How To School Your Scoundrel Read Online Free PDF Page A

then. Well, buck up. That’s what Mama says. Buck up and try again later, when he’s in a good mood.”
    “I see.”
    Young Lord Kildrake sighed and stuck his finger in his hair, twirling it into a thoughtful knot. His gaze shifted to the door behind her. “The trouble is, he never is. In a good mood.”
    From the entrance hall came the sound of feet on marble, of the butler issuing quiet orders. A woman’s voice called out. The boy’s mother, probably. Lady Somerton, summoning her son.
    He never is. In a good mood.
    In the end, that long-ago day, Luisa had lived, but not because she had stared the bear down. The thunder of avenging hoofbeats had filled the forest, and Prince Rudolf had appeared on his white charger. He had risen in his stirrups, dropped his reins, lifted his rifle, and shot the bear dead without a break in the horse’s stride.
    Luisa looked down at the little boy. He had lost interest in her now. He let out another long sigh, turned, and ambled back down the hallway, still twirling his hair.
    Her father was dead. Her husband was dead. Her sisters, her governess, all scattered to the winds of England.
    She was alone.
    Luisa straightened away from the door and shook out her shirt cuffs. She had better get on with it, then, hadn’t she?

TWO

    O n the occasion of his fifteenth birthday, the Earl of Somerton’s father had taken notice of him at last. “Getting to be a man, aren’t you, Kildrake, my boy?” he’d said, in his rough-edged voice. “Look at the shoulders on you.”
    Somerton—then merely Leopold, Viscount Kildrake—had beamed with embarrassed pride. He had returned home from school just the day before for the summer holiday, and apart from the butler, who had made the arrangements for his journey, nobody in the house seemed to have noticed his arrival. “Yes, sir,” he said.
    “You’re rising fourteen now, aren’t you?”
    “Fifteen today, sir.”
    “Today! By God!” The earl’s red-tipped nose had dipped toward his. “Been having a go at the housemaids, have you?”
    A bolt of pure fright went through young Leopold’s body, as if his father had just read his thoughts. Not that he’d attempted a single housemaid—he hadn’t dared to poach on his father’s established turf—but he’d admired them from afar. Plump bosoms and round arses and . . . He folded his hands behind his back and dug his fingers hard into his skin, because his unruly young adolescent body was already responding to the mere suggestion of female flesh. “No, sir!”
    “No?” A perplexed scowl. “Well, then. Come along with me.”
    It was ten o’clock in the evening, and Leopold had been on his way upstairs to undress for bed, after a solitary dinner in the family dining room. (His mother was attending three different balls that evening and took the usual tray in her dressing room during her two-hour preparatory toilette.) “Yes, sir,” he’d said, and walked outside to the waiting carriage with his father. They had proceeded to his father’s favorite brothel, where Leopold had lost his virginity to a plump forty-year-old whore in one room while the Earl of Somerton had expired of a stroke in another.
    In the curious way of memory, he recalled little of the carnal act itself, or how he had come to be lying in mingled shock and shame atop the wide white belly of his companion, veins still throbbing, at the vivid instant when his father’s two strumpets had burst naked through the doorway screaming,
He’s dead! He’d dead! God save us!
He was still wearing his shirt, and his trousers were tangled around his ankles; he remembered that, because he had tripped off the bed and fallen on his face, and the whore had laughed. “Why, then, you’re the earl now! And I’ve got your mess in my cunt this instant, bless me! Ha-ha!”
    He’d turned red with humiliation at the words
mess
and
cunt
;
he’d turned black with horror at the words
He’s dead
, which the other two prostitutes were still