The Runaway Countess Read Online Free PDF Page A

that Janefound calming after all that had happened before in her life.
    She enjoyed talking to him and he seemed to enjoy talking to her. When she had declined to dance at the assembly, saying only that her dancing days were behind her, he did not press her. But he was kind enough to dance with Emma and listen to her talk about plants, even though Emma seemed to find him ‘stick-in-the-muddy’.
    So when Jane had encountered him and his sister in the village, it seemed natural to invite them to tea. Only to be a friendly neighbour, of course. There could be nothing more. She was a married woman, even though she had not seen her husband in years.
    She was a married woman for now, anyway. And she could not quite deny that when David Marton smiled at her, sought her out for conversation, she felt something she hadn’t in a long time. She felt—admired.
    Even before she left London she had begun to feel invisible. The one person whose admiration mattered—her husband—didn’t see her any more and all the chatter in the fashion papers about her gowns and her coiffuresdidn’t matter at all. Nothing mattered beyond Hayden’s indifference. She started to feel invisible even to herself, especially after she had failed in her main duty to give her husband an heir.
    Back home at Barton Park she had started to feel better, slowly, day by day. She had started to feel the sun on her skin again and hear the birds singing. The weed-choked gardens didn’t care what she looked like and Emma certainly didn’t. Things seemed quite content. So it had come as quite a surprise how much she enjoyed Sir David’s quiet attentions.
    She leaned towards the mirror to peer more closely at her reflection.
    ‘No one in London would recognise you now,’ she said with laugh. And, indeed, no one
would
recognise the well-dressed Lady Ramsay in this woman, with her wind-tossed hair and the pale gold freckles the sun had dotted over her nose. She reached for her hairbrush and set to work.
    She suddenly felt giddily schoolgirlish in how much she looked forward to this tea party.

Chapter Three
    ‘R amsay? By Jove, it
is
you! Blast it, man, what are you doing in this godforsaken place?’
    Hayden slowly turned from his place at the bar. He had just been asking himself that very thing, What was he doing in a country inn, sipping at tepid, weak ale, running after a woman who clearly didn’t want him, when he could be in London, getting ready for a night out at balls and gambling clubs?
    He had just come to the startling realisation that a night out gaming and drinking wasn’t something he would miss very much when he heard those shouted words. Theywere a welcome distraction from his own brooding thoughts.
    He turned away from the bar and saw Lord Ethan Carstairs making his way across the crowded room towards him. Lord Ethan was not what Hayden would call a friend, but they were often in the same circles and saw each other at their club and across the gambling tables. Lord Ethan was rather loud and didn’t hold his liquor very well, but he was tolerable enough most of the time. Especially at moments like this, when Hayden needed distraction.
    ‘Lord Ethan,’ he said. ‘Fancy seeing you here. Can I buy you an ale?’
    ‘I won’t say no to that,’ Ethan said affably as he leaned against the bar next to Hayden. To judge by his reddened cheeks and rumpled hair, and the dishevelled state of his expensive clothes, he had been imbibing the ale for quite a while already. ‘My damnable uncle is making me rusticate for a while. Says he won’t increase my allowance until I learn some control and I am completely out of funds.’
    ‘Indeed?’ Hayden asked without muchinterest as he gestured to the innkeeper for more ale. Everyone knew that Ethan’s Puritanical uncle, who also held the Carstairs family purse-strings, disapproved of his nephew’s wild ways. Hayden sympathised. His own father had so often been disapproving.
    And now here he was, drowning