Leslie Lafoy Read Online Free

door. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t inherited one. He had a slew of servants. Enough that he was constantly either tripping over them or bumping into them. At some point he was going to have to learn to think like a nobleman and actually use them.
    And given the apparent intelligence, willfulness, and self-confidence of Caroline Dutton—no, it was Lady Caroline—he needed to get his feet under himself as quickly as possible. If he didn’t, the charade was going to be blown to tiny, embarrassingly public bits.

  Two  
    HIS GAZE VERY STUDIOUSLY FASTENED ON THE WORLD outside the carriage—on anything other than the woman sitting in the opposite seat—Drayton mulled his predicament. Caroline was what? His cousin three times removed? Which surely qualified them as hardly related at all. It certainly wasn’t as though she were a sister or a first cousin. So given all that, there really wasn’t anything unholy or grossly unnatural about noticing her physical attributes and imagining what might come of their forced companionship.
    Brown wasn’t the color he would have chosen for her if he’d been asked for his opinion. And there was something rather off-putting about wool; silks and satins and fine, thin lawns were ever so much more inviting to the touch. But the fact that her traveling costume was made of brown wool and covered her from neck to wrist to ankle didn’t do a damned thing to detract from the wonderful curves it encased.
    Neither did the little grosgrain-trimmed cape, the ruched overskirt, the fashionably sized bustle, or the straight skirt with the narrow knife pleats in brown satin around the hem. Combined with the perfectly proper andmatching brown kid gloves and the feather-adorned hat that hid most of her hair and made her eyes impossibly huge and her skin look like alabaster . . .
    God, he was doing it again, he silently groaned. She was legally under his protection until a suitable husband could be found for her. Ogling your ward and wondering just how much of her incredibly tempting shape was due to corset boning and lacings and how much was the woman herself . . . It was not only socially unacceptable, it was a sign of complete mental depravity.
    He had to get control of himself, firmly and quickly. And the surest way to do that, he knew from experience, was to become immersed in a battle. He slid a glance in her direction and squelched the idea of commenting on the drab color of her clothes. With his kind of luck, she’d retaliate by stripping naked and throwing them out the window. How a woman who’d been suddenly handed far more than she could have ever dreamed possible could sit on a plush seat in a private carriage and look so beautiful and so put out by it all . . .
    He cocked a brow and seized the opportunity. “Are you planning to sulk for the rest of today?”
    “Yes,” she answered crisply and without bothering to look at him. “And, quite likely, tomorrow and the next day, too.”
    “Just as a point of information, gentlemen prefer their companions to be cheerfully distracting.”
    She slowly turned her head to meet his gaze. “I see a series of great disappointments in your future.”
    Yes, well, so did he and he preferred not to think about them. “You said that your Jane has a key to the shop,” he countered, pressing on with his plan for distraction. “You wrote her an excruciatingly long and detailed explanation.You have more than adequately fulfilled all of your obligations as a proprietress and as an employer, and are being whisked off to a life of considerable luxury and great privilege. Forgive me, but I fail to see what it is that you have to sulk about.”
    “Forgive me,” she said dryly, “if I’m less than delighted to be on a course I wasn’t allowed to choose for myself.”
    “And do women in your world commonly get to chart their own ways?”
    “Yes, until a man enters their lives and ties a millstone about their necks.”
    Ah, yes, money and