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

streets of London. Perhaps he was manufacturing reasons to dislike her. If so, he could not help himself.
    And he . . . well, he was not what she thought. If she only knew! He was no hero, he was a killer.
    His roving gaze wandered the room and lit on Miss Truelove Becket, sitting just behind the others, in a shadow. She, too, was looking his way, but her eyes were calm and serious, with a hint of sweet understanding. There was no demand there, no expectation, nothing for him to live up to. Blessed relief! He moved to a chair next to hers, and she observed him gravely.
    “I hope you will be comfortable here at Lea Park, Miss Becket,” he said.
    She smiled. “Oh, I shall make the attempt,” she said. “With a mere eighty or so rooms, three dozen servants or more, no doubt, gardens to enjoy, a park to wander, a river . . . I shall try to be satisfied with that after the luxurious accommodation afforded me as the vicar’s daughter in a very small Cornish village.”
    He laughed out loud at her droll comment and sober delivery, and felt the others’ gaze collectively fasten on him. He nodded politely in their direction, but then bent his head toward Miss Becket, anxious to hear her lovely voice again. He had not expected from her slight stature that it would be so low, nor so achingly sweet. “When I first got back from a field hospital in Belgium and stayed briefly in our London house, I was almost overwhelmed by the opulence of my surroundings. I had been on the march for so long, and it seemed obscene how well-provisioned the average English aristocrat is.”
    “I can imagine that,” Miss Becket said, her head on one side. “But the contrast is even more absurd when one realizes the chasm that yawns between the aristocracy and their own people, the people of England.”
    “Perhaps I have been used to taking that for granted. But at least our people have not had to deal with their homeland being invaded by marauding bands of foreign armies, all poorly provisioned, and so scavenging from the land anything they can take. I’m afraid the country folk of Belgium will have little in the way of harvest this year, after the trampling we gave their crops.”
    Her brilliant eyes regarded him with interest. “I had been thinking, my lord, that I should like to learn more about your experiences in the war, but then I thought that was impertinent, to ask you to bring out stories that must be harrowing for you to remember, and merely for my edification.”
    “I have not spoken of it much. Too many people do not want the truth when they ask, and I will only ever tell the truth.” He spoke from bitter experience. Conroy, his best friend, the companion of his youth, was a willing audience when Drake first arrived home. But he did not really want the truth, he wanted stories of valor and glory, a major-general borne from the field of battle after a glorious victory. Conroy had stopped asking after the first ruthless tale of blood and misery. Drake was afraid he had lost forever the ability to make small talk. He was not fit for the drawing room, nor for polite company.
    “That is ever the way of people though, my lord. In my village many of the gentry wish to help the poor, but they want it to be the picturesque poor, in rags, but clean rags, you see, despite the lack of firewood to heat the water to clean the clothes. They want to see clean, pretty children with bare feet and round rosy cheeks, not the half-starved babies of the abandoned wife, or the gin-soaked farm laborer who beats his family on Sunday, or the dirty little heathens children become when insufficient attention is paid to their upbringing.” She sighed with a wry grimace. “To gain their help for the poor I must sometimes dress the truth, as well as the children, in prettier clothing.”
    He gazed down at her frowning. She returned his fierce gaze with her steady blue eyes, wide but not alarmed. “I refuse to prettify war!” he growled. It had turned his