Heiress Without a Cause by Sara Ramsey Read Free Book Online Page A

the twins as a pretext for visiting, it was more proper to drive.
    Maria and Catherine were twenty-one, born to the sweet doormat the old duke had married when Ferguson’s mother died. They sat on the opposite seat, draped in black, blonde hair pulled into tight chignons and blue eyes firmly fixed out the windows. Except for their hair, they had little in common with their mother, who had died almost two years earlier. In fact, their contained poise and stubborn chins reminded him of his full sister, Ellie. He hoped the chins were an anomaly. He had never been able to manage Ellie, and he didn’t want to try again with two of her. But a bit of spine would be nice, if only to make them more attractive to suitors.
    The coach was enclosed and the view unremarkable, but they studiously avoided his gaze. Other than a single awkward breakfast earlier in the week, when he surprised them on his first day back in London, he had not seen them in a decade. Even before that, he hardly knew them. He was shipped off to Eton less than a month after his mother died and he avoided the nursery — and memories of the happier years he spent there with Ellie — on the rare holidays when he came home.
    He knew their names were Catherine and Maria, but it was a shame no one thought to introduce one to one’s own siblings. He could not tell them apart — and if they never spoke, he might never discover which was which. Imagine if he agreed to an engagement for the wrong one?
    He cleared his throat. They ignored him.
    Finally, he said, “Ladies, you do know that I shall not hurt you, correct?”
    This finally got their attention. They swiveled toward him, each giving him an identical once-over. Then, the one on the right said, “We do not know that with certainty, your grace.”
    So at least one of them had a bit of backbone. He smiled. “I’m your brother, not a distant cousin. You may call me Ferguson.”
    “You may as well be a distant cousin, for all we’ve seen you,” the other one said.
    They both had backbone. And from the sudden mutinous cast to their mouths, they would use it with him.
    Perhaps backbone wasn’t a quality to be prized in younger sisters. “I had my reasons for staying away, I assure you.”
    If he thought his quelling tone would dampen them, he was wrong. “Your reasons were serious enough to leave us to our own devices with Father?” the right twin asked.
    “If you were so unhappy in his house, you should have married. It would have at least been an escape.”
    They both laughed, a bitter sound incongruous with their innocent appearances. “And where should we have found husbands? We still haven’t debuted. Other than walking in the park, we never leave the house.”
    “Surely you go shopping, or calling on other ladies?”
    “Father wouldn’t let us,” they said simultaneously. The twin on the right continued. “With you turning into a notorious rake, Henry drinking himself to death, Ellie making herself the most scandalous widow in London, and something clearly off about Richard, Father was determined to keep us from misbehaving. He found it easiest to keep us at home.”
    The duke’s children had not lived up to their breeding. Richard and Henry, the unstable sons from his first wife, had raced toward death since they were in their teens. Ferguson and Ellie, products of the duke’s only love match, were cast aside when their mother died and spent a lifetime making their father pay for it. After his third marriage, the duke declared that his first two children were too strange, his second pair too emotional, but his future children would obey him. The twins must have inherited his stubbornness, though, despite his attempts to corral them.
    He sighed. “Well, my dears, I am quite ready to find you husbands. We’re going to see your new chaperone now. With any luck, she can get you out and affianced within the month.”
    If they were mutinous before, now they looked beyond ready to toss him out of