The Lady’s Secret Read Online Free PDF

one question he’d asked: Why?
    And that raking look, as though he could see all her secrets.
    He had hired her on a trial basis for a month. She needed to stay for at least two, long enough to attend Dunsmore’s Christmas house party. She would have to make herself indispensible to him so he’d let her stay till then. She hoped several years of dressing actors in every conceivable costume, styling hair and painting cosmetics on faces was going to help her in her new role. For the next month at least, she would have to pass as George Fellowes, valet to Lord Nathaniel Harland, the most elegant gentleman in London.
    Lord Nathaniel Harland.
    She would be drawing his bathwater, looking after his clothes. Shaving him! Good lord, she would need to get some practice in. She had never shaved a man in her life.
    She pulled her hat a little lower over her face and set a course for Lily’s house, two miles away. She’d come in a hack and this was her first time walking out in broad daylight, dressed as a man. It felt distinctly odd. Odd and liberating, to walk without the heavy weight of skirts around her legs, to feel instead her legs moving freely, unrestricted. The capacity for movement was astonishing. She relished it and almost feared it. She found herself wanting to run. It would be something to run, clad like this, without fear of tripping, without having to hold fistfuls of fabric in her hands. Instead of running, she did the next best thing, taking long strides and swinging her arms in an unladylike manner.
    She dipped her hand in her pocket and withdrew her lucky coin, a somewhat misshapen half crown Papa had given her years ago. She’d been very small at the time, five or six. Papa had dropped the coin in the street and a carriage had promptly rumbled over it. They’d laughed at its warped shape when he’d picked it up again and he’d given it to her “for luck.” She always kept it with her—even when she used to go on stage. Not that it had brought her much luck there.
    But it had worked today.
    As Georgy walked, she flipped the coin under and over every finger on her left hand, catching it with her thumb each time she reached her pinky and beginning again. It was a deft, flashy trick Papa had taught her. She wasn’t even particularly aware of doing it as she ran over that strange, brief interview in her mind.
    Her first glimpse of Harland had all but felled her. She’d never seen a man like him. Not that she hadn’t seen handsome men before. The theatre was full of handsome men. But she’d never seen a man like Harland. Not her brother, who was like a Greek god with his big body and fair hair. Not Will Grainger, Max’s lead actor, with his dashing moustache and straight white teeth. Not even Michael McCall, with his piercing blue eyes and stirring kisses. Harland was different.
    He was beautiful .
    Something in her had ached when she’d seen him. She’d watched him rise from behind his desk, tall and lean and broad-shouldered, with his dark hair flopping over his forehead. Dark like sable, as dark as his skin was fair, as dark as his melting eyes. Those eyes. She’d thought she’d drown. Lushly, extravagantly lashed; so much so it was as though his eyes were lightly outlined with kohl. And his mouth—it might have been thought almost feminine in its beauty, were it not for the firm, purely masculine line of the jaw beneath.
    She had told him he was the most elegant gentleman in London. That was his reputation and it did not lie. He had been wrapped up exquisitely in his finely tailored superfine coat, silk waistcoat and buff breeches. And all that starched white linen about his pale throat.
    She would be dressing him. More to the point, she would be un dressing him. Her mouth went dry at the thought. What would he look like beneath the wool and the silk and the linen?
    She was not ignorant of men’s bodies. She helped actors in and out of costumes every night—she had seen men naked. And Michael