All I Want for Christmas Is a Duke Read Online Free

to remain upright in it. “You saw her?” he breathed out. “You saw Jane? When? Where?”
    His aunt smiled knowingly. “Just yesterday. She was astounded to know we were related and asked how you were. She remembers you quite fondly. Though she was a touch sad about the way you had left her and London. Did you know she scandalously called you by your birth name? Why is that?”
    His breath hitched in disbelief. By God. Jane. His Jane remembered him. Him. Martin. “I always insisted she call me Martin. She and I were friends. In my younger years.” When he was a mere fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen and his father was still alive. How he achingly remembered a regal, striking blonde with soulful green eyes. She had captured more than his heart. She had captured his soul. She was everything he wasn’t. Bold, outspoken, concise, and to the point. Jane was the first woman that he as a man—or, rather, a boy—had ever truly noticed. And wanted. And loved. “How is she? I haven’t seen her in years.”
    “She was snubbed by her circle and disowned by the earl when she took off to Drury Lane to sing.”
    “I know. I, uh…I snuck out of Eton and traveled into London just to see her onstage. I can still remember when I first heard her sing. It was incredible. There was this one song she sang, ‘Ah, Mio Prence,’ that devoured the last of me. She was—” His throat tightened. Even though she had been singing to a crowd of more than a hundred that night in the opera house, he felt like she was singing for him and only him. Mio prence, after all, was Italian for My prince. And that was what she had always made him feel like. A prince. “My father caned me for attending that performance, citing I disrespected Lord Chadwick for acknowledging her scandal and defiance. He then ensured I wasn’t given access to another carriage until I was eighteen.”
    He bit back a smile. “It was well worth it. I got around not seeing her by writing her countless letters.” Letters she never knew were from him. His smile faded. “And then she was engaged.” Which had crushed all of his hopes of having her for himself, though he knew, at seventeen, he had been far too young for her. “I lost sight of her after that. I did a six-year tour across Europe. I’m assuming she has children by now?” It hurt even asking it. For they should have been his children.
    “No. Sadly, her husband died before they had a chance to have any. They were only married two weeks.”
    His pulse almost choked him. Two weeks? So she wasn’t married anymore? “I didn’t know.”
    “It’s been many years now, but it affected her greatly. She retired from singing and hasn’t been onstage since. Apparently, she thinks herself cursed. I will have you know she never leaves the house on Twelfth Night. Her husband died on Twelfth Night. It was rather strange. He was talking one moment and dropped without a breath in the next.”
    Martin swallowed. The fact that Jane believed in curses and tales of Twelfth Night bespoke of the romantic soul he remembered all too well. The first time he had met her, when he was all but fifteen and she was a glorious twenty, Jane had been exquisitely dressed in debutante white and had been staring up at a painting in his father’s drawing room. It was an ordinary painting of a garden at sunset but the fact that she had been staring at it so intently made it extraordinary.
    After pacing the corridor several times and drumming up enough courage to approach her, seeing they were alone, he had veered back into the drawing room and quietly asked her what she thought of the painting. She turned and with vivid green eyes filled with endless expression confided in a conspiratorial tone, “It lacks the breath of mist and magic. There should be faeries painted into it. Though not ones you can easily see. They should be hidden within the blades of grass and the glint of the sun so that only those who take the time to truly look are