Maggie MacKeever Read Online Free PDF Page B

him. It was only fair that a female who had just received a terrible blow—albeit for the hundredth time—should be permitted to indulge in a slight display of wounded sensibility. “I have cared for all of them!” She sniffled. “Of course, no one can ever compare with my dear——”
    “Courtney! I know, I know!” Innis was in no mood to hear again a catalogue of his happily deceased brother-in-law’s nonexistent virtues. Sir Courtney Blissington had been of a disposition and character that made the feckless Ashleys appear models of virtue in comparison. “Sometimes, Adorée, I think you have windmills in your head. Roxbury was the plumpest pigeon that’s ever come our way, but you had to turn squeamish and refuse to feather your nest! Ah well, what’s done is done, and can be undone, I always say! Where is this fine sapphire set?”
    “Innis!” Lady Bliss quite forgot the loss of her latest swain in the face of this new threat. “You don’t mean to take them from me?”
    “May I recall to you the bailiffs and the moneylenders, the champagne and spring chickens and green peas?” Innis held out his hand. Adorée sighed and reluctantly placed in it a jeweler’s box. “That’s my girl!” applauded Innis, and inspected the gems. “Very fine, in truth! Never mind, sister, you’ll have even finer, and before long.”
    Nor did Lady Bliss respond to this tantalizing promise; Lady Bliss was contemplating the patent absence of her guardian angel on this miserable day. Not only had she lost Lord Roxbury, who had been generous if a trifle dilatory in his attentions; but even worse, she had been deprived of the splendid jewels with which she might have consoled herself. Life, decided Adorée, was most extraordinarily unfair.
    Innis had a fair comprehension of the reflections that passed through his sister’s lovely, if empty, head: Innis was the only Ashley to have ever possessed any degree of native wit. He was shrewd, and canny, and had a remarkable flair for recognizing and using to his own good advantage the foibles of his fellow men. “Young Cristin,” he remarked, seemingly at random, “has gone with Eleazar to Gunther’s. It is an excellent time, Adorée, to discuss the future of our niece.”
    “Eleazar! With Eleazar at Gunther’s!” echoed Lady Bliss, then giggled most delightfully as she envisioned that aged roué in a confectioner’s store. Her merriment was replaced by a sudden suspicion. “What plans?”
    “Don’t you trust me, sister?” Innis prudently allowed her no opportunity to reply. “Believe me, I have everything very well in hand.”
    “Poor little Cristin!” Lady Bliss looked woebegone. “She should be able to enjoy her stay in London, instead of hiding herself of an evening in the upper story of the house. And no, Innis!” she added, for he had moved as if to speak. “I have told you before that I will not have Cristin in the gaming rooms.”
    So she had, to Innis’s grave disappointment, and it was furthermore a point on which she had proven unusually adamant. “I don’t see,” Adorée continued, “why you had to bring her here. Surely Niall’s affairs weren’t in such bad train that she couldn’t have been placed elsewhere?” Innis’s crude rejoinder recalled to her the ne’er-do-well nature of their elder brother. “Oh, curses! The thing’s done, but understand this, Innis: I will not have Cristin bothered with our little problems.”
    Innis stretched out his long legs before him and contemplated his sister’s reasoning, or lack thereof. If being harried half to death by creditors was a small problem, he hated to think what Adorée would consider extreme. “You have not grasped the situation,” he remarked. “It was the greatest stroke of good fortune that brought Cristin to us. And I think I may safely wager that our niece’s London sojourn will not be without, ah, happy consequence.”
    Adorée Blissington may not have been the most nimble-witted of