Haunted Hearts Read Online Free Page A
something, dear lady, and therefore must leave your side for now. But please tell me you will still be here for the entertainments that I hear will come after midnight ?”
Why had he put that little bit of emphasis on midnight? Did he wish to see her without a mask before he committed more time or attention to her? For that matter, was he a bit too eager to abandon her? The huffy feeling that stole over her stung more than a little…but only lasted a moment as she admitted to herself, As you’ve done to others all evening .
Pushing notions of injury aside, and even though she’d had no intention of staying, she nodded. “I zink I might,” she said, amazed at the breathlessness of her own voice. It had been caused by the dancing, of course.
He bowed again, taking up her hand just long enough to give her a long look--which, again, gave her pause. She turned away at once, hoping the gesture left him with the impression she was not overly concerned about a meeting that might happen later.
Quickly surrounded by a circle of admiring gentlemen, Olivia gratefully allowed one of them to take her into a country dance. Once out of King Louis’s arms, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of the stranger.
She relegated the experience to the back of her mind, knowing there was time enough to think again about the mysterious Louis XIV once midnight crept nearer.
Chapter 2
Ian Drake, the new Viscount Ewald, leaned against a column in his king’s garb, as open to public view as a man could be in such a crowded room. His arms were crossed behind his back, against the column, giving him the look of any other indolent young buck in the room, if one looked beyond the too-warm white wig he wore.
He’d arrived expecting to meet someone tonight. The only problem came from the fact he didn’t know who that someone was to be. Hadn’t known , he tested the thought; had he found the French informer? Perhaps, perhaps.
Ian tried to look around with eyes that weren’t too greedy. Yes, he was here to enact one last duty, but far more importantly, at least to him, was the fact he’d come home. I am surrounded by Englishmen. These are my people. By the length of but one day, he’d come to the land he’d been increasingly longing for from afar. He’d not been within her borders for nearly twenty years, not since he was seven.
He’d been to a hundred parties not too dissimilar to this, amid the British who, like he and his small family, had resided away from their land of birth. He believed he knew how to behave--but all the same, he watched these mostly untraveled compatriots with eager, questing eyes. Who are you? Among you, who am I?
One thing he knew he was: yet a mourner. It was not four months since Mama and Papa had died, carried away by typhus. They’d survived insurrections, and rioting, and once the attack of a knife-wielding servant who’d been placed in their household to spy upon them. Afterward Ian had not even hated the man, whom Papa had clubbed into insensibility with a fireplace poker before turning him over to authorities--for his parents and he had all been spies themselves, and knew the risks of traveling and scheming abroad for King and Country. His brother, Arthur, had been the most disconcerted, because his eyes were already turning to the sea, his part in any espionage being only because he belonged with his family. Still, the unexpected was all a part of how life unfolded in unsettled places where England required prying eyes. They’d lived in three meager rooms without doors between the four of them, and they’d lived in a grand chalet with a third floor they’d never figured a way to fill or use. They’d seen filth and squalor, and they’d walked on the finest carpets on majestic marble floors. They’d seemed somehow blessed to reside above the touch of the sickness and poverty ever to be found. Yet in the end, with Arthur long since off to his naval career, it had been but a common
Why had he put that little bit of emphasis on midnight? Did he wish to see her without a mask before he committed more time or attention to her? For that matter, was he a bit too eager to abandon her? The huffy feeling that stole over her stung more than a little…but only lasted a moment as she admitted to herself, As you’ve done to others all evening .
Pushing notions of injury aside, and even though she’d had no intention of staying, she nodded. “I zink I might,” she said, amazed at the breathlessness of her own voice. It had been caused by the dancing, of course.
He bowed again, taking up her hand just long enough to give her a long look--which, again, gave her pause. She turned away at once, hoping the gesture left him with the impression she was not overly concerned about a meeting that might happen later.
Quickly surrounded by a circle of admiring gentlemen, Olivia gratefully allowed one of them to take her into a country dance. Once out of King Louis’s arms, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of the stranger.
She relegated the experience to the back of her mind, knowing there was time enough to think again about the mysterious Louis XIV once midnight crept nearer.
Chapter 2
Ian Drake, the new Viscount Ewald, leaned against a column in his king’s garb, as open to public view as a man could be in such a crowded room. His arms were crossed behind his back, against the column, giving him the look of any other indolent young buck in the room, if one looked beyond the too-warm white wig he wore.
He’d arrived expecting to meet someone tonight. The only problem came from the fact he didn’t know who that someone was to be. Hadn’t known , he tested the thought; had he found the French informer? Perhaps, perhaps.
Ian tried to look around with eyes that weren’t too greedy. Yes, he was here to enact one last duty, but far more importantly, at least to him, was the fact he’d come home. I am surrounded by Englishmen. These are my people. By the length of but one day, he’d come to the land he’d been increasingly longing for from afar. He’d not been within her borders for nearly twenty years, not since he was seven.
He’d been to a hundred parties not too dissimilar to this, amid the British who, like he and his small family, had resided away from their land of birth. He believed he knew how to behave--but all the same, he watched these mostly untraveled compatriots with eager, questing eyes. Who are you? Among you, who am I?
One thing he knew he was: yet a mourner. It was not four months since Mama and Papa had died, carried away by typhus. They’d survived insurrections, and rioting, and once the attack of a knife-wielding servant who’d been placed in their household to spy upon them. Afterward Ian had not even hated the man, whom Papa had clubbed into insensibility with a fireplace poker before turning him over to authorities--for his parents and he had all been spies themselves, and knew the risks of traveling and scheming abroad for King and Country. His brother, Arthur, had been the most disconcerted, because his eyes were already turning to the sea, his part in any espionage being only because he belonged with his family. Still, the unexpected was all a part of how life unfolded in unsettled places where England required prying eyes. They’d lived in three meager rooms without doors between the four of them, and they’d lived in a grand chalet with a third floor they’d never figured a way to fill or use. They’d seen filth and squalor, and they’d walked on the finest carpets on majestic marble floors. They’d seemed somehow blessed to reside above the touch of the sickness and poverty ever to be found. Yet in the end, with Arthur long since off to his naval career, it had been but a common
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