Sheri Cobb South Read Online Free Page B

chamber whose understated elegance made her feel hopelessly dowdy. An oil portrait whose subject she recognized as Lady Helen hung over the mantel and the painted image, dressed all in white and wearing a dazzling necklace of diamonds, seemed to sneer disapprovingly at the uninvited guest. Spying a gilt-framed mirror on the opposite wall, she took stock of her appearance, and found her worst suspicions confirmed. She smoothed her rumpled dark skirts, which had been hopelessly crushed from her hackney ride, and was in the process of slicking back her disheveled curls when the door opened to reveal the honey-haired beauty from the bookstore.
    However, it was not Lady Helen but the man beside her who commanded Polly’s full attention.   Although not above the average height, he was more solidly built than most of the fashionable gentlemen who patronized Mr. Minchin’s shop, and his mulberry colored coat, while obviously cut from the finest cloth, was so baggy it might have been made for a much stouter man.  His dark curly hair, though fashionably cropped, was somewhat disheveled. He was not handsome at all, at least not in the sense that the gentleman in the bookstore had been handsome. It would have been hard to imagine a less likely husband for the elegantly beautiful Lady Helen. If this were indeed Mr. Brundy, she could see why Lady Farriday had been so appalled. And yet there was something inviting about his welcoming smile and warm brown eyes, something that belied Lady Farriday’s gothic whisperings of coercion and brutality. To Polly, he looked more brotherly than brutal. Brotherly. . . And she was in desperate need of a male relation. . . .
    “Mr. Brundy?” Her voice shook on the words.
    “Aye, that I am,” he answered.
    “Ethan!” she exclaimed, smiling uncertainly at him. “Don’t you know me? But of course you could not! I’m your sister!”
     

Chapter 3
     
    Marriage is a desperate thing.
    JOHN SELDEN, Table Talk
     
    “Sister?” echoed Mr. Brundy. Gone was any trace of the welcoming warmth she thought she had seen in his eyes, and the frigid contempt which replaced it was sufficient to convince Polly that, if anything, Lady Farriday had been too generous in her assessment of his character.
    “Ethan!” cried Lady Helen, clasping Polly’s hands warmly. “You never told me you had a sister!”
    “Life is just full of surprises,” he muttered in skeptical tones.
    “Do come and sit down,” she urged, steering Polly toward a striped, satin sofa. “Only fancy, Ethan, if your sister had come a day later, she would have found us gone.”
    “What a shame that would’ve been,” was his less than enthusiastic reply.
    Lady Helen, fully occupied in seeing her new-found relation comfortably disposed on the sofa, made no reply to her husband, but instead inquired as to her guest’s name.
    “Polly,” replied the visitor, watching from under demurely lowered eyelashes to observe the effect of this pronouncement on Mr. Brundy. “Polly Crump.”
    His reaction was swift and profound. Indeed, as Evers later confided to an enthralled Cook, the master might have been turned to stone before his very eyes.
    “Polly Crump, did you say?”
    “Ethan, what is the matter?” asked Lady Helen, observing her husband’s distress.
    He stared with unseeing eyes at his wife’s anxious face. “Crump was me mum’s name—and mine, before I took the name of Brundy.”
    “Then it is hardly surprising for your sister to share it,” Lady Helen pointed out reasonably. Then, spying a curious Evers still hovering in the doorway, she sent him about his business. “Evers, have Miss Crump’s things brought up to the blue bedchamber, and tell Cook that we will be increasing our covers for dinner.”
    As Evers quit the room, Mr. Brundy seized his wife’s hand and quickly followed suit.
    “A word with you, ‘elen, me dear,” he growled, half-dragging her into the corridor and firmly shutting the door behind her.