A Reckless Desire Read Online Free

worse. Even her own father had been mortified, and when he drank too much he’d wept from the shame of siring such a daughter.
    “A Di Rossi who cannot dance,” he said again, marveling. “Who would have thought it possible?”
    “But that is why I have come to you, my lord,” she said fervently. “Last night you offered me the first chance I’ve ever had to change things, a chance to make them all see that I’m more than their chambermaid.”
    He leaned back against the chair. “I did?” he asked uneasily. “How in blazes could I have done that?”
    Her heart sank. He didn’t remember. But now that she’d come this far, she’d no choice but to continue.
    “You did, my lord,” she said, taking another step closer as she willed him to remember. “You said you could make me into a great actress who could play queens. You said you could teach me to be better than Madame Adelaide, that you could—”
    “Everett’s wager,” he said slowly. “You’re the girl he wanted me to transform, aren’t you?”
    Now that he’d remembered, she wished he’d show more enthusiasm.
    “Yes, my lord, yes, yes,” she said, eagerness and desperation making her talk too fast. “I would be the best student any teacher ever had. I’d make you so proud of me, my lord. You’d see. I’d make sure you’d win that wager from Lord Everett.”
    He sighed. “Do you truly believe I’ve the power to change you like that?”
    “I do, my lord,” she said promptly. “I must. Because if I don’t, my lord, all I’ll have ahead of me is an entire
life
of being ordered about by Magdalena, and that—oh, I do not think I would survive that.”
    “I know I couldn’t,” he agreed. “Given time, she’d make a turnip weep and beg for mercy.”
    He was obviously considering it, his expression thoughtful.
    “Please, my lord.” She pressed her palms together in dramatic supplication. “It might have seemed no more than a gentlemen’s wager to you, but to me—to me it was the purest, rarest magic, like a gift from the very heavens.”
    He rose abruptly in a great swath of yellow silk and went to stand at one of the windows, his arms folded across his chest and his back toward her.
    Was he dismissing her? Had her plea been too much, too impassioned? Even though she had lived in London for most of her life, she still forgot how much more reserved Englishmen were.
    “Forgive me if I’ve spoken too much, my lord,” she said sadly to that imposing back. “But it’s only that—”
    “Can you read?”
    “Yes, I can read,” she said, taken aback that he’d ask that. Just because the Di Rossis danced did not mean they were unlettered fools.
    “Not just claptrap and nonsense, either,” he said. “Can you read true English?”
    “Of course I can,” she said. “I have even read many of your English playwrights, too, so you needn’t ask that.”
    He nodded toward the window.
“Ma sei più al tuo agio con la madrelingua, l’italiano di Napoli.”
    Because he was still turned from her, she didn’t bother to hide her dismay. He’d just declared that she was more at ease in her mother tongue, the Italian of Naples (which wasn’t true), and he’d turned it into a self-righteous little statement that was designed more to display his own facility in that language than to test hers—hardly an auspicious sign of a sympathetic teacher. He wasn’t alone, of course. Every other Englishman that she’d ever met who’d claimed to speak Italian was much the same. They might know the words, but they hadn’t the heart or the passion to speak proper Italian, especially Neapolitan Italian. Living in the shadow of a volcano, as everyone in Naples did, changed everything.
    Not that she could tell Lord Rivers that, not at all. She’d learned that much about male pride from observing how deftly Magdalena had managed that fragile article with her various lovers.
    “You speak Neapolitan Italian as well as any Englishman,
il mio