The Beautiful One Read Online Free PDF

would be staying for the night and led her upstairs to a bedchamber.
    She entered the room, closed the door behind her, and leaned against it, sinking to the floor in the candlelit darkness. Her limbs quivered uncontrollably. Lord Grandville’s behavior had been appalling. The man was a heartless pig, and not the first one she’d encountered in the last month. She was so furious and disgusted with men in general at that moment that if God had put the fate of all males in her hands, their future would have been in grave doubt.
    As soon as she stopped shaking, she would go see Miss Tarryton. The girl must be crushed by the welcome she’d received. Anna could all too easily imagine how she was feeling: alone in the world, as good as abandoned by the man who should be responsible for her.
    Although Anna’s father had never been cruel, as the viscount had been to his ward, perhaps that would have been easier to bear. He—her only parent—had merely been uninterested in her. What drew Matthew Bristol, beyond the medical duties he fulfilled to the grateful satisfaction of his patients, was his obsession: birds.
    A precise, composed man who never chatted and disdained emotions, Dr. Bristol had spent every free moment on his studies in medicine and nature. The fact that he had no attention to spare for his children hadn’t mattered so much to Anna when her brother, Lawrence, was alive, but once he was gone, she couldn’t avoid the conclusion that she was little more to her father than a dinner companion.
    The only time he’d shown interest in her had been when he asked her to do the drawings for his two published studies of birds, Anatomy of a Songbird and A Study of Owls . She’d been happy to walk the woods and fields with him as they looked for meadow pipits and long-eared owls to sketch. But when the books were done, it seemed as though his interest in her was over as well.
    There had been advantages to having an unconcerned parent. No one had scolded her if she was sometimes rather tan, or noticed that she didn’t dress fashionably and that she was deficient in such feminine accomplishments as graceful tea pouring. She’d learned to ride and swim by copying her older brother, read every book in the house, including her father’s medical texts (the ones having to do with the reproductive process holding particular interest), and studied drawing and painting to her heart’s content, becoming good enough to illustrate her father’s bird books.
    This last occupation gained her enough renown locally that she was engaged as a drawing tutor for the daughters of the local gentry, and she dreamed of one day using the money she earned to open a drawing school.
    But being an unconcerned parent also meant that her father had never been concerned .
    He certainly hadn’t cared when she’d told him that his apprentice, who was often in their home, made her uncomfortable.
    â€œI feel as though Mr. Rawlins watches me,” she’d said.
    â€œHe’s a decent apprentice,” he’d said, not looking up from the prescription he was writing. “That’s all that matters.”
    Mr. Rawlins had left a few weeks before her father sickened and died, and she forgot about him—until one day a month ago.
    She’d been returning from giving a lesson that afternoon. Though she had inherited the cottage after her father’s death, she’d discovered that he’d been funding a fellow naturalist who was to bring him specimens from South America, and there was hardly any money left, so she had to be very careful with her tutoring earnings. But she loved teaching, even though she knew that her pupils’ families thought her unusual and not the sort of woman they’d want their sons to marry.
    As she approached her house, she’d seen a carriage stopped there.
    She knew from the crest that it belonged to the Marquess of Henshaw, who had an estate a few