The Viscount and the Virgin Read Online Free

didn’t.’
    â€˜Anyone who knew him will take one look at her,’Lady Callandar had wailed, ‘and say she is bound to turn out exactly like him!’
    â€˜Then you will just have to make sure,’ her uncle had said sternly, ‘that she never gives anyone cause to think it!’
    â€˜Imogen, dear,’ her aunt had said sympathetically, once her uncle had stormed from the room, ‘you must not let your uncle’s manner upset you. You are—’ she had floundered for a moment, before her face lit up with inspiration ‘—just like a lovely rose that has rambled in all the wrong directions. Your uncle may seem to be severe with you, but it is only because he wants to see you blossom.’
    And from that day forward, her aunt had set about pruning her into shape.
    â€˜If you could only learn to carry yourself with the poise of Penelope or Charlotte!’ her aunt had advised her, time after time. ‘People might gradually stop talking about the thorny issue of your mother’s Dreadful Disgrace!’
    Although the shocking scandal in which her mother and father had been involved had happened over twenty years earlier, Imogen’s emergence into Society had reminded people of it.
    Her mother had taken a lover. Not that there was anything unusual in that, in her circles. But feelings between William Wardale, Earl of Leybourne, and Baron Framlingham had apparently run high. They had got into a fist fight. And only weeks later, the earl had brutally stabbed Imogen’s father to death. As if that were not bad enough, it turned out that both men had been involved in some form of espionage. The Earl of Leybourne hadbeen found guilty not only of murder, but treason. He had been stripped of land and titles, and hanged.
    No wonder people stared at her and whispered behind their fans, whenever she walked into a room!
    She was not pretty, she was not rich, she lacked poise and she had a scandal attached to her name. Mrs Leeming had been one of the very few Society matrons prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. But Imogen had just ruined her chance to demonstrate she was nothing like either of her parents, by getting embroiled in that scene with Viscount Mildenhall.
    The promises of invitations her aunt had managed to cajole, bribe or bully from her other intimates would probably dwindle away altogether now.
    â€˜Perhaps,’ she ventured timidly, ‘we should abandon the attempt to find me a husband.’
    She had already begun to suspect that she would be completely miserable married to the kind of man her uncle would approve of. The more she learned about fashionable Society, the more she under stood her mother’s willingness to accept her banishment to the wilds of Staffordshire under the aegis of the somewhat reclusive Hugh Bredon. He may have had his faults, but he had never treated Amanda like a piece of topiary that needed constant clipping to maintain an artificially decorative shape.
    Her aunt shot her a darkling look, but made no reply, for the carriage was slowing down.
    If she ever did have any children, Imogen decided, mutinously, ignoring the footman’s out stretched hand and jumping down from the carriage, she would make sure each and every one of them knew they were loved exactly as they were, be they boys or girls. She wouldnever try to stifle their personalities or make them feel they had to constantly strive for her approval.
    Though, she thought despondently as she trailed up the front steps behind her aunt, it was not likely that she ever would have children of her own.
    No man that Lord and Lady Callandar considered eligible would want to ally himself to a girl who could bring so little credit to his name. She only had to think of the disdain she had read in the viscount’s eyes, the mockery in those of his friends, to know she was never going to measure up.
    â€˜In here, if you please,’ said her aunt, making her way across