Douglas: Lord of Heartache by Grace Burrowes Read Free Book Online Page A

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    “She enjoys it. Do you like children?”
    “I hardly know. Miss Rose is the first child with whom I’ve any acquaintance, unless you count her little cousins at Willowdale and Oak Hall. And they, thankfully, are still quite in the nursery.”
    “Mama, I’m ready!” Rose careened back into the room, a small bonnet in her hand. “Can we go now, and will Mister… Cousin Douglas walk with us?”
    “He will,” Douglas said, deliberately cutting off any objection Miss Hollister might have made and silently excusing the child’s faulty grammar—and use of familiar address.
    The girl chattered incessantly down two flights of stairs, through the house, and out onto the back terraces. She reported on what she saw, what she thought, what she felt, and what she would have felt if various contingencies—such as a wild unicorn from Mongolia galloping into the garden—were to occur. When they reached the gardens below the back terrace, Rose galloped off to see if a certain bush still had any flowers, abandoning her mother to Douglas’s company.
    Had Rose’s mother ever been so voluble and carefree?
    “Managing a few thousand acres must seem a lark after trying to manage that one child.”
    “Sometimes,” Miss Hollister replied. “Not always. An estate can’t love you back.”
    Douglas gave her a curious look, but she said no more on this topic, and he did not ask her to elucidate particulars, though elucidating particulars was one of her strengths. Miss Hollister had walked off a little way to sit on a stone bench with a clear view of her cavorting daughter.
    “She’ll come back from time to time, then go off, then come back,” Miss Hollister explained. “We might as well have that discussion about our calendar, my lord.”
    Douglas gestured to the bench. “May I?”
    She swished her skirts aside. “Of course.”
    “I foresee a complication, Miss Hollister,” Douglas said, his gaze on the child as she systematically sniffed each rose in a blooming bed. “You have apparently instructed your daughter to refer to me as Cousin Douglas, and yet you, who would be my closer relation were I Rose’s cousin, are still referring to me as my lord, and Lord Amery, and so forth.”
    “Children are often permitted less formal address.”
    He certainly hadn’t been as a child. “Will it not confuse Rose if you address Heathgate and Greymoor by their Christian names, and yet I remain a title to you?”
    “It’s time Rose learned something of proper address. You might as well be the example.”
    He expected stubbornness from her on this matter—on every matter thus far and for the foreseeable future as well—and because he, too, was stubborn, he liked it about her, for the most part.
    “When we travel to Sussex,” Douglas said, “you have assured me you will do so only as my relation or something of that nature. You do not refer to your familial relations formally, though both of your cousins hold titles. Rose knows this much and will surely remark on your inconsistency at some point when others are in her hearing.”
    Children were demons about adult inconsistency. Even Douglas knew that much of their natures.
    “Do as you will.” Miss Hollister stalked off in the direction of her daughter.
    That was not quite clear permission to address her by her Christian name, which was, of course, what he had been angling for. She did call Heathgate, Greymoor, and even Fairly—Astrid Alexander’s brother, and thus no relation to Miss Hollister at all—by their Christian names, and she had insisted she and Douglas travel to Sussex as relations.
    “Mama!” Rose’s scream pierced the afternoon quiet, a scream conveying fear and pain. “Maaaaaaamaaaaaa!” The screaming continued as Douglas sprang off the bench and vaulted hedges and walls to get to the child.
    “Rose!” Douglas bellowed. “Hold still. Stop thrashing this instant!” Then in a more civil voice, he called out, “She’s all right.” And she more