To Sin With A Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page A

retching.
    Hurriedly she deposited the goblet onto the passing salver of a distracted footman, and then sighed, nervously shifting from one foot to the other. Isobel knew she didn’t belong there—didn’t really belong anywhere—but grand Society events especially made her feel an absolute misfit.
    At balls and galas like this one, Isobel was all too aware that she was but a politician’s daughter in a glittering assembly room rich with nobility and the descendants of kings.
    Still, she always accepted any invitation Minister Cornelius Carington’s notoriety in the House of Commons garnered the two of them. She and her father were all that was left of their once happy family.
    Everything was different for them, now that her mother had died. Her father spent full days and nights at Parliament, often failing to return home, all the while growing more and more embittered with life, and intolerant of others. She tried not to give her father reason to be disappointed in her, at least not more than her sex already had, but somehow she always managed to do just that.
    Tonight, it seemed, would be no different. From the corner of her eye, she observed a gentleman trying to conceal that he was jabbing a finger toward her, while conversing with a gaggle of snickering matrons and their escorts. He raised his fist before the shortest of the ladies standing near and drew it back, then let it fly, jerking it away a scant second before it hit her nose. They all laughed.
    Criminy. A tickle coursed up Isobel’s throat as she realized that the gentleman was recounting her…exhibition…at the Pugilistic Club. Of course, that was it. Why she hadn’t done anything the least bit scandalous since then.
    Truth to tell, she had been rather amazed that her father hadn’t already heard of her impulsive entry into the club to request money from the clodpates inside. Those men obviously had so much, they were willing to throw it away on two brutes pounding each other.
    She glanced back at the gentleman, and as if his report was a pebble tossed into a pond, she watched the gossip spread into the crowd in ever-widening circles. It was only a matter of time before the story reached her father. “Oh, that wretched louse,” she ground out beneath her breath as she quickly turned to scan the room for her father.
    She had certainly fooled herself by thinking he mightn’t hear of what she’d done. What a goose she had been!
    Then she spied him near the doorway and began to glide toward him, not wishing to draw any more attention than she already had. Why, if she was quick about it, mayhap she could convince him that she had a pain in her head and they ought to leave. It was possible he would never hear about the incident with the fighter on the stage.
    By the time she reached her father, his jowls were red and wobbling with anger—but amazingly he did not seem angry with her. “I cannot believe any of the patronesses, not even Lady Sefton, would invite a common bruiser into our gentle fold,” he was saying to Sir Rupert Whitebeard. “But there he is, and it looks as though he’s brought a half-dozen seconds.”
    Her father caught notice of her then and grabbed her arm. He moved his mouth to her ear and whispered, “Isobel, stand by my side; do not even turn your head toward the door. Your name cannot survive additional scandal.”
    Isobel did not argue. He was entirely right, but she had to look, had to see whose reputation instilled such loathing in her father.
    And so she straightened her arm and, as a ruse, allowed her reticule to slip to the floor. “Oh dear,” she muttered, and then bent to retrieve her bag before her father was able.
    As she rose, her gaze flitted toward the doorway, and her eyes met
his
—the mannerless, wicked, impudent brute who’d humiliated her at the club. Behind him was a collection of the tallest, most beautiful beings she had ever seen. The women were the height of most men, their features delicate and