How the Marquess Was Won Read Online Free PDF Page A

students from even considering exploring her room.
    Bloody aristocrats , she thought . Why would I want to spend another moment in their presence? Especially if he might be there.
    She plunged her quill into the well of ink and began:
Dear Lisbeth—
Thank you so much for your kind invitation, and as delightful as it would be to see you again, I fear I will not be able to—
    She jerked her head up from her foolscap when the tap sounded at her door.
    She sighed gustily enough to send her half-written message fluttering, pushed back her chair, abandoned her work, and flung the door open.
    The maid standing there leaped backward, perhaps to get out of the reach of the flames shooting from Phoebe’s eyes.
    With an effort, Phoebe composed her face into more placid planes. Mary Frances, who was short and round and had springy rusty red curls, offered the sort of wobbly conciliatory smile you might show an armed looby to discourage them from lunging. She dipped a little curtsy.
    “Beggin’ yer pardon, Miss Vale, and sorry to interrupt yer important work,” she peered curiously past her into the simple room, at the two thick rag rugs, the bed covered with an eccentric quilt she’d stitched from dresses and pelisses she’d dismembered when she couldn’t coax any more wear from them. “Miss Endicott would like a word with you before she leaves.”
    Phoebe drew in a steadying breath. Mary Frances thought they were all very clever and did important work here at the academy, which was rather sweet and soothing.
    “Thank you, Mary Frances.”
    Miss Endicott was about to leave on holidays, too, she knew, but she’d left the running of the academy in the hands of senior teachers Mrs. Bundicraft and Mrs. Fleeger.
    Phoebe turned to the oval mirror nailed up over her bureau and gave her fine, fair hair a cursory smoothing, shook out her skirts and gave them a cursory smoothing, and then hurried down the long hallway and darted down the winding stairs, one hand sliding along that deliciously smooth banister polished by generations of recalcitrant young ladies doing that very thing, just as she had when she was young.
    She came to a halt in the doorway of Miss Endicott’s office to avoid colliding with a big black wall.
    The wall turned around slowly and proved to be the marquess.
    “Ah, there you are, Miss Vale.” Miss Endicott managed to make it sound as if she’d been waiting for her all afternoon. She was dressed for travel in an elegant gray wool dress and matching pelisse and a splendid gray-lavender felt hat. A packed portmanteau sat atop her great polished desk. A trunk was lined up next to it on the floor.
    “I’d hoped you’d show the marquess at least one of the upper-floor classrooms, as I must leave at once or miss the mail coach, and my sister, I assure you, will never forgive me if I arrive an entire day late for our visit as she has a full program of entertainments devised.” She pulled on a pair of gloves as she spoke. “I felt it of value that His Lordship should speak with one of our teachers in residence. He mentioned he had the pleasure of making your acquaintance in Postlethwaite’s.”
    Miss Endicott’s eyes were small, blue, and piercing. She was another in a long line of Miss Marietta Endicotts who ran the academy with the skill of a general, the finesse of an orchestra conductor, and business wiles that might make even Isaiah Redmond blush. She was in fact very kind, a secret all the girls in the school eventually uncovered.
    Mind you, it took a good deal of digging to uncover it.
    And she was kind, but never weak. Implacable was in fact a better word for her.
    A decade or so had accustomed Phoebe to the gaze, and yet she had never been able to defy it or lie to it. Not once. And she’d once been able to defy everything .
    Her skin heated again from a mix of emotions and sensations, none of them compatible.
    “Of course,” Phoebe said evenly. “We had the . . . pleasure.”
    Miss Endicott