught her to err on the side
of caution, she climbed the dusty mahogany stairs. She had little doubt--
given her current luck-it was possible someone was sleeping through the
ruckus she’d been making.

In the upper hall, she found six closed doors. She approached the first
on silent feet, cautiously turned the glass doorknob, and found a lovely blue sitting room and beyond it a bedroom with its bed dismantled and draped in
sheeting.
Further down the hallway she found three more bedrooms—-one obviously a master suite—then a water closet, and an entrance to a backstairwell. She climbed that flight of stairs and found six vacant garret rooms.

From the size and limited furnishings she assumed them to be
servant quarters. She exhaled and a billowy white cloud formed. “My
word.”

The townhouse was hers for the night.
“Tomorrow,” she promised the silent building, “I’ll find a new position
and be gone. Well, perhaps by week’s end, but soon, I promise.”
~#~

Standing ramrod straight at the rail of the HMS Atlantis, hands buried
d

eep in linen pockets, Connor Kenroe, sixth Duke of Kilgory, surveyed the
densely packed warehouses and vessels girdling the Thames.

As the Tower of London came into view above budding green treetops, the wind shifted and a familiar stench engulfed him.

He turned out of the wind, muttering, “Welcome to London.”

He disliked cities and this one in particular. Not only did he detest being
trapped within its great sprawl of closely packed humans and cattle, but
here he’d again be surrounded by individuals whose only interest in him
amounted to what they could garner by associating with a duke.

Too, it was crawling with women. Women--he’d found to his sorrow--all cut from the same cloth.

Be they temptingly beautiful or plain, they all managed to be vain and self-serving; his neglectful, ton-obsessed mother, Lady Lilith Kenroe, and his conniving ex-fiancée, Beatrice Worthington-Barlow, being prime   examples.

Well, no one within the ton need know he’d returned. With the help of
his friend and solicitor, Roger MacGregor, he could quietly accomplish in a few weeks what his grandfather had apparently been reluctant to do in alifetime; liquidate all the extraneous Kenroe properties whose taxes were
forcing the Kenroe estate into
bankruptcy.

But first things first.

He had to transfer the treasures he’d excavated in Egypt—the fragile
pottery, mummies, and clay figurines now nestled in the straw-filled
cypress creates in the ship’s hole--to the warehouse he’d rented.

That done,he would meet with the director of the British Museum and sell the artifacts he’d unearthed. He could then turn his attention to unloading the stable and racehorses, and then to the monstrous Mayfair townhouse his grandfather