Raven's Ransom Read Online Free PDF

and a generous helping of minted lamb.
    The waiters were tumbling over themselves to help, the innkeeper on such pins to please that his ingratiating manner became rather intrusive until the cutpurse wisely shut the door in his face. Primrose raised her brows at this decided action, for certainly there was not the necessary three-inch gap to preserve their combined reputations. Still, she decided, dining with a gentleman masquerading as a cutpurse was proving a novel experience. One quirkish enough, she felt, to risk a little flexibility in observing the conventions. There was no doubt in the elder Miss Chartley’s mind, you see, that Barnacle Jack was a gentleman. True, his manners were outrageous and his flirtatious style quite beyond the pale, but there was a certain directness of manner that pleased. If he was not a gentleman born, she was no judge of anything.
    Daisy, of course, had no such dampening suspicion. On the contrary, she was quite enraptured with her roguish villain, something that disturbed the perceptive Miss Primrose a little. Adventures were one thing, but attaching too much significance to a chance encounter quite another. Relieved, she noted that the Raven chaise had arrived, an abominably ostentatious thing, gilded in gold with vivid blue wheels and an interior of matching hue. Even the plush squabs were of royal blue velvet, commissioned only recently in keeping with current fashion.
    The earl, when not upon his deathbed, enjoyed squandering his quite inordinately indecent fortune. Lily bravely helped him. Primrose sighed. There was no hoping, now, that they would be able to glide out unremarked. The White Dragon would probably be speculating about their noble visitors for weeks.
    She nodded to Daisy, who looked anything but noble in her clinging gown. It becomingly revealed her many feminine perfections, a fact that Barnacle Jack did not mind in the least.
    “Wretched man! You need not look so smug!” Primrose frowned reprovingly at his impudence.
    For answer, she received a wide-eyed grin and a quite unabashed compliment on her own high good looks, which served to make her crosser still.
    “Flummery, sir! Now say farewell to Daisy, for I suspect we shall not meet again.”
    “No?” The words were soft and rather whimsical. Primrose glanced at him sharply, her tone unusually firm.
    “No!”
    Daisy sighed. “How I wish you were not a cutpurse!”
    “How contrary of you! I could have sworn you desired the reverse this morning. No, that was a highwayman. But of course, I double as a highwayman at night.”
    “Don’t be absurd, sir! I could not have wished such a thing! Well, perhaps I did, but that was before we were acquainted! Can you not reform, sir? I would not like to see you hang from a noose.”
    Barnacle Jack’s eyes sparkled with merriment. “Indeed, no! I have always found that particular prospect singularly unappealing! As to reforming . . .” He shrugged. “I am a rogue at heart.”
    “Probably the truest thing you have uttered all day,” Primrose remarked under her breath. The cutpurse regarded her with a certain amused sympathy.
    “Hush, you shall disillusion the infant and I shall be quite overset!”
    He turned from her and smiled quite deliciously at Daisy. “I shall help you into your carriage and beg your direction. Then, on a moonless night—or no, perhaps the moon shall be full—I shall be heard riding across the moors proclaiming your name.”
    “Daisy?” Daisy giggled, though her round eyes widened at the beguiling tone.
    “I wish my mother had named me Ariel or Athena, or something heroic! Even Camellia or Rose would have been more suitable.”
    “Well, it just so happens that I adore Daisies.” Armand pushed back the guilty thought that he hadn’t set eyes on a daisy for years, and if he had, he would not have known it from a petunia or a common garden variety iris. Still, his words seemed to be having the desired effect, for the younger Miss Chardey was