A Kiss at Midnight by Eloisa James Read Free Book Online Page A

ago, Gabriel would be in Tunis this very moment, quarreling with his old professor Biggitstiff over excavation of the legendary city of Carthage.
    He wouldn’t be sitting in a damp castle in a puddle of summer rain, surrounded by elderly family members and debt-ridden courtiers . . . he’d be sweating in the sun, making sure the dig didn’t turn into a greedy ransacking of history.
    Gabriel looked down to discover that he was polishing the Haas’s barrel so hard that he was likely to obliterate the duchy’s coat of arms.
    Damned Augustus and his damned ideas. Gabriel had been on the very eve of leaving for Tunis when his brother’s religious fervor burst into flame, inspiring the Grand Duke to expel from his court everyone he considered corrupt, infirm, awkward, or mad.
    In short, practically everyone, and all to save Augustus’s self-righteous little soul.
    One by one, each of his elder brothers had refused to intercede, either because he was toadying up to Augustus or because (like Rupert) he just didn’t give a damn.
    Finally it was left to Gabriel. He could accept a godforsaken castle in England, big enough to house all those deemed too imperfect to grace Augustus’s court, or he could leave for Tunis and never look back.
    Put Wick and Ferdinand and the pickle-eating dog and all the rest of them out of his mind.
    He couldn’t do it.
    So . . . rain rather than blinding sun. A bride on her way from Russia, with a dowry to support the castle. And a castle full of miscreants and misfits, rather than an excavation site full of crumbled rocks and bits of statuary that might, eons ago, have been the magnificent city of Carthage.
    Not that he believed it was Carthage. He had wrangled his way into the excavation because he didn’t believe in Dido, the famous Queen of Carthage, or even the existence of the city, for that matter. It was all a myth, made up by Virgil.
    And now Biggitstiff was out there in Tunis chortling and labeling half the rocks in the countryside “Carthage.” Hell, by now he’d probably identified Dido’s supposed funeral pyre. The next step would be articles detailing his sloppy assumptions and sloppier fieldwork. Gabriel’s jaw clenched at the thought.
    But he had no choice, not really. He wasn’t Augustus, with his religious principles unleavened by a sense of humor. He couldn’t watch everyone he grew up with, from his cracked uncle to his father’s jester (seventy-five, if he was a day), be thrown into the street because Augustus deemed them likely to tarnish his halo.
    The only thing he could do was pray that Augustus’s choice for his bride—probably pious and whiskered, as virtuous as she was virginal—had enough backbone to run the castle, so that he could leave for Carthage.
    He didn’t really care who she was, as long as she could manage the castle in his absence. Beddable would be nice; biddable was a necessity.
    He bent back over the Haas.

Eight
    A fter four hours in the carriage with Lord Dimsdale, Kate decided that the most interesting thing about Algernon was that he wore a corset. She’d never dreamed that men wore stays.
    “They pinch me,” Algernon confided. “But one must suffer to be elegant; that’s what my valet says.”
    Since Kate disliked suffering, she was very glad that the seamstresses had not had time to alter one of Victoria’s traveling costumes to the point of elegant pinching. The one she was wearing bunched comfortably around the waist.
    “The padding doesn’t help,” Algernon said fretfully.
    “What have you padded?” Kate asked, eyeing him. He swelled in the chest and shrank down at the waist so she had a good idea.
    “Everyone’s costumes are padded these days,” he said, avoiding the particulars. “At any rate, I don’t want you to think that I’d ordinarily discuss such a thing with you, except that you are my family. Well, almost my family. Do you mind if I begin calling you Victoria immediately? I’m not very good with names