It Happened One Midnight (PG8) Read Online Free PDF Page A

you wish to participate in the Mercury Club, you can have your portion and more the moment you marry appropriately. Not until then. Then again, I suppose you could always rely on the turn of a card for your future.”
    The word “marry” landed on his ears like the very first note of a funeral march. Now he was good and wary.
    It occurred to him that his father might actually be leading to something unexpected.
    “What does ‘appropriately’ mean?”
    His father sighed. “Why am I not surprised that you should ask such a question?”
    “Forgive me. Perhaps I should have asked: what does ‘appropriately’ mean to you, Father?”
    Jonathan kept his voice level, his face as impassive as he was able.
    But the question was barbed.
    And his father was no fool. He could sniff out a rebellion the way a fox can sniff out a rodent in a thicket. He fixed Jonathan with a cold stare.
    Jonathan was both too angry and too curious now to be cowed.
    Because the question was valid. His older brother Miles had married the wildly inappropriate (as far as Isaiah Redmond was concerned) Cynthia Brightly, and showed no signs of being anything other than gloriously happy, in that very sure, very immovable way Miles had that made it seem like he’d done the most right thing in the world. And then Violet had married an earl of all things, quite unexpectedly, which would have made most parents ecstatic, except that the earl she’d married was Captain Asher Flint, the Earl of Ardmay—purportedly part Indian, nicknamed “The Savage,” of unknown parentage, American-raised no less, who’d earned an earldom from the king in part through application of a set of unsavory skills, violence among them.
    When his father had craved a title his entire life.
    It was funny, when one thought about it. When he was a small child, Jonathan coveted his father’s black stallion more than anything in the world, and he used to try very hard at night to dream of riding it; instead, he wound up dreaming of riding mules, or sawhorses, or tree branches, if he dreamed of riding anything at all.
    For his father, getting his children married to appropriate people must be rather like that. So close, and yet so far.
    Still, no one could argue that the Earl of Ardmay wasn’t the only man alive who could tame Violet and get her happily, if queasily and tyrannically, with child.
    “Appropriately means a woman of whom I approve, born of a fine family, preferably with a title. Surely you could have surmised this much without asking.”
    He paused weightily.
    It was, Jonathan realized even as it was happening, tantamount to the moment before the judge reads a verdict in court.
    “I have in fact decided any additional funds you receive from me will be contingent upon you marrying appropriately inside the year.”
    Jonathan went very still. As though some disgusting and multilegged and poisonous creature, something his naturalist brother Miles might have discovered or known the name of, had settled on him, and would bite if he moved.
    How is it I never saw this coming ?
    Then again, his father had a few more decades experience with darts, the metaphorical kind at least, than he did.
    Men who are fatally struck usually take a moment to drop. He felt rather suspended in that moment.
    “If club membership is what you want, and if you believe you have an ‘aptitude,’ as you say, for investment, I think the gentlemen of the Mercury Club would be more inclined to trust the judgment of a married man, Jonathan. After all, marriage demonstrates one’s willingness to shoulder responsibility and manage a household, and requires a certain steadiness of character.”
    This was such balderdash that Jonathan had to bite down on his back teeth to keep his jaw from swinging wide. Drinking and gambling had practically been invented in order to help married men forget about their wives. Everyone knew that.
    My father really does believe I’m stupid, he thought, in some surprise. Or at