She drew in a bracing breath and looked straight into the laughing blue eyes of the Duke of Rushton.

Chapter Five

“Your Grace,” she said, between tightly clenched teeth. “Are you perhaps often given to following women into book shops?”
He blinked as if baffled by the tartness of her speech. “Not generally, no,” he said. “As it happens, I did not follow you by design. I was seeking a book for a friend, and you simply happened to be here when I arrived.”
Skeptically, she inquired, “Which book?”
“Mansfield Park,” he said. “It has proven difficult to locate. This is not the first book shop I’ve visited today.”
She narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing him. “And yet you continued browsing?”
“I saw you reaching for this,” he said, holding aloft the book. “I thought to assist you. Good God,” he said, as he read the title for the first time. “Byron? Really?”
“He’s quite popular,” she said defensively, snatching the volume from his fingers. “I don’t recall asking for your opinion of my taste in literature.”
“That’s good, because I surely would have offended you with it.” He scowled as if the book had rendered some heinous insult to him. “I doubt I will ever understand what it is that people see in his work. He says little of substance and yet somehow manages to go on and on about it.”
Jilly was startled into a flutter of laughter; he had somehow managed to echo the very thought she had had often enough about the much-celebrated author. While she did not precisely dislike him, she certainly did not hold him in the same regard that most of the Ton did.
“If you want something worth reading,” he said as he scanned the shelves and selected another book, “might I recommend this instead?” He offered the book to her, and she took it with a strange sense of astonishment, as if the very earth had tilted beneath her feet in an effort to cast her off.
“I have it already,” she said, staring down at the leather-bound cover of The Wanderer. It had been widely criticized upon release due to its portrayal of a woman desperately seeking control over her own destiny, its unflattering depiction of the upper class. But she had liked it quite a bit, and it occupied an honored space on her book shelf, a novel not intended simply to provide escape from a harsh reality but to remind the reader of it. That the duke thought it worth reading when she had yet to hear a single flattering word said of it amongst any of her acquaintances was surprising.
“I enjoyed it,” he said. “Despite what the critics said of it, I found it to be a compelling narrative.”
So had she. She had empathized with the protagonist, who had found herself cast adrift, toppled from her genteel life into poverty. In her life she had found that men frequently considered women good for nothing but decoration. It had come as no surprise, then, that the novel had been roundly condemned by them, as they were loath to consider that there could be anything of a woman’s struggles that was worthy of note.
“I wouldn’t have thought you were the sort that would enjoy it,” she said.
He arched a golden brow, his mouth curled into a sardonic smile.