The Desperate Love of a Lord Read Online Free

had been her friend Jane’s skill, not her own.

    When she selected some apples, her maid placed them in the skirt of her pinafore to take them home.
    What was Geoff doing now? How had he taken the news that she’d gone? He would be unhappy. That she knew.
    She paid the man and turned to go back to what was now her home. But it did not feel like home. Sadness swept over her, in a wave of regret and guilt. But how could she feel guilty for saving her child?
    Geoff .
    She’d thought she’d loved her first husband. They had been friends and he’d been very dear to her… It had not been love. Not as this was.
    She loved Geoffrey.
    The love for her husband had only been a warm feeling of attachment or endearment.
    This love was overwhelming.
    She sighed. It mattered not. What mattered was the child.
    Once more she touched her stomach.
    ~
    None of the inns remembered a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman staying on her own or even passing through. How could anyone forget the vibrancy Violet carried with her?
    Perhaps she had not stayed here.
    Perhaps she had not come this far at all and left the post-chaise further back.
    Geoff was sitting at the table in the private parlour he’d hired to dine. He rested one elbow on the table and his hand gripped his forehead. He needed to think. If she was not staying in an inn, perhaps she’d rented a property here. Perhaps she’d been planning this for ages and their affair had only ever been a finite thing. Maybe she had just forgotten to mention that fact to him.

    Tomorrow he would check with rental agents.
    Leaning back in his seat again, he lifted his ale and then sipped from it. Damn the woman.
    “Your meal my Lord.”
    He’d not heard the maid enter. A sign of how distracted his thoughts were, no doubt. The inn’s staff probably thought him mad.
    He ate the meal, but the food tasted like ashes. He felt as though his body was frozen in time. He was only waiting out the hours until his search could start again.
    When he went to his room, he undressed to sleep, but sleep only came in fitful patches. His eyes were open at sunrise, and he got up and dressed, then walked the quiet, empty streets of Bath until it was a suitable hour to start calling on the property agents.
    He crossed the Pulteney Bridge and walked back into the city at nine, heading for the Pump Room first. Yesterday he’d checked for Violet’s name in the register, today he was here to ask the master of ceremonies for a list of all the letting agents in the city.
    He left the Pump Room with the list gripped in his fisted hand. Today was a new day. He was going to find her. If he could not believe that, then what the hell was he doing here?
    It was just like yesterday, though, when he’d walked about the inns, every agent he went to denied knowledge of a lone blonde woman.
    When the bells of the Abbey chimed at four past midday, he still had no lead. No one remembered a vibrant blonde, with blue eyes.
    Geoff remembered her. Her company was all-consuming. How the hell could she have simply vanished? But what if she had come here to meet a man and she was not alone at all. Had she simply moved on from him?
    Damn!
    The pain of that thought bit at his heart.

    He’d had a conversation with Robert in a coffee-house in London a couple of weeks ago, when Robert had been searching for the woman he was now married to. Robert’s agitation then had been palpable, and Geoff remembered watching his friend with no understanding… now… God … now he knew how Robert had felt then.
    If Geoff had just opened his mouth a month ago and spoken the words he should have said, I love you , then he would not have had to bear this anguish. He should have offered for her. But she’d always made it clear to her men that her interest was only in a bed and nothing more. He hadn’t found the courage to try her, to see if that had changed. Fear had gripped his chest with a cold hard sense of steel each time he’d thought of speaking. If