Louise Allen Read Online Free

man. And then to be labelled as on the shelf and too ordinary to offer any
temptation to a connoisseur, such as Mr Harker obviously considered himself to
be, was the crowning insult.
    It took a few moments to compose herself. Isobel turned back
the way she had come, unwilling to risk walking into them again. Was that
cowardice or simply the wisdom to keep well away from Mr Harker while her palm
still itched to slap him?
    There was a footman in the hall when she emerged. ‘May I help
you, my lady? The family is in the saloon, just through here, ma’am.’
    Ushered back through the inner hall, Isobel found herself in a
pleasant room with a large bay window. It was curtained now against the February
darkness, but she assumed it would look out onto the gardens and park stretching
off to the north.
    The earl was poring over what looked like architectural
drawings with Mr Soane and a fresh-faced youth was teasing a giggling girl of
perhaps twelve years—Lord Royston and Lady Lizzie, she guessed.
    The countess sat on a wide sofa with Lady Anne and her
fifteen-year-old sister, Catherine, who were making a show of working on their
embroidery.
    Mr Soane must have come through a connecting door, but there
was no sign of the viper-tongued Mr Harker. Where was he? Isobel scanned the
room, conscious of butterflies in her stomach. The evidence of nerves gave her
another grudge against Mr Perfection.
    The children saw her first. ‘Ma’am.’ Philip bowed. ‘Welcome to
Wimpole Hall.’
    ‘Are you our Cousin Isobel?’ Lizzie was wide-eyed with
excitement at being allowed to a grown-up party. Isobel felt her stiff shoulders
relax. He was not here and the children were
charming.
    * * *
    Giles Harker straightened up from his contemplation of
the collection of Roman intaglio seals in a small
display table set against the wall. Lady Isobel had entered without seeing him
and he frowned at her straight back and intricate pleats of brown hair as she
spoke to Philip and Lizzie. She was a confounded nuisance, especially in a
household presided over by a lady of known high standards. Lady Hardwicke’s
disapproval would blight his chances of commissions from any of her wide social
circle. She might be a blue-stocking and a playwright, but she was the daughter
of the Earl of Balcarres and a lady of principle.
    The Yorke daughters were charming, modest and well behaved, if
inclined to giggle if spoken to. But this distant cousin was another matter
altogether. At his first sight of her a tingle of recognition had gone down his
spine. She was dangerous, although quite why, Giles would have been hard pressed
to define. There was something in those wide grey eyes, her best feature. Some
mystery that drew his unwilling interest.
    Her frank and unabashed scrutiny had been an unwelcome surprise
in an unmarried lady. He was used to the giggles and batted eyelashes of the
young women making their come-outs and made a point of avoiding them. His birth
was impossibly ineligible, of course, even if his education, style and income
gave him the entrée to most of society. But he was unmarriageable and dangerous
and that, he was well aware, was dinned into the young ladies he came into
contact with.
    Yet those very warnings were enough to make some of them think
it irresistibly romantic that the illegitimate son of the Scarlet Widow was so
handsome and so unobtainable.
    For certain married ladies Giles Harker was not at all
unobtainable—provided his notoriously capricious choice fell on them. Something
the son of the most scandalous woman in society learned early on was that one’s
value increased with one’s exclusivity and he was as coolly discriminating in
his sins as his mother was warmly generous in hers. Even in her fifties—not that
she would ever admit to such an age despite the incontrovertible evidence of an
adult son—her heart was broken with delicious drama at least twice a year. His
remained quite intact. Love, he knew from observation, was at