A Kiss at Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the tooth as a dowager.
    Why hadn’t she noticed that she wasn’t rounded and charming and delectable anymore? When had bitterness entered her bloodstream and—and changed her from a young girl into something else?
    “This isn’t going to work,” she said abruptly. “I don’t have the faintest resemblance to a young debutante who took the ton by storm.”
    “It’s a matter of wearing the right clothing,” Rosalie said. “You don’t look your best in this gown, miss. But I’ll find a better one for you.”
    There wasn’t much Kate could do but nod. She had thought . . .
    Well, she hadn’t thought much about it. But she knew that she wanted to be married, and to have children of her own.
    A sharp pang of panic rose into her throat. What if she was already too old? What if she never—
    She cut off the thought.
    She would do this visit for Victoria, for her newfound sister’s sake. After that, she would leave, go to London and parlay her modest inheritance, the money her mother had left, into a marriage license.
    Women had done that for years, and she could do it as well.
    She straightened her shoulders. Since her father died, she had learned what it felt like to be humiliated: to tuck your hands out of sight when you saw acquaintances for fear they would see the reddened fingers. To hold your boots close to the horse’s side so that no one saw the worn spots. To pretend you left your bonnet at home, time after time.
    This was just a new kind of humiliation—to be dressed as lamb while feeling like mutton. She would get through it.

Five
    B y the time Kate escaped to her room hours later, she was exhausted. She had been up at five that morning to do three hours of accounts, then was on a horse at eight . . . not to mention the emotional toll taken by the day’s charming revelations. At dinner, Mariana had been snappy even with the viscount, and Victoria had wept softly through three courses.
    And now the dogs—the “rats”—were waiting for her, sitting in a little semicircle.
    There was no more fashionable accessory than a small dog, and Victoria and Mariana, with their characteristic belief that twenty-three ball gowns were better than one, had acquired not one small dog, but three.
    Three small, yapping, silky Malteses.
    They were absurdly small, smaller than most cats. And they had a sort of elegant sleekness about them that she found an affront. If she ever had a dog, she’d want it to be one of the lop-eared, grinning dogs that ran out to greet her when she stopped by the cottages on Mariana’s lands. A dog that barked rather than yapped.
    Though at the moment they weren’t yapping. As she entered her small room, they rose in a little wave and surrounded her ankles in a burst of furry waving tails and hot bodies. They were probably lonely. Before the bite, they were always at Victoria’s side. Perhaps they were hungry. Or worse, they might need to visit the garden. If only she had a bell in her room . . . but persons of her status had no need to call servants.
    “I suppose,” she said slowly, thinking of the stairs and her aching legs, “I have to take you outside.” In point of fact, she should be grateful that they had not urinated in her room; it was so small and the one window so high that the smell would last a month or more.
    It took a few minutes to figure out how to attach ropes to their jeweled collars, not helped by the fact that they had begun yapping, jumping up and trying to lick her face. It was hard not to flinch away.
    She trudged down the back stairs that led to her room, her steps echoed by the scrabbling little claws of the rats. She was so tired that she couldn’t even remember their names, though she thought they were all alliterative, perhaps Fairy and Flower.
    “What do they eat?” she asked Cherryderry a few minutes later. He had been kind enough to accompany her to the kitchen garden and show her the area fenced off for the dogs’ use.
    “I sent