Beauty and the Spy Read Online Free PDF Page B

now!" boomed a cheerful cockney voice. Two stocky, booted men were staggering across the marble floors bent under the weight of the pianoforte. Susannah stepped aside; briefly she saw her own reflection, distorted and pale, in the instrument's polished surface, before it vanished out the door, forever.
    Douglas threw a quick, longing look over his shoulder toward the door. He'd done that a few too many times in the last five minutes.
    "Douglas—" She heard the plea in her voice and stopped. She was damned if she would beg. She'd never begged for anything in her life.
    Damned . Now there was a word she had never before included in her vocabulary.
    But one needed the fortification of such words when one has just been jilted.
    Susannah's mind reeled with the sheer speed of the spread of the news— Susannah Makepeace is penniless �as if the fly orbiting Mr. Dinwiddy had in fact been a spy for all the mamas in the area. Douglas's own mama had leaped so quickly into action she might as well have been whisking him away from the plague.
    " Whoop ! Lift yer feet for me, miss, there ye are luv, my thanks." Two more men were rolling up the soft parlor carpet as merrily as if they were playing with a hoop and stick. They hoisted the great tube of it up under their arms and wended their way toward the door, and the carpet's heavy fringe trailed across the curve of a bulbous cream-and-blue Chinese vase, like fingers dragged against the cheek of a lover. The vase wobbled threateningly on its pedestal once, twice… it stilled. Susannah exhaled. She was glad it hadn't broken.
    She might need to hurl it at Douglas.
    "It's… it's for the best, Susannah." Quoting his mama again, no doubt.
    "How, Douglas? Please explain to me how it can possibly be for the best? Or perhaps"—she added bitterly, and she could not recall saying anything bitterly before in her life—"you should have your mama come explain it to me."
    They stared at one another wretchedly as cheerful cockney voices drifted in from the courtyard, where the crewmen were loading carts with the things she'd taken for granted since she was a girl. Carpets, chandeliers, candelabras, books, settees, beds.
    Her life.
    "Don't do this, Douglas," she cried softly, despising the hint of plea in her voice. "I love you. And you love me, I know you do."
    Douglas made a little sound in his throat then, and took a sudden step toward her, his hand outstretched in… in what? Supplication? Comfort? Farewell? Whatever it was, he apparently thought better of it, for he dropped his hand and shook his head roughly, as though clearing his mind of her. And then he turned abruptly and went the way of the pianoforte and the parlor rug, smashing his hat down on his head as he went.
    He never looked back.
    Susannah stared after him. She could feel what surely must be the jagged edges of her heart clogging her throat, and her hand went up to touch it there.
    "Make way, miss, thank ye kindly!"
    A man was marching down the stairs, his arms piled high with her beautiful gowns. The silks and velvets and muslins slipped and slid in his grasp, and suddenly, to Susannah, they all seemed like kidnap victims struggling to escape.
    "Put… those… down. Now ."
    The glacial ring of her own voice strengthened her�she hadn't know she'd had such a voice at her disposal, and it certainly seemed to give that big man pause. He froze midstep and stared at her wide-eyed.
    "But miss, we've orders to take all of—"
    She seized the heavy vase from its pedestal and hoisted it slowly, meaningfully, over her head. The man's eyes followed it up there warily.
    "You have until the count of three." Every word chiseled from ice.
    He raised a brow and took the tiniest step forward, daring her. Susannah brandished the vase warningly.
    "One… " she hissed. "Two…"
    "Susannah?"
    Susannah turned her head swiftly. Amelia stood in the doorway, her dinner-plate eyes bulging with astonishment.
    There was a rustle from the