Carla Kelly Read Online Free PDF Page B

telling you this for your own good, Miss Hampton. I assure you it’s nothing personal. I mean, I think you’re charming.” He blushed some more, and Susan laughed in spite of herself.
    “Well, thank you, I think,” she said, rising to go. Now what, she asked herself as she looked outside. It was snowing harder. “No,” she said, and sat down again. “I need a job. My father, Sir Rodney Hampton, is a gambling fool, my aunt wants to turn me into her footstool, I am twenty-five with no dowry, and I need a job.” I could cry without too much effort, she thought as she looked from one Steinman to the other. She wondered briefly which one would yield the faster to tears, then rejected the notion. This is business, she told herself. Tears are out.
    “You’re making this difficult,” Joel said after a moment, but there was more regret than dismissal in his tone.
    She took heart and hitched her chair closer to both desks. “I suppose I am,” she began, “but I . . .”
    “. . . still need a job,” he finished for her, his eyes merry in spite of her dilemma.
    “Oh, I do,” she sighed. “Please, help me, sir.”
    Steinman looked at his mother for a long moment and then drummed his fingers on his desk. The rat-a-tat sound had a definite military cadence, and Susan wondered again where he had lost his arm.
    Her attention was broken by the postman’s whistle and the
whush
of letters shoved through the opening in the door. Without thinking, Susan got up and gathered the mail together, brushing off the snow. She handed it to the man in front of her. He glanced at the letters, then slapped one of them.
    “
Oy gevalt,
Mamele, here’s another one from Lady Bushnell.” Forgetting her presence for a moment, he made a face at it, then took the envelope in his teeth and carefully slit it open with the letter opener. He took out the letter and shook it open, looking over it at Susan again. “You’d appreciate this lady, Miss Hampton. I think she is almost as persistent as you.”
    He was about to toss it into a wire basket when he stopped and read it through again, looking over the letter at her when he finished. He put it down then with scarcely concealed excitement, and glanced at his mother. “Mamele, I have an idea,” he said finally, triumph in his voice as he looked at Susan. “Miss Hampton, I have an offer for you.”
    “Joel! You can’t be thinking . . .”
    He swiveled in his chair to watch his mother. “And why not, Mamele? Everyone we’ve sent, she’s rejected. ‘Too old, too slow, too stupid, too vulgar, too this, too that’ until I want to smack her!”
    Susan grinned in spite of herself. Joel Steinman, you are irresistible, she thought. “She sounds like a dragon.”
    “Most certainly. And Lady Bushnell is only the dog guarding the entrance to the underworld. What
was
his name?”
    “Cerberus,” she said automatically, wondering what he would say next.
    “Ah ha!” he exclaimed, kissing his long fingers at her. “Exactly. I have here a letter from Lady Bushnell, widow of Lord Bushnell, late colonel of the Fifth Regiment of Foot, the Cotswolds Guards. I have been trying for months to please her with a lady’s companion for her mother-in-law, the dowager Lady Bushnell.” He leaned across the table until he was quite close to her face. “Miss Hampton, do you have any objection to old ladies?”
    Captivated by him, she shook her head.
    “Strong-willed, stubborn, drive-you-crazy martinets?”
    Again she shook her head. “I’ve been living with them for years, sir,” she said.
    His smile was beatific. She thought for one amazed moment that he was going to kiss her, but he sat down again, slapped the desk in triumph, and nodded to his mother. “Miss Hampton is going to put us all out of our misery.”
    Mrs. Steinman considered the matter a while longer, then slowly nodded her head. “There’s no one there beyond the bailiff ever to be tempted by Miss Hampton,” she considered,