Perilous Pleasures Read Online Free Page A

dark eyes blazing above her pockmarked cheeks. Her passion gave her face life, which contrasted strongly with the ugliness of her features.
    Well, the girl should be thanking whatever stars ruled over her birth for that ugliness, for it had saved her mother’s life. He’d been so shocked by his first sight of her crude features that he’d lost his momentum. Even now, he couldn’t help staring at her. How could this be Isabelle’s daughter? Even without smallpox’s disfigurement she would have been ill-favored. Her nose was large and aquiline, her chin too strong, and her posture was ungainly. She was everything her mother was not.
    For nine long years he’d pictured the harlot’s daughter—that girl whose life had been saved at the cost of his beloved Charlotte’s—and all that time he’d imagined her as dimpled and seductive, stupid and heartless, a pallid copy of her mother, the woman who’d ruined his life.
    But the girl who had confronted him in Isabelle’s boudoir was not the girl he’d imagined. The contrast had stopped him in his tracks even as he’d played through the cruel joke he’d set up to humiliate his victims—and determine if the girl had retained her virginity. She’d shown such courage. He’d expected cunning and greed from Isabelle’s daughter, not bravery. But it was bravery she’d shown him, and that had made him hesitate—so much so that at that long-awaited moment when he might finally have taken his revenge, his knife had remained in its sheath.
    Even now, he couldn’t understand it.
    He knew nothing about the girl, really. Whatever she looked like, she was still the harlot’s daughter, inheriting all her cunning and her guile. She probably didn’t deserve his pity. But even so, he hadn’t been able to kill her mother before her eyes.
    The harlot would live on—though whether her daughter would, when they got to the Dark Lord’s island—he gripped the handle of his cane more tightly—well, that would be up to his teacher to decide.
    W hen they alighted at the school, the arthritic old porter opened the heavy front door at Lord Ramsay’s first knock. His wrinkled face had never seemed so dear to Zoe before, but she had no time to linger with him, as Lord Ramsay immediately ushered her into the building and stood glowering behind her, tall and spare. The porter gave him an uncertain look.
    â€œPlease inform Mrs. Endicott that Miss Gervais’s guardian would have a word with her,” Lord Ramsay said coolly.
    The porter nodded and went off to look for his mistress. Soon the swish of her heavy old-fashioned skirts against the polished wooden floor announced Mrs. Endicott’s arrival. Barely acknowledging Zoe’s presence, she made her way across the room to Lord Ramsay and curtseyed deeply, as she would have done to the father of one of her wealthier students.
    He inclined his head very slightly in acknowledgment, narrowly avoiding being rude. But Mrs. Endicott didn’t allow herself the luxury of taking offense. Addressing him in her low, well-modulated tones, she said, “Lord Ramsay, I’m so sorry to hear that the Laird of Iskeny’s illness is such that he isn’t expected to live. His man of business has informed me that he sent you to bring Miss Gervais to him in Scotland.”
    Lord Ramsay nodded. “Yes. We leave immediately.”
    Zoe was appalled. Until this moment she’d been sure her schoolmistress would step in and keep her from being taken way, as she’d done in the past when her mother had tried to remove her from school to set her up in some more profitable employment. But she detected no hint of opposition in the dulcet tones with which Mrs. Endicott addressed Lord Ramsay.
    Zoe shot her a look of appeal, but the schoolmistress ignored it and continued on serenely, “We will feel the loss of Miss Gervais. She has been an