The Viscount and the Virgin Read Online Free Page A

the hall to the sitting room. She waited in silence while a footman hastily lit some candles, banked up the fire, enquired if they wanted any refreshment and then withdrew.
    â€˜Sit up straight,’ she then urged Imogen, who had slumped down on the sofa. ‘Just because you have suffered a little setback, there is no excuse for forgetting your posture!’
    Imogen sat up straight, mentally bracing herself for yet another lecture about how young ladies ought to behave.
    â€˜Now, Imogen, I have not taken you into my home and drilled you into the ways of Society, only to have you fall at the first hurdle! I do not despair of seeing you make a creditable alliance before the end of the Season.’
    Imogen had a depressing vision of endless balls where she sat on the side lines, watching the prettier, wealthier girls whirling round with their admiring partners. Or dancing with dutiful, bored men like Mr Dysart. Of picnics and break fasts where she endured the spitefulcomments of girls like Penelope and Charlotte, while the matrons whispered about her father’s terrible fate, and the bucks sniggered about her mother’s scandalous conduct. Of always having to rein herself in, lest she betray some sign that she took after either of her scandalous parents.
    And then she looked at the determined jut of her aunt’s jaw. Her poor, be leaguered aunt, who had so determinedly taken up the cudgels on her behalf.
    The last thing she wanted was to become a lifelong burden on her aunt and uncle. ‘If…if I have not received a proposal by the end of the Season, though, I could always go and teach in a school some where. For you surely cannot want me living with you in definitely.’
    â€˜That is for Lord Callandar to decide. Though I am sure it would make him most uncomfortable to think of a Herriard teaching in a school!’
    â€˜But I am not a Herriard,’ Imogen pointed out. ‘I am a Hebden.’ It was why Hugh Bredon had not wished to adopt her, after all. Because she was the spawn of the notorious Kit Hebden.
    â€˜Nobody will be in the least surprised that you could not make anything of me. Though I am sure everyone can see that you have done all you could to try and make me more…’ she waved her hands expansively, then frowned ‘…make me less…’
    Her aunt sighed. ‘That is just the trouble, is it not? You are what you are, niece, and I am beginning to think no power on earth will ever make a jot of difference.’
    â€˜I am sorry, Aunt.’ She bowed her head as she tugged off her evening gloves, one finger at a time. The backs were sticky with dried champagne. ‘I do not want youto be ashamed of me. I do not ever wish to cause you any trouble.’
    â€˜I know that, dear,’ her aunt replied on yet another sigh. ‘But trouble seems to find you, nonetheless.’

Chapter Two
    I mogen was in the sitting room, with her tambour on her lap, trying extremely hard to look as though she did not think decorative embroidery was the most point less exercise ever foisted upon womankind.
    Sitting indoors on a sunny day, embroidering silk flowers onto a scrap of linen, when real crocuses would be un fur ling like jewelled fans in the park not two hundred yards from her door…just in case somebody chose to pay a visit! Not that anybody ever came to see her. Still, when her aunt was ‘at home’ a steady flow of callers made their way through this room. And her aunt insisted that they saw Imogen sitting quietly in her corner, applying herself to her embroidery, so that they could go away with a favourable impression of her.
    Not that Imogen could see what was so praise worthy about stitching away at some thing that was never going to be of any practical value.
    â€˜Lady Verity Carlow,’ her aunt had explained, asthough delivering a clincher, ‘sits for hours at a time plying her needle.’
    Well, huffed Imogen, so had she, back