Bertrice Small - Deceived

Aurora arose quietly and walked across the lawns toward her husband. St. John had really, as the dowager remarked more than once, bitten off more than he could chew when he married Isabelle Bowen. He had indeed gotten his just deserts in a loving martinet of a wife, as Isabelle had turned out to be. She utterly adored him, and to his amazement St. John felt the same way about her. She ran his house with an iron hand, and bore him beautiful children; but she expected total obedience from her husband, her children, and her servants. She had totally engineered her courtship and elopement, the dowager said. Poor St. John had never realized he was being taken in hand until the ring had been placed upon Isabelle's dainty finger-and in St. John's aristocratic nose.

Coming up to her husband, Aurora slipped her hand through his arm. "What a perfect day," she said. "Could it be any better?"

He smiled down at her. "No," he agreed. "It could not."

"Mama!" Her eldest son tugged at her skirts. "Mama! There are new puppies in the stables! May I have a puppy? Please!"

"How many puppies are there, Georgie?" she asked him.

"Five, Mama! They are liver and white, and Franklin says they'll be ready to leave their mother in eight or nine weeks. Their eyes aren't opened yet. They are so tiny, Mama. I may have one, mayn't I?"

Aurora looked up at her husband. "If Georgie gets a puppy, the others will want one too," she warned him, and then she laughed at the look on his face. "Oh, very well," she said, and she looked down at her son. "Yes, Georgie, you may have a puppy. And so may your brothers and sisters too."

"But I get to pick first because I am the eldest," the boy said. "I am the eldest, and I am the heir."

"I was born five minutes before you were," his twin sister, Charlotte, said. "I don't want a puppy, Mama. I want one of Pusskin's new kittens, and so does Cally. If he gets a puppy, I get a kitten."

"Cally isn't old enough for a kitten," Georgie said. "Or a puppy either," he concluded. "You just want two kittens, Lotte."

"You're just jealous because I was born before you were," his sister replied. "Cally will want a kitten if I get one, Mama."

"You may be older," the boy replied, "but I am the heir. I will be Duke of Farminster one day, and I shall banish you to a nunnery, Lotte."

"You can't do that!" she cried. "What's a nunnery, Mama? He can't do that, can he?"

"A nunnery is where ladies who have decided to devote their lives to God live, Lotte," her mother said, "and no, Georgie cannot banish you to a nunnery. One day you shall fall in love, and marry."

"And I shall marry a duke who is even richer than you will be," Charlotte Hawkesworth told her brother smugly.

"Will not!" he cried.

"Will too!" she replied.

"Sheep face!" he insulted her.

"Frog's head!" she taunted him, and giving him a quick smack she ran off, her twin in hot pursuit to gain his revenge.

The duke looked into his wife's face. His deep blue eyes were dancing wickedly. Tenderly he patted her belly. "Nonetheless," he said, "I do love children, my darling, and I love you even more than the day I married you. I think our life together a fairy tale."

Georgie Hawkesworth had caught up with his sister. He grabbed at her curls, and catching one, yanked hard upon it. Lotte shrieked so loudly that the sheep in the nearby field scattered madly.

The duke began to chuckle.

"And they lived happily ever after," Aurora replied, and then joined her husband in merry laughter.