Miss Westlake's Windfall Read Online Free Page A

disappointment. He must have had a few bottles this time instead, but damned if he could remember anything between slamming out of Ada’s house and waking up in his.
    Never again, the viscount promised himself before he fell back asleep. Never again. No woman was worth this agony, not even Ada.
    * * * *
    When the viscount next awoke—in itself a miracle of the body’s will to survive—his memory was stronger, but so was his agony. Lud, no amount of drink could have made him this wretched. He ached not only with the hurt of Ada’s rejection, and the entire shire’s knowing of it, but also with more physical injuries. Chas tried to take stock by the faint glow of the fireplace embers, which meant he must have slept an entire day away, then. It wasn’t enough.
    He had the devil’s own headache, for one, not surprising considering the quantities of cheap spirits he’d imbibed at Jake’s Mermaid Tavern. His right eye felt swollen and sore, likely from the brief melee at the same venue. One of the dive’s denizens had accused another of cheating at cards, at which fists and furniture had gone flying. Chas had ducked, but obviously not fast enough.
    His left cheek burned as though he’d been shaved with a butcher’s knife—by a blind barber. He tried to feel under the bandage there, but his left hand would not move, strapped as it was between two boards. Zeus, was his wrist broken, then? Perhaps he’d been concussed by the airborne bar stool after all, before Jake settled the argument with a belaying pin, and that was why Chas could not recall being knocked out, half scalped, and trampled. For sure at least one of his ribs must be broken, his lordship reasoned, since he was having so much trouble breathing.
    No, that was Tally. The blasted bitch was lying smack on top of the viscount’s chest. At least one female held him in affection. Nevertheless, Chas shoved the mixed-breed hound off the bed with his good hand, complaining, “Lud, you stink.”
    No, that was him. He recognized the odor from the last time his groom had doctored a bruised pastern—on a horse. What the deuce had happened to him?
    He started to review the previous evening in his mind, skipping the argument at Westlake Hall, which was far more painful than the other aches and far more lasting, Chas feared. He began instead with his arrival at Jake’s Mermaid Tavern, on the seaward outskirts of Lillington village.
    Chas had gone to meet an old friend and sometime business partner, Leo Tobin. Both natives of Lillington, they’d been acquainted since boyhood, although they were from far different classes and circumstances. Chas had been born to wealth and privilege, while Leo had been raised by hardworking fishing folk. The heir to the viscountcy was educated at the finest institutions; the heir to his father’s ketch was taught by the local vicar and schooled by experience.
    Still, they dealt well together, from days of cricket on the village green, and rowing races near the shore. They even resembled each other in looks, each being tall and dark and broad-shouldered, although Leo had a swarthier complexion from his days sailing, and a few more years in his dish. Now that his new shipping business was so successful, it was Leo who dressed in the first stare, a diamond winking from his cravat, while Chas had donned his oldest riding coat and a spotted cloth tied loosely at his neck. In the murky light of the Mermaid Tavern, a stranger would be hard-pressed to name which was the aristocrat, which the smuggler.
    Sitting quietly in a secluded corner, they’d been awaiting the arrival of a third man, but Prelieu had never arrived. According to Tobin, the rest of the expected shipment of goods had been delivered ashore earlier that evening, but not the Frenchman. Disturbed by the hitch in his plans, to say nothing of the wound to his heart, Chas had stayed on at the tavern, drinking the swill that passed for ale, then switching to the stomach-corroding