The Horsemaster's Daughter Read Online Free

but in a way all the world would notice. He’d made a voyage in record time; he’d delivered a fortune to the ship’s owner.

    If only his father had lived, perhaps he would have acknowledged Ryan’s achievement. That would have been a first.

    Ryan felt a peculiar thickness in his throat. He’d succeeded. He wished he could freeze this moment in his heart and keep it there forever. He wished he had someone besides a nameless prostitute to share it with.

    He banished the darkness and resolved to enjoy his triumph.

    “A toast!” he roared, holding the woman’s clasped hand aloft like a prize-fighter. “To the Swan, and to all her brave crew!”

    “To us!” the men bellowed, clinking mugs.

    Ryan aimed a crooked grin at his companion, who had begun squirming suggestively in his lap. “Sugar-pie, my legs are going numb.”

    She screeched with laughter. “I hope that don’t affect the rest of you.”

    “We’ll see when we get to the stateroom.”

    Her hips ground down on him. “Who needs the stateroom?”

    He had a fleeting thought of privacy, but the rum—and the whore’s sly fingers—coaxed a dark, desire-filled laugh from him. With slow, teasing movements he plunged his hand beneath her skirts. He found the stolen flask but passed it right over in pursuit of richer treasures.

    No doubt the puritanical Mr. Easterbrook would be appalled to see such revelry on his ship, but Ryan banished the last of his scruples. No proper Bostonian would show up now. Anyone who strayed to the docks at this time of night deserved what he saw.

     

    “I feel quite wicked being out so late,” Isadora confessed to Lily Raines Calhoun. She leaned back against the burgundy leather seat of the hooded clarence. Her father, who always demanded the best, had had the carriage fitted with a curved glass, like a show window, in the front. Lily and Isadora sat side by side on the rear seat, watching the city through the glass.

    A waning moon cast the State House dome in pale gray; misty orbs of gaslight glowed along State Street, and shadows haunted side streets and Merchants’ Row.

    “Your driver looked a mite startled when we told him we wanted to go to the harbor,” Lily remarked. “I do hope this won’t cause trouble with your family.”

    “Believe me, Mrs. Calhoun, since the age of fourteen, I’ve done nothing but cause trouble for my family.”

    Lily turned, the light on her face flickering from pale to gold in the swinging glow of the carriage lantern. “Whatever can you mean?”

    Isadora toyed idly with the strings of her lace cap. “Until I was fourteen, I lived with a maiden aunt in Salem. I only saw my family once in a great while.” She thought back to the long, dreamy years with Aunt Button when nothing mattered more than spending a few hours reading a wonderful book. “It was an arrangement that suited all of us very well indeed. But when my great aunt died, I had to return to the house on Beacon Hill. I’m afraid I’ve been a trial to them ever since.”

    “I can’t imagine you a trial,” Lily said.

    “Yes, you can,” Isadora replied with gentle censure. “You’re too kind to say so. A plain spinster, awkward in conversation, clumsy on the dance floor—I’m a trial, especially to the Peabodys.”

    “We all have our own unique gifts. It is incumbent upon the larger society to discover them.”

    “And if they do not?”

    Lily Calhoun turned on the seat so that she was facing Isadora. The shifting lamplight glazed her face with fire. Very deliberately, with her dainty gloved hands, she reached out and removed Isadora’s small rectangularlensed spectacles, letting them dangle from the black silk ribbon around her neck.

    “Why then, my dear Miss Peabody,” she said in her lazy, lovely drawl, “they aren’t seeing you at all.”

    It was something so like Aunt Button would have said that Isadora felt a sudden lump in her throat.

    “They are the Peabodys of Beacon Hill.” Isadora