Betina Krahn Read Online Free PDF Page B

of her traps, but marry the treacherous little piece she’s saddled him with,” Everstone ground out, his jowls reddening. “I tell you, it’s right crimi-nal the way that womanoperates. Respectable as cottage pie one minute and devious as the devil’s backside the next.…”
    Remington looked from Everstone to Woolworth to Searle, then to Peckenpaugh and Trueblood. They were taking young Howard’s demise hard, quite personally, in fact. It occurred to him that only the flare of righteous anger separated the expressions they wore from the haunted look of the despairing bridegroom. Suspicion bloomed in his mind, and as he looked from one to another, it hardened into certainty. He rolled his brandy snifter back and forth in his hands a moment, then leveled a searching look on his old school friend.
    “You were married yourself not long ago, eh, Wool-worth?”
    The young lord understood the question beneath the question. His face grayed and his jaw set like mortar as he visibly weighed the discomfort of the revelation against a desire for revenge on the cause of the alterations in his life. “I was indeed married some months ago”—he paused and swallowed hard—“after a particularly ugly encounter with the Dragon.” The confession, in this brotherhood of ruined bachelors, seemed somehow to lighten his soul. He sat straighter.
    Remington turned to the middle-aged Everstone. “And you, Sir Albert?”
    The portly MP huddled back in his chair, looking like a cornered bulldog. He glanced around the circle as he gathered the courage to say it. “We’re all her victims, every man jack of us. And we’re resolved that something must be done about the woman.”
    In the silence that followed Remington felt the weight of their accumulating stares and finally caught a glimpse of what it was they wanted with him. “So you’ve some nefarious plot in mind, and you’re looking for someone to work out your bit of revenge for you.” For one brief momenttheir eyes lighted with hope. He smiled and let them down as gently as possible. “I wish you luck in finding the right man.”
    “But we thought … p-perhaps you …,” Wool-worth stammered.
    “S-since you hate women and marriage so …,” Searle tried to finish for him.
    Remington’s eyes glinted with amusement. “While it is quite true that I despise the archaic institution of marriage, I must disabuse you of the notion that I also despise all women. I hate only those who insist upon being married and maintained by men.”
    “Which means virtually every woman in the world,” Trueblood concluded.
    Remington’s shoulders quaked with a quiet laugh. “Very nearly. However, there is a new breed of woman about these days, gentlemen. Women of learning and enlightenment who see the inequity and injustice of the old social order and are ready to embrace new ways. They are fully capable of being educated and employed, and are quite capable of supporting themselves entirely. It is my opinion that we should give them the vote … give them places on school benches and in offices, mills, and factories … and give them some of the wretched headaches of governance, diplomacy, and commerce that we men have grappled with for centuries.”
    He had scandalized them; he could see it in their shock-blanked expressions. And it was not altogether unexpected. His radical views on women and conventional morality had earned him a place of infamy among the hidebound upper orders. He made to rise, but Woolworth grasped his sleeve to halt him.
    “You see?” Woolworth turned to the others with a wistful expression. “He’s perfect!”
    Remington felt the coil of tension that had recentlyloosened in his gut tightening once more as Woolworth coaxed him back into his seat. He cast a longing glance at the door as they began to relate hair-raising tales of the atrocities Lady Antonia had committed against male freedom. But he listened, in spite of himself, and gradually began to picture her