A Tall Dark Stranger Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t spare George to accompany me. I was just strolling through the park with my sketch pad and watercolor box trying to decide what to sketch when I heard the clatter of hooves. Looking through the trees to the road, I saw our neighbor, Beau Sommers, was coming to call. Another gentleman was with him.
    Five years ago the sight of Beau would have sent my heart racing in delight. At a callow seventeen I could imagine no greater enchantment than a kind word from Beau. His curled lip and air of cynicism had seemed the height of sophistication to me.
    Now that I have some small experience of men and the world, I recognize him for what he is. A gazetted flirt, a fribble, a here-and-thereian who gives each new generation of ladies a fling as they put up their hair and let down their skirts.
    I had my inoculation at seventeen. He still calls from time to time, when he is in the suds and fears he may need my dowry. I expect when he is about forty he will marry some youngster for the sake of an heir, but I doubt he will ever provide his lady with a tame husband. He is tall and well enough built, with dark hair and brown eyes. The cut of his jacket and the arrangement of his cravat are of more importance to him than the profitable management of his estate, Beauvert.
    When he espied me, he and his friend came forward and dismounted to greet me. I suspected at a glance that Beau’s friend was cast from the same mold as himself. The fashionable cut of his blue jacket of Bath cloth and the intricate folds of his cravat suggested it. He wore his curled beaver at the same cocky angle, tilted over a lean, tanned face. Like Beau, he rode a prime blood bay. And, like Beau, his eyes examined me with a purely physical interest.
    “Miss Amy,” Beau said, lifting his hat. For a period of two weeks five years ago he had called me Amy. Miss Amy was the compromise he settled on, halfway between the formal Miss Talbot and the friendlier Amy. Its unsuitability didn’t bother Beau. I have no elder sister; I am Miss Talbot to my acquaintances, Amy to my friends.
    “Good morning, Beau,” I replied, not because I wanted to foster any intimacy, but because everyone called him Beau. I had done so for years.
    “May I present Mr. Renshaw, an old chum from university.” Beau had attended Oxford for one year.
    Renshaw lifted his lids, bowed, smiled a well-practiced smile, and said in a bored drawl, “Charmed, Miss Talbot. Beau has been singing your praises so loudly, I insisted he introduce me.”
    His eyes toured from my head to toes and back up again while I scarcely had time to glance at him. Yet I felt I had been thoroughly assessed as a physical specimen in that brief second.
    The first thing I noticed when he removed his hat was a scar above his left eyebrow. The white scar, shaped like the blade of a scythe, stood out against his swarthy skin. His dark eyes were hooded, giving him a lazy look, as if he were still half asleep. His thin lips curved in a cool smile.
    He would have been more handsome without that theatrical air of ennui. His build, I noticed, was impressive. His well-cut jacket sat easily on his broad shoulders. His buckskins lay flat against a firm stomach.
    “How do you do,” I said coolly, and offered him my hand. Being caught in mid-bow, he looked at it as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it but finally took it and gave it a limp shake.
    “Now you see for yourself I spoke no more than the truth,” Beau said to his chum. They both gazed at me with feigned admiration, as if I were Helen of Troy. I knew I looked a sight in my dowdy painting gown and an old straw bonnet. I began to suspect that one of them had an eye on my dowry. “Did you ever see such eyes, Renny?” Renshaw murmured unconvincingly of sapphires and cornflowers.
    “I assume you’re referring to cornflower leaves, Mr. Renshaw,” I said. “My eyes are green.”
    He had the grace to blush at that, before casting an irritated glance at his cohort.