The Lady Risks All Read Online Free

sitting room, he didn’t pause to let himself think but tapped on the door. Hearing a muffled “Come,” he turned the knob and entered.
    Caroline was standing with her back to the window, her arms wrapped tightly about her. Inclining his head, Julian closed the door, then walked toward her. “My condolences. I would it were otherwise, but we have to talk.” Halting a yard away, he met her blue eyes. “Minchinbury and Draper told me they’d explained the situation. Is there anything about it you don’t understand?” He kept his tone even, uninflected and distantly polite.
    Her face stripped of all masks, Caroline stared up at him; he could see the emotions, the questions, the rage, roiling behind her eyes. In the end, she rasped out one word, hoarse and ragged. “ Why ?”
    Julian shook his head. “He couldn’t help himself.”
    “But—” She broke off, then waved a hand and looked away. “I can’t . . .” She hauled in a breath and, lifting her head, continued without looking at him. “I’m still finding it hard to . . . accept that, for all these years, while I’ve been imagining you the villain, it was him all along.”
    Julian frowned. “You suspected?”
    “Not him.” She laughed harshly. “Never him. But some of my jewelry—it’s paste, not real. Even some of what used to be real is now paste.” She glanced at Julian. “I thought he’d used the jewels to pay your debts, perhaps thinking that I would never notice the difference in the stones, and that in his mind that was better than drawing from the estate—” Her breath hitched and she swung away. “Oh, you needn’t tell me—I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been.”
    He didn’t have time for hysterics, even of this sort. “Caroline—if I’m to avert financial catastrophe, I need to act quickly.”
    She cast him a bitter glance. “According to Minchinbury and Draper, I have no choice but to allow you to do whatever you wish, not if I want to continue to live here in comfort with Henry, or for my son to have any kind of future at all.”
    This was the downside of the older men’s well-intentioned interference. “In that, they’re correct, but what they didn’t make clear was that for my plan to succeed, you, too, need to play a part. And for that, you need to know what the plan is.”
    Caroline considered him for a long moment, then settled on her feet facing him, arms tightly folded, and nodded. “All right. Tell me your plan.”
    She didn’t sit, much less invite him to. So he stood and told her his plan.
    When he’d finished, she stared all but openmouthed at him.
    After a minute ticked by, he baldly asked, “Well? Will you do your part? Play the role you obviously have to play to carry the fiction off?”
    She blinked, stared again. “I . . . don’t understand.”
    His temper was getting the better of him. “It’s a simple enough question. Will you—”
    “No, not that. I . . .” She lowered her arms and drew a huge breath. She paused for a second, then, her gaze on his face, said, “You’re proposing to sacrifice yourself. Why ? That’s what I don’t understand—what I don’t trust. If I accept this plan of yours and actively support it, I’ll be placing myself, and even more my son and his future, in utterly insurmountable debt to you.”
    He thought, then nodded. “True.”
    She laughed, a broken, discordant sound, and turned away.
    “Caroline.” By main force, he kept his tone even, calm. “Are you really proposing to let your pride dictate your actions even now, and to reject my help?”
    She glanced at him, met his eyes.
    A distant, high-pitched shriek reached him—a sound of happiness, not despair. Glancing through the window, he saw his sisters and Henry come out of the wood. They’d been for a walk and were returning, Millie and Cassie swinging a delighted Henry between them. He was only three; the reality of his father’s death hadn’t yet touched him. Two footmen and a nursemaid