Miss Westlake's Windfall Read Online Free PDF Page A

starting to feel for swelling. When the viscount winced, the old man made clucking sounds, as he would to soothe a restless horse. “There now, lad, what the devil happened to you?”
    Chas had shrugged, a painful mistake. On an indrawn breath, he gasped, “Must have been a rabbit hole.”
    “A rabbit hole, you say?” Old Coggs, who had put Chas on his first pony, dropped the viscount’s aching arm like a hot iron to rush to the horse’s side, checking for injuries. Lord Ashmead’s injured wrist bounced against the barrel.
    Somehow he’d reached the kitchens, where his valet and his butler, Epps, another old family retainer, had clucked their tongues. “Don’t say it,” Chas had ground out while they searched the housekeeper’s stores for salve to spread on his cheek and the cook’s pantry for a beefsteak to lay on his discolored eye. The dog was pressing herself close to his side for comfort, or for the beefsteak.
    When Coggs came in from the stables, he pronounced the viscount’s wrist badly sprained but not broken, as far as he could tell. He decided they’d ought to put it in a splint anyway, to keep the arm from being jostled. “Else the gudgeon’s liable to damage it worse, don’t you know.” Since the old horseman had done more doctoring of man and beast than any sawbones, the others nodded in agreement. By now half the staff was in the kitchen, watching their jug-bitten master being trussed up like a plucked goose, but Lord Ashmead was beyond caring.
    “Odd kind of rabbit hole it must of been,” Coggs noted as he spread some foul-smelting substance on the viscount’s fingers to take down the swelling. “Didn’t leave a mark on a single one of the gelding’s legs, not even a smidgen of dirt.”
    Lord Ashmead hadn’t commented. He’d passed out ten minutes earlier when Purvis started pulling tree bark splinters out of his cheek.
    * * * *
    Where was that blessed oblivion when he needed it? Chas wondered, there in the dark. In his houseful of servants, he was alone and aching. His cheek was burning, his wrist was throbbing, and his blasted dog was back on the bed, snoring. The fire was nearly out, and the bellpull might have been on the moon for all the good it was doing him across the room. His throat was too parched to call for help, not that any of his lordship’s loyal retainers would bring him a cup of hemlock. And he stank.
    Besides, Viscount Ashmead’s pride was battered worse than his body. His mission for the War Office was a failure, to say nothing of his intended engagement. He’d lost Prelieu’s reward, the respect of his associates, and Ada’s friendship. No one loved him except his dog ... and his mother.
    Bloody hell.
     

Chapter Four
     
    “Turned you down again, did she?”
    Chas winced, and not just from the bright light in the morning room. His darling mother’s voice grated on his raw nerves like an unoiled wheel. He felt like stable sweepings, and knew he looked worse, there being only so much damage even Purvis’s hare’s foot could cover. He also knew he had to attend the viscountess this morning or she’d be rapping on his bedroom door. Purvis did not have the spine to deny her. Lud knew, the scarecrow in Cook’s kitchen garden, with a broom for a backbone, couldn’t have stopped Lady Ashmead on a mission. Chas’s diminutive, elegant, well-dressed mother was like a force of nature, going where she wished, shoving aside everything in her way, meanwhile looking like the sweetest, most genteel of ladies, busy about her embroidery.
    Lady Ashmead had returned to the Meadows for a visit two years ago, to take her wayward son in hand, she’d declared. She had not left yet, despite frequent lamentations on the gay life she was missing at her home at the Royal Crescent in Bath. Chas lamented louder, but in private, being a dutiful son. Previously, the viscountess had divided her months-long visits between her two daughters. Chas could swear his sister Emily and her