A Common Scandal Read Online Free PDF Page B

the daughter, that manager could be him.
    Well-bred Society misses weren’t to his taste. The women in his past were as interesting and varied as the countries he’d visited. Looking around the ballroom, he was having a hard time telling all these English girls apart. They differed only slightly in regards to hair color, eye color and the shades of their dresses, and even those were no more than an array of white and pastel innocence. They had been carefully groomed to speak in the same gentle, modulated speech, to use the same graceful gestures, to discuss the same bland, safe topics. He wasn’t even slightly stirred by a single one of them.
    Well, that wasn’t true. He’d been stirred up like a typhoon on the open ocean moments ago, but Amelia was decidedly off-limits to him, no matter how alluring. She might be the only girl in the room who lit so much as a flicker of desire in him, but he’d have to forget it. What he wanted didn’t matter here. There was only what he needed, and what he needed was Julia Harrow.

Chapter Two
    Sleep eluded Amelia all night. Long after she’d arrived home, she lay awake, staring at the ceiling, but only seeing Natty, those long-lost sea green eyes, the chilly, distant expression on his handsome face. The encounter had started so joyous, and ended so bitterly, she was still reeling from it, still smarting from his careless dismissal of her and all they’d shared.
    When morning finally came, she lingered in bed, ignoring her lady’s maid coming in and puttering about, ripping open the drapes and rattling the jars on her dressing table. Fantine was from France and considered herself too sophisticated to wait on a mere daughter of an arms manufacturer, no matter the fat salary her father had used to bribe her. She and Amelia nursed a deep mutual dislike. Eventually Fantine gave up trying to raise her and stomped from the room, muttering obscenities in French. She had long ago assumed Amelia was too uncouth to speak French and Amelia had chosen not to disabuse her of that notion.
    She pulled back the bed drapes and stared sullenly at the room, awash with late morning sun. The day stretched out before her as one tedious task after another, no different than any of the days that had come before or any that would come after. Nothing but boring visits and calling cards and cups of tea and a thousand conversations about the weather and the opera and the current shapes of sleeves. It was enough to drive her mad.
    Sliding out of bed, she crossed the room to her dressing table. In the corner, looking out of place surrounded by silk ribbons and glass bottles, dwarfed by her large, lovely rosewood jewelry box, was a little metal box, dented and tarnished. It was the last artifact of her childhood in Portsmouth. No, that wasn’t quite accurate. Inside, she found the very last remnant—Natty’s green sea glass, its surface worn smooth and satiny, first from his fingers, then from hers.
    He’d promised to come back, and he hadn’t. A month had stretched into two as she’d walked the length of the docks every day, peering into every sailor’s face as they disembarked, that wretched piece of glass clutched in her fingers.
    She hadn’t kept her promise to look after his family, either, because in the third month of his absence, she’d come home to find the servants in a flurry, filling wooden crates with their belongings. All her protests, all her tears, had been in vain. They were leaving Portsmouth forever. Tearfully, she’d said goodbye to his mother and siblings and left her address in London. Surely he’d come to visit once he returned. He never came.
    Seeing him last night, it was no wonder. When he’d sailed away, he’d sailed into his future and left his past completely behind, including her. He’d promised to come home her equal, and he had, but he’d also come home a stranger. It was silly, really, to mourn the loss. They’d just been children, and as he’d told her once,