A Most Unladylike Adventure Read Online Free Page B

to that she deserved this and why she was protesting every step of the way. She reassured herself that could only happen if she was caught and resolved to stay in this scandalous disguise for the rest of her life if she had to, rather than endure such a fate. So she did her best to glare defiance at the wretched man while she convinced herself even his company was preferable to roaming the streets now she was grown up and vulnerable, open to the use and abuse such a reckless female might attract from rogues like this one, if she wandered about even more freely dressed in what was left of Charlton’s fantasy disguise.
    ‘Aren’t you willing to add me to your stable of lucrative lovers then, my darling doxy?’ hesuddenly asked as if he had every right to insult her.
    He’d only set eyes on her twice in his life, for goodness’ sake, and she doubted he even remembered their first encounter now, given the reek of brandy on his breath whenever he came near her. Not knowing her at all, he somehow thought he had every right to eye her like a starving dog slavering over a juicy bone—surely he couldn’t know a visceral, wayward part of her was inclined to look at him the same way and only made the rest more furious.
    ‘Firstly, I’m very particular whom I allow to even call me darling, Captain Darke, and secondly, I certainly wouldn’t take a man like you to my bed, even if I wasn’t,’ she informed him haughtily, kicking herself for letting him know she’d been fascinated enough to find out what his name was after that first sight of him in Kit’s office.
    ‘You put such a high price on your charms, then?’ he asked as if he was surprised.
    She had to bless his consumption of brandy for fogging his wits that he hadn’t even noticed her
faux pas
, even if it fuddled him into mistaking her for Kit’s mistress rather than his sister. After all, she didn’t want him to thinkof her as his employer’s close kin, did she? No, of course she didn’t. If he knew who she really was, he might ruin everything by handing her back to her temporary guardians, so it was far better if he thought her no better than she should be and let her stop here for the night.
    ‘A very high one indeed,’ she assured him with a toss of her head, which she hoped told him it was beyond anything he could pay, if he had anything left of his share of the last cargo after buying enough brandy to inebriate even him.
    ‘How’s a man supposed to know if a woman’s price is worth the paying when he’s not even been permitted to check the quality of the goods? Strikes me you’re asking a man to buy a pig in a poke, my dear.’
    Good heavens! The appalling man really thought she was a streetwalker, casually selling her body for a bed and food in her belly as well as the clothes on her back. More of a roof-walker, her sense of the ridiculous reminded her, and the past years of suffocating respectability threatened to fall away under the liberty of his wild conclusions about Miss Alstone, spinster of impeccable birth, if not exactly unimpeachable upbringing. Maybe Aunt Prudence was right and she’d never bethe proper lady she should have been since birth, if only said birth hadn’t taken place in a rundown lodging-house, so perilously close to the rookeries of St Giles it was almost a part of them.
    She’d never know now how differently she might have felt about the world if she’d come into it at lofty Wychwood Court, a vast Tudor mansion in the county of Derbyshire that was the Alstones’ ancestral home. A house she’d never been invited to visit and doubtless never would be now, since her Alstone cousins seemed intent on ignoring any relations low enough to run the streets for most of their childhood and then lower the family name still more by taking to trade in order to make up their lamentable lack of the proverbial penny to bless themselves with. Reminded how little she’d enjoyed a life of cramping propriety, she made herself meet