Lady Anne's Lover (The London List) Read Online Free PDF Page B

know what to do.”
    “Don’t write to The London List just yet. We have months to muddle through. Miracles happen.”
    “Do they? I hadn’t noticed,” Mrs. Mont said softly. She crossed the kitchen and shut her door firmly behind her. Gareth heard the turn of the key in the lock. He wondered if she locked herself in every night or if it was because he still sat at the table. Did she fear ravishment?
    Gareth wouldn’t touch her, no matter the temptation. He still had one hand—that was good enough to touch himself.
    He had been too honest, always a flaw. She would leave, and he’d be forced to advertise anew. The local women wouldn’t work for him. Bronwen had seen to that in life, and even more so in death. She haunted him still.
    He pushed himself back from the table, leaving his half-empty cup. There was the bottle in his room, and this time he wouldn’t trip down the stairs in haste to get to it.

C HAPTER 4
    D amn and damn . Anne could not say she was happy here, but she was getting used to the place, and proud that her efforts had immediate results. Things were much less cobwebby. She’d beaten the dust out of the sofa so one could sit on it without sneezing one’s head off and moved the few pieces of ugly furniture in the parlor into a pleasing seating arrangement at one end of the cavernous room. The kitchen pots may not have gleamed, but the crusty burnt bits had been scraped off. The slate floors were swept if not scrubbed, the pictures straightened, the candle wax removed from where it had made little volcanic mountains. Her hands were blistered and her back ached, but she felt useful for the first time in her life.
    Now she’d have to move to another household, a place where a sober employer might be more observant of her utter unsuitability to be a servant.
    She needed to be hidden away for two years. She couldn’t get her money until she was twenty-one or married, and the chances of her marrying anyone now after all she’d done were nil. Even the most desperately debauched rakehell would not want her after the scandals she’d caused. She was a rakeshame, although her antics had really been more silly than sinful. But she had tiptoed to the precipice, walking out of Garrard’s “forgetting” she was wearing that diamond necklace, kissing Miss Rosa Parmenter on the lips in her father’s theatre box before the lights dimmed, tattooing a daisy on her left ankle and raising her skirts often so that anyone could see it.
    Anne knew now that she’d been mistaken in her method of rebellion. Her father was never going to let her go. But she could not bear his increasingly frequent attempts to touch her. She was fleet of foot and sharp of tongue and had so far restricted his damage to her person. A few unwelcome kisses and cuddles were not going to kill her, though they had made her feel filthy. She wondered if she could ever bear any man’s touch.
    A tear slipped down her cheek. Blast! Tears would not help. She’d cried an ocean of them at first after her mother died, prayed on her knees, made bargains with God. Nothing had changed. There was something wrong with her.
    She crawled under the moth-eaten blankets and shut her eyes. She could hear the major moving around the kitchen, jiggling the tricky damper on the old stove, trudging slowly up the back stairs to his bedroom above. When he had fallen earlier, she had been as wide awake as she was now, shivering beneath the thin covers. She expected to find him dead from the thunderous fall, although his wild laughter soon disabused her of that notion.
    Anne supposed he had reason enough to drink—the loss of his arm as well as the pending loss of his home was a dreadful thing. She had no home herself now, no friends, no family. Just rooms full of lonely dirty work and dismal wages. One day off a week. Sunday mornings to repent and regret her follies.
    And by spring she’d be turned out, hopefully with a real reference this time.
    By spring she’d