Nicola and the Viscount Read Online Free

penniless girls like Nicola—even penniless girls of good family and excellent education—to marry them. Love matches were all well and good, but, as Madame had often reminded them, starvation is not pleasant. Young men who did not marry as their fathers instructed them often found themselves cut off without a cent. And it was perfectly untrue that one could live on love alone. Love could not, after all, put bread on the table and meat in the larder.
    But from parental objections to a match between her and the God, at least, Nicola felt she was safe. Lord and Lady Farelly seemed prodigiously fond of her. Why, in the short time since she’d come to live with them, they seemed already to think of her as a second daughter, including her in all of their family conversations, and even occasionally dropping their formal address of her as Miss Sparks, and calling her Nicola.
    No, should Lord Sebastian see fit to propose to her, she could foresee no difficulties from that quarter. But would he? Would he propose to a girl who was merely pretty but not beautiful? A girl with freckles on her nose, who had only recently been allowed to put her hair up? An orphan with only a bit of property in Northumberland and a vast knowledge of the romantic poets?
    He had to. He just had to! Nicola felt it as surely as she felt that the color ochre on a redheaded woman was an abomination.
    Really, the only cloud in Nicola’s otherwise sunny existence was Nathaniel Sheridan, who took every opportunity that arose—and there were many, as the two of them were often thrown together at various balls and assemblies—to tease and bedevil her about Lord Sebastian.
    But Nicola tried resolutely to put Nathaniel from her thoughts as she penned her letter home, dwelling only upon the many merits of the God—to whom she correctly referred as Lord Sebastian in writing: only in her many private conversations with Eleanor, whom she saw with pleasing regularity, did she call him by their pet name for him—so that when she later wrote to inform Nana of their engagement—and please God, there would be an engagement—it would not be such a shock.
    It was as she was describing the God’s godlike dancing ability that Lord Sebastian himself walked into the room. Nicola hastily hid beneath a sheet of foolscap the lines she’d been penning.
    â€œGood morning, Mother,” Sebastian said, stooping to kiss Lady Farelly, who sat writing her own letters in a robe of stunning blue satin that, to Nicola’s knowing eye, must have cost at least as much as one of Lord Farelly’s new hunters, of which he was not a little proud. “I’m off to Tatt’s to see a man about a horse. Is there anything I can get for you while I’m out?”
    Lady Farelly made a distracted noise. She was busy writing letters of her own. Only hers were letters of regret, declining some of the many invitations Honoria had received to various balls and entertainments. A girl just out could be invited to as many as twenty events in a week, and had to be scrupulously careful which she chose to attend. The wrong dinner party could result in a connection with a bad crowd from which a debutante might never recover.
    His duty to his mother having been dispatched, the God turned his attention to his sister and Nicola. He did not have the teasing sort of relationship with Honoria that Nathaniel and Eleanor Sheridan shared. Instead, the viscount was unfailingly polite to his sister, which Nicola thought only right and proper behavior, for a god.
    â€œAnd how will you two occupy yourselves today?” he wanted to know, though the question seemed more directed at Nicola than at Honoria.
    Still, it was Honoria who answered, as she lazily flipped through the pages of a copy of Lady’s Magazine —Honoria disliked letter writing, and, being a bit of a standoffish type of girl, hadn’t anyone to write to anyway, having made virtually no