Maggie MacKeever Read Online Free PDF

themselves at his feet? “How very foolish you must think me,” she said, shyly. “I owe you an apology, I think. It must be deuced inconvenient—I mean, it must not be wholly pleasant to be in possession of a reputation such as yours, sir! You are making a dreadful muddle of those shirt buttons. Let me help you, pray.”
    Vivien was not averse to some assistance. Tabby crossed the room and applied herself to the task of buttoning the rakehell’s shirt and thus sparing herself further sight of his bronzed bare chest. Her fingers were not quite steady. No one had ever kissed her before. Or wandered about in her presence in a state of undress.
    Tabby was feeling very somber. On the morrow she was off to Brighton to a life of hired servitude, after all. She glanced up with innocent longing into Vivien’s wicked face. Vivien was oddly moved by that glance. He gripped her shoulders.
    At that most inopportune of moments, the door flew open. The divine Sara stood on the threshold, in a state of quite fetching déshabillé. “Well!” she cried in heartfelt tones, as one glance at the guilty-looking couple fulfilled her direst fantasies. Clutching dramatically at her breast, she staggered forward. “Wretch! Heartless beast! Seducer!” And then she gracefully swooned, trusting that Vivian would catch her before she hit to the floor.
     

Chapter Five
     
    Miss Ermyntrude Elphinstone stood gazing out the window of her papa’s rather charming house on Brighton’s Marine Parade, which stretched for a considerable extent along the sea. The view was quite delightful, of blue skies and windswept trees and waves pounding on the soft white cliffs. The view also afforded a clear view of anyone approaching Sir Geoffrey’s house, and it was this latter circumstance that accounted for the gloomy expression on Ermy’s pretty face.
    She glimpsed a shabby coach. It did not interest her especially; only the carriage of a certain viscount could do that. Idly, Ermyntrude decided the shabby vehicle must have lost its way, and was surprised to see it stop in front of the house. Perhaps St. Erth had suffered an accident to his own carriage? Perhaps it suited him to travel about in this queer vehicle, incognito, so to speak? Ermyntrude didn’t care if the viscount came calling in a dogcart, just so long as he appeared.
    She leaned forward in the window, the better to see. No elegant golden-haired lordling descended from the coach, however, merely one drab-looking female carrying a very shabby portmanteau. The female turned toward the house.
    “Drusilla!” Ermyntrude called over her shoulder to her sister, who was putting together a map of Europe with the assistance of her inseparable companion, a large, multicolored, and very shaggy hound of indeterminate ancestry known as Lambchop. “That female that Pa hired—I think she’s here.”
    “Oh, fudge!” muttered Drusilla. “I was hoping she’d had a better offer. Or been kidnapped, or worse!”
    Ermyntrude couldn’t argue with this sentiment. It was one thing to hire a tutor for Drusilla, who was still in the schoolroom; but at seventeen, Ermyntrude already knew more than she wished about geography and history and other matters of a similarly dull nature. Why her father had hired this female, Ermyntrude wasn’t certain. She suspected, from his evasiveness when she’d broached the subject, that Sir Geoffrey was none too certain himself. “Where is Pa?” she asked.
    “Don’t know.” Drusilla was preoccupied with trying to decide where Asia Minor fit into her map. “I think he went out.’’
    “I suppose we’d better let her in.” Ermyntrude sighed and wandered out into the hall.
    It was an elegantly furnished hallway—as was, indeed, the rest of Sir Geoffrey’s house. The walls of the drawing room, for example, were japanned in soft shades of slate and green, with gilt decoration; the sides of the ceiling were coved; and Brussels carpeting in a trailing floral pattern on a