If I Fall Read Online Free Page A

timing.
    It had been almost four months since that terrible night, when Jason Cummings, the Duke of Rayne, had dashed everyone’s hopes and called off their engagement. Shortly thereafter, Lord and Lady Forrester had retired with their daughters for the spare remainder of the Little Season to Primrose Manor, the family seat near Portsmouth. Four months should have been plenty of time for people to forget. For Sarah to forget.
    It had been peaceful at Primrose. Comfortable. There, Sarah had room to breathe.
    But it was also quiet. And the quiet only let the memories slip in.
    As such, she had been determined to return to London for the Season proper. New gowns, new plays, new people. It would be, in her estimation, a fresh start.
    She had expected some questions. Some whispers.
    But not like this.
    It hadn’t helped that Jason had been so bloody
good
about the matter! Once the engagement was called off, he told everyone who would listen that absolutely no fault lay at Sarah’s door, that she was nothing if not a kind and deserving young lady. And then, blessedly, he left town for an extended stay on the Continent.
    But when Jason left London, he left the gossipmongers behind.
    The day after they first arrived back, the gossip columnsnoted their arrival. Strange, as no one really noted the comings and goings of the Forresters before. They were proper young ladies of good family, of course, but not high ranking enough or scandalous enough to pique a newspaperman’s interest. For heaven’s sake, her father was president of the boring, stuffy, academic Historical Society. The Forresters could not have been less salacious if they tried.
    But there it was. In bold print.
    “The Girl Who Lost a Duke Returns to Town.”
    After that, Sarah avoided the papers.
    So she hadn’t known about the announcement. Until yesterday, when one of her mother’s “friends” told her.
    “Oh, my dear,” Lady Whitford said, coming over to clasp Sarah’s hands in a show of sympathy early in the morning. Too early, really, to be paying calls. And far too early to be wearing such a ridiculous silk costume of patriotic ribbons across her bodice. But there she was, her round face shining with predatory concern, the feathers from her striped turban flopping into her earnest eyes. “How can you stand it? How can you go on?”
    And then she told her. The Duke of Rayne had been married last week in Provence, to noted historian Winnifred Crane. Sarah tried to feel something. Anything. Other than a wistful sort of dread.
    Because, while Sarah had been certain that she would be quite able to go on, contrary to Lady Whitford’s opinion, it seemed more and more people were just as certain that she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, they’d said. Enough people repeated the same thing to her with wide, sad eyes, and thus she began to question herself.
    Will I be able to go on? … Should I even try?
    She held out a small hope that something, anything would happen to distract the population. A global catastrophe, a declaration of war, anything. But sadly, the only bit of gossip involved some gentleman who got caught in, and then managed to escape from, Burma—and since most people could not locate Burma on a map, it was not nearly of enough interest to waylay the ogling of the “Girl Who Lost a Duke.”
    Therefore, the dinner party that Lady Forrester had planned for weeks, as a casual reintroduction of herself as a hostess, while also easing her daughters into society again, had been a clamorous game of expectations. People had been expecting her to break. To make some sort of comment about the situation.
    And the whispers and stares had made her want to do nothing more than oblige them.
    To give in to gravity’s pull.
    Bridget’s imperious voice broke the silence from within the drawing room, and broke through Sarah’s racing thoughts. “And
smoothly
would have been if anyone had bothered to remember that they were there to meet me,