Edith Layton Read Online Free Page B

what most single females I know are after.”
    “But I’m not one of them, am I?” she replied as sweetly. “And you don’t know me.”
    “Alas, my loss, which I feel more acutely each moment,” the viscount said, hand on his heart.
    “Are you sure?” she asked. “How many ladies do you number among your acquaintance who were jailed and then sent to the Antipodes? Not a whole lot, I’d wager,” she said with a roguish wink at Geoff.
    She looked at her inquisitor again. “I didn’t kill anyone, so you don’t have to pick up your knife in case you have to defend yourself, my lord. Actually, all I did was hold a brace of partridges my father brought home for me to cook. They were one brace too many, especially after the trout he’d taken the week before. Because they were poached from the woods of our neighbor, his dearest enemy, as our dinners often were. This time, the squire had my father followed. So we were caught with the goods and removed from the premises, as they put it. We were also speedily tried and convicted of a long string of similar offenses.”
    She raised her chin, and spoke in her haughtiest accents. “You can do a great many things in this country, my lord, but God help you if you take a ha’penny from a gentleman’s purse, or money in the form of a rabbit or a trout from his property. My father, who had been wellborn, was unfortunately overly fond of spirits and not lucky at his favorite sport: gambling. He was also in the habit of lifting his dinners when the spirit moved him, and it frequently did. He also particularly loved to vex the squire.”
    She gave a pretty shrug. “I suppose the squire had second thoughts at the last. My father had been a gentleman in the neighborhood before he drank and diced away his own house and lands, and gentlemen have a code of honor, I’m told. So the squire had our sentence commuted to transportation rather than hanging. And so there I was, and now here I am. Not in need of a husband at the moment, thank you very much,” she said with a sly smile, aping his exaggerated way of speaking. “Just happy to be home again at last, safe, and,” she added with a soft look to Geoff, “among friends.”
    “You are that!” the earl declared. “Don’t mind Lee. He teases unmercifully but there’s no real harm in him.”
    “Gad!” Leland murmured. “That sounds dreadful! Worse than if you thought I meant harm.”
    “The thing is that you are here now, as you say, Daisy,” the earl went on. “I’d like to help you settle in, if you’ll let me.”
    She felt the hard knot of tension ease in her chest. She gave him her best, most winning smile, and the whole truth. “Oh, Geoff,” she said on a sigh. “Of course. Thank you. That is exactly, precisely, absolutely what I wanted you to say.”
     
    “A lovely creature,” Leland commented after Daisy had left them. “Clever, too.” He sat back and swirled the brandy in his glass, but kept watching his host, who stood by the fire staring into it, thinking, long after Daisy’s coach had gone. “Very clever, indeed.”
    “She’s had to be. Poor child.”
    Leland’s silence was his question.
    “No harm in telling you the rest,” the earl said. “She told you how she got into her predicament, and if you’re going to help, you need to know more. You are going to help, aren’t you? You weren’t just being polite?”
    “I’m never just polite. I meant it. I’ll send word to an employment agency; she’ll have eager would-be companions lining up at her hotel door tomorrow morning, early. And I’ll help to outfit her, too. That, at least, will be a pleasure. She really is a charming armful. Her body is exceptional. Slender, but firm and full…Oh, don’t scowl. I could go on, but I won’t. Still, she has spectacular good looks, you know.”
    “I do.”
    “ That sounded very matrimonial,” Leland said with interest.
    “What? Oh, ‘I do’? What? Me, and her? What are you thinking of?