Nicola and the Viscount Read Online Free Page B

out both hands toward the spindly, nattily garbed man standing beside one of Lord Farelly’s splendid marble fireplaces. “How good it is to see you.”
    Norbert Blenkenship—now Lord Renshaw, thanks to Nicola’s father, who had left his title to his only living male relative, but all of the property that came with that title to Nicola—had been blessed at birth by neither fortune nor nature. He’d made up for the former inadequacy by marrying, through some miracle of fate, an heiress who’d had the good sense, after realizing what she’d done, to die. Nicola had always ungenerously supposed that the poor woman had rolled over one morning, gotten a good look at her husband, and promptly expired. In any case, she had left the unprepossessing Norbert the whole of her fortune, with the exception of what had been settled upon their only offspring, Harold.
    The real mystery, of course, was why the poor woman had chosen Norbert Blenkenship at all. Lord Renshaw was markedly unattractive. He had never, in the sixteen years Nicola had known him, smiled. Not even once. His thin lips seemed permanently set in a frown of disapproval, and he tended to dress in the somber colors of an undertaker, though his wife had died long ago, several years before Nicola had been born. That, and his nearly constant complaints about everything from his health to the state of the empire, were what had earned him from Nicola the pet name of the Grouser.
    â€œNicola,” the Grouser said somberly, giving her fingers the barest of squeezes before dropping them. “I see you are looking well…except for some freckles along the nose. Shame about that. You should be more careful. Sun damage can permanently ruin a lady’s complexion. Still, you should count yourself fortunate that you have not, as I have, succumbed to the ague that is sweeping through this wretched town.”
    As if to emphasize his words, the Grouser reached into his waistcoat pocket, withdrew a large linen handkerchief, and blew his nose into it loudly and lengthily, causing Nicola to regret having touched his hands a moment before, as doubtlessly they’d spent plenty of time recently in the vicinity of his nostrils.
    While Lord Renshaw was suffering his latest round of ague, Nicola turned her attention toward his son, Harold Blenkenship—or the Milksop, as Nicola preferred to call him, though never to his face, of course. Harold, a dandy of the first order, always took the time to turn himself out in the finest and most up-to-date fashions, however hideous they might look on him, though he seldom seemed to take the time to make similar improvements to his mind, which was of a taciturn, sullen bent. Today the Milksop was wearing a velvet waistcoat and matching breeches in a startling shade of chartreuse. He looked, to Nicola’s way of thinking, perfectly hideous. But he didn’t seem to know it as he preened before a looking glass at the far end of the room.
    â€œGood morning, Harold,” Nicola called to her cousin. “How are you today?”
    The Milksop turned casually from his inspection of himself, then halted as abruptly as if he had been struck as his gaze fell upon Nicola. It took Nicola a moment to realize what had startled him so. He was used to seeing her in braids. It was the first time the Milksop had seen her with her hair dressed as a proper lady’s ought to be. He looked as if he might faint from the shock of it. Nicola would not have been surprised if he had. Once, on a visit to Beckwell Abbey, the Milksop had fainted at the sight of a two-headed calf that had been born, and lived briefly, at one of the nearby farms. Though Nicola had been only six at the time, she had found her cousin’s behavior low-spirited in the extreme, and had silently christened him the Milksop as he lay in the hay and muck of the barn floor, moaning, until Farmer McGreevey poured a bucket of trough water on his head and