Miss Truelove Beckons (Classic Regency Romances Book 12) Read Online Free

down on the dusty hill and stared at the miniature for hours by the body of his first kill, a man not more than thirty and probably younger, a lieutenant like himself but with a family to support. What was the fellow doing unarmed away from his regiment? Deserting maybe? Or had he become detached from his regiment, lost in the unfamiliar Spanish wilderness? It did not matter. He was dead, and his wife and child would likely never know what happened to him. His body would rot in the blazing sunshine until scavengers pulled it apart.
    Drake sighed as he came back to the present and gazed out the window toward the gardens. That poor lieutenant’s was just one of the faces that haunted him, just one of the crimes he laid at his own door, made worse by the fact that when he remembered back he was almost certain the fellow shouted “Ne tirez pas!” just before falling. “Don’t shoot!” Would it have made a difference if Drake had understood or caught what he said? Could he have taken the chance that a Frenchman with a gun really would not—or could not—shoot him?
    He shrugged and turned away from the window, trying to recapture the thread of the conversation. They were speaking of London, and the little Season just starting. Conroy, his dark Byronic locks falling over his forehead in studied grace— his valet was a genius who considered his master his work of art—was performing his magic again, and Miss Swinley was laughing, her lovely face and green eyes alight with pleasure. She cast him a mischievous glance and made some remark that set Conroy into the whoops, but Drake didn’t catch what it was. He had a headache coming on, the usual outcome of too much socializing. He would never survive a London ball at this rate, and did not intend to be bullied into going down to London for the little Season, or any other Season, until he felt like it.
    What a gloomy Gus he had become, he thought, shifting and trying to ease the ache in his leg with a surreptitious rub. He was truly not fit for polite society. Horace had given it as his opinion that it was the lack of sleep that was making him a surly beast. Maybe, but maybe it was a thousand faces of the dead haunting him, from the first death he saw, a young man from an artillery regiment whose rifle exploded in his face, to young Lewis, the last body he had seen before passing out at Waterloo.
    His obsession with death was not healthy. He must find some way to get over the war, to get past all the men he had killed and seen killed. His mother worried, and he knew that she was anxious for him to move on with his life now that the wars were over. Arabella Swinley had been invited with the express intention of making a match with him. He vaguely remembered that in the brief break, while Napoleon was incarcerated at Elba and he was given leave to visit his parents in May of the previous year, Arabella had seemed a pleasant enough diversion. She was lovely and witty and good company for an evening’s flirtation. Had he raised expectations during that visit that he could not fulfill? He could not remember. Everything before Waterloo seemed like a hazy dream.
    She glanced at him again and cast him a flirtatious look, eyes downcast, and then slowly rising to meet his. There was a sweet expression of innocence and softness there, an invitation, a submission to his will. He should feel his blood race, his heart pound. The chase was on, and the doe was a willing victim. She was, as much as a young lady could, inviting him to pursue her. However, instead of the thrill of the hunt, all he felt was a vague distaste and the blooming of incipient dislike.
    It wasn’t fair to her. He was sure she was a very nice young lady, but . . . and there was that deadly “but” again. But he could not like her. But her voice made him cringe. But her actions were so calculated as to leave him cold. But she seemed as fraudulent and superficial as his “hero’s” welcome home had been in the