Leslie Lafoy Read Online Free Page A

privilege were such burdens for women to bear. “I don’t think that you can honestly characterize your situation as being a hideous trial of feminine independence and prerogative. I have acceded to your every condition and allowed you far more time to accommodate your thinking to the changed circumstances than I had originally intended.”
    Acceded? Allowed?
How very much like a man. “The fact that—” Caroline bit the rest of the words off and looked away. “Never mind,” she finished tartly. “I’d have a better chance of reasoning with a post than I do with you.”
    “I think that I’ve given a highly credible performance of a reasonable man.”
    “ ‘Performance’ being the key word,” she countered, remembering how he’d looked her up and down when she’d come back into the showroom, ready to go. How he’d cocked that damn brow of his and then not only pointedly looked away, but made patently obvious efforts to avoid looking at her again. “But credible? Reasonable? I’m afraid not. Imperious I would be willing to concede, though. Pompous and disdainful, too. And thoroughly underhanded.”
    “Underhanded?”
    Out of all the less than sterling qualities,
that
was the one that concerned him? “There was no footman guarding my back door,” she reminded him.
    “Oh, yes, that.”
    He’d all but waved his hand in dismissal! Marriage to a stranger wasn’t looking quite as awful as it had earlier in the day. “And the purchasing of the building so that you could seize my business and force me to bend to your will.”
    His brow went up again. “Do you always keep such detailed score?”
    “Yes,” she supplied as the coach angled out of traffic and slowed.
    “It’s going to be a very long autumn.”
    “It is, indeed. Unless there’s a God and you spend much of your time traveling about to inspect all the various and wondrous estates you’ve inherited.”
    “No weather will be too foul,” he muttered, leaning forward to turn the door handle. He was already out on the walk when he said, “I shouldn’t be overly long. Stay there.”
    Sit. Heel. Roll over. Be a good dog.
Her teeth clenched and her blood pounding, Caroline grabbed a handful of her skirts and vaulted out of the carriage door before he could get it closed behind him.
    He blinked. His gaze dropped to the vicinity of her waist and then snapped back up to her eyes. Closing the space between them so that she had to tilt her head and arch her back to see his face, he glowered down at her and said, “I must insist that you get back into the carriage.”
    “You may insist all you like.”
    He bent his head to snarl into the side of her bonnet, “No lady should be seen entering a house of ill repute.”
    Caroline glanced past him to the sagging façade of thebuilding—the building with the red curtains and the half-dressed woman standing in the open doorway. Her stomach went queasy in realization. She’d blundered. Hugely. How many times had her mother warned her of the consequences of not controlling her temper? Enough that she’d become very good at hasty but strategic retreats. She took a step backward and lifted her chin. “But sitting in a carriage parked in front of one
is
acceptable?”
    “If you hadn’t gotten out, no one would have known you were here,” he said tightly, taking her firmly by the elbow and turning her toward the still open carriage door.
    She climbed back inside because it was the only dignified thing to do at that point. “Is one of my sisters in there?” she asked to cover what was, in the final analysis, a retreat.
    “Lady Simone,” he answered, releasing her elbow. “Now, kindly let me be about getting her out of there with the least amount of embarrassment possible to any of us.”
    He didn’t wait for her to offer approval or a pithy comment before he closed the door. Through the open window, she watched as he resumed his earlier course. He didn’t get much farther than he had the first