The Viscount's Revenge (The Royal Ambition Series Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

position would have pretended to have servants, would have pretended to lead a life of leisure.
     
    A footman placed a large steaming dish of olio almost under his lordship’s nose. Chunks of beef, fowl, partridge, and mutton floated in the brown broth. Lord Hawksborough shuddered and raised a scented handkerchief to his nose. Miss Amanda Colby said eagerly, “Oh, do you think I could possibly…?”
     
    “Yes,” he said wearily. “You may.” But he felt he could not spoon the olio onto her plate and signalled the footman to perform the service for him.
     
    He sat in silence while Amanda demolished her third plateful of food with a hearty appetite. Amanda at last guiltily dabbed her mouth with her napkin and sought in vain for something to say. She felt she should not have eaten so much so quickly. But she had been
ravenous.
     
    She still felt she had some room left to sample the array of gingerbread and Portugal cakes, ratafia cakes, saffron cakes, ice cream, and jellies. She had never seen so many delicacies before. But what would he think of her?
     
    “If only you would eat something, my lord,” she said anxiously.
     
    “So that you may not feel conscience-stricken should you fill your plate again?”
     
    “Exactly, my lord.”
     
    “Allow me to assist you. I have not seen such an appetite since Bartholomew Fair.”
     
    “I am
not
a freak,” said Amanda stiffly.
     
    “Not yet,” said his lordship nastily as another twinge of indigestion seized him by the throat.
     
    Amanda’s eyes flew up to meet his for the first time. They were amazing eyes, he reflected. Wide and green with glints of gold. They reminded him of a woodland pond in the evening sunlight. They reminded him of spring sunshine flickering on the green of new leaves.
     
    “Forgive me,” he said abruptly. “I am impolite because I am a trifle out of sorts.” He waved his hand and a footman appeared with a clean plate. He told the footman to fill it with a selection of cakes and pastries.
     
    “Do you perform the waltz at these assemblies?” he asked.
     
    Amanda shook her head. “I think everyone has practised the steps in secret. Even Mrs. Jolly, and she is the vicar’s wife. But no one has had the courage to perform publicly, I believe. But I am not very well versed in the social life of the county.”
     
    “Odso! Why is that, pray?”
     
    “I have no money.”
     
    “Then may I suggest your Richard find work?”
     
    “No, you may not,” snapped Amanda. Then she added in a milder tone, “It is a sore point with me, don’t you see.”
     
    “He could always enter the army,” pursued the viscount, noticing idly that her cloud of curly hair glinted faintly with red and gold lights under the stiff, shiny green of her coronet of ivy leaves.
     
    “He could enter prison, too,” said Amanda, wishing he would stop asking questions and allow her a chance to eat just one of the delicious cakes in front of her. “Of what good is the army if one has not a commission? Of what use to be degraded and flogged and beaten?”
     
    “There are quite a number of educated young men serving in the ranks in the Peninsula,” he said quietly. “They are not all cannon fodder.”
     
    “A fact you know from personal experience, of course?” mocked Amanda, tilting her head a little on one side and studying the elegance of his dress and the whiteness of his long hands.
     
    “As I know from personal experience,” he said equably.
     
    “How long do you expect to stay with Lord Hardforshire?” asked Amanda quickly, to change the subject.
     
    “I have finished my stay,” he replied, finding himself wishing she would look up at him again, but she addressed all her remarks to those dratted cakes. “I shall stay here tonight, and tomorrow I travel to Bellingham to escort my sister and my mother back to town.”
     
    “You will surely not travel by night?” asked Amanda quickly. “I have heard tales of