Nicola and the Viscount Read Online Free PDF Page B

Abbey? It makes no sense.”
    â€œStill, twelve thousand pounds.” Eleanor shook her head. “It’s an awful lot of money, Nicky.”
    Nicola turned a stricken gaze upon her friend. “Et tu, Brute?” she asked. But Eleanor only looked confused.
    â€œOh, Eleanor,” Nicola cried. “From Julius Caesar . Don’t you remember? We studied it only last term!”
    Eleanor shook her head. “How can you talk about Roman emperors at a time like this? Twelve thousand pounds could keep you in new lace mittens for years and years, Nicky.”
    It was at that moment that the God walked up with two cups of punch, one of which he gave to Nicola.
    â€œHere you are, Miss Sparks,” he said. “Beastly stuff, but it does the trick.”
    Nicola, catching Eleanor’s congratulatory look, merely smiled and sipped her punch. She supposed she oughtn’t feel so wretched. After all, here she was, having punch with the handsomest man in the room.
    Still, it was a little unsettling that no one— no one —understood how she felt. She was thinking to herself, I suppose I am being childish. I mean, it’s true that I need the money more than the sheep need the grass. And I could always use a portion of that twelve thousand pounds to set Nana and Puddy up comfortably somewhere else, after all, when Eleanor inhaled sharply and dug her elbow into Nicola’s ribs, causing her almost to spill the contents of her punch glass down the front of the God’s godly white shirt.
    â€œLook,” Eleanor said in a hiss, gazing across the room with a shocked expression on her face. “He’s here!”
    Nicola, assuming he meant the Prince of Wales, since it couldn’t possibly mean the God, as he was standing there beside them, lifted a hand to her hair to assure herself that her ribbons were still in place. It would not do, she knew, to meet the Prince of Wales with her hair ribbons hanging down. Oh, if only she’d been able to get her hands on some face powder! Those freckles would be the end of her.
    But then she saw that it wasn’t a prince at all elbowing his way toward them through the crowd.
    â€œStuff and bother,” she said irritably. Because the Milksop was bearing down upon them at full speed.
    Unbidden, her mind flew back to earlier that day, when the Grouser, having taken his leave of Nicola—in a thick cloud of disapproval—stalked from the room, leaving her alone with his odious son.
    The Milksop, seeming to have recovered the use of speech, which he’d lost at the sight of Nicola without her braids, had asked her unctuously, “You’ll be at Almack’s tonight?”
    â€œOf course,” she had replied, in some surprise. The Milksop had rarely, if ever, deigned to speak to her after that incident in the cowshed. In fact, this was the first time in nine years Nicola could remember him having said anything to her other than hello and good-bye.
    But her astonishment was only to increase a hundredfold when the Milksop went on to ask, with a smile she supposed he’d been told was charming, but which she thought perfectly suspect, “Then will you save the first dance for your cousin?”
    Nicola only barely managed to keep herself from asking curiously, “Which cousin?” before realizing he meant himself . The Milksop! The Milksop, who had never looked at Nicola with anything but contempt and disapproval for what he’d called her hoydenish ways—Nicola having had, in her childhood, an extreme love of mud tossing and tree climbing—had actually asked her to save a dance for him! What kind of ague had consumed him that he could, even for a moment, consider dancing with Nicola, whom he’d never made a secret of despising, especially after her having witnessed that famous faint?
    â€œOh. Er. Um,” Nicola stammered, perfectly unable to think how to reply. She was not accustomed to odious young men