Viscount Vagabond Read Online Free PDF

protection, and virtually without hope. She had no idea how to get home, dreadful as that homecoming would be. She had not a farthing to her name, and Mr. Demowery must be miles away by now.

Chapter Three
    Her eyes swam with tears and Catherine scarcely noticed where she walked. She would have stumbled into the path of an oncoming carriage if a hand had not shot out to grab her elbow and drag her back to the curb.
    “Damn if you ain’t an accident waiting to happen,” said a familiar voice.
    Still immersed in her misery, Catherine looked up into a lean, handsome face. As she had the previous night, she caught her breath, as though the piercing blue of his eyes had stabbed her to the heart.
    “You ought to be carried about in a bandbox yourself.” He took her baggage from her.
    “Mr. Demowery, how—what are you doing here?”
    “Protecting my investment. I wasn’t about to watch fifty quid trampled into a puddle. Not to mention how it mucks up the streets, don’t you know?” With that, he strode swiftly away from the square, and she, seeing no alternative, followed him. They had not gone many yards before he located a hackney. Not until her luggage was stowed away and she had been hustled into the musty-smelling vehicle did Catherine venture to ask where they were going.
    “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” was the abstracted answer.
    “Oh, no. I mean, there isn’t anything to figure out. I shall have to go back now.”
    “Back where? Granny Grendle’s?”
    “Good heavens, no! I shall have to return h-home.”
    Though her voice broke at the last, Catherine squeezed back the tears that had welled up as soon as she’d thought what she’d be returning to.
    “Is it as bad as all that?”
    The sympathy she heard in his voice nearly undid her. So unused was she to sympathy of any kind that it rather frightened her, in fact. “Oh, no. I’ve made a dreadful mistake. I see that now, and it has been a lesson to me—not to let my passions rule me, I mean,” she explained, just as though he had been Miss Fletcher and had asked her to examine her conscience.
    “What passions are those, Miss Pettigrew?”
    “Resentment, certainly. And pride. And—oh, everything opposed to reason and good sense. If I’d stayed and done what I was told, none of these horrid things would have happened to me—”
    “What were you told?” he interrupted.
    Subterfuge was alien to Miss Pelliston’s character. She was, as she had admitted, an inept liar. The fibs she’d told Miss Collingwood had cost Catherine agonies of guilt. Besides, she could conceive of no more unworthy return for his unexpected kindness than to lie to him.
    She told him the truth, though she eliminated the more sensational elements in order to present the matter with dry objectivity. She did not enlighten him regarding her true identity, either, and named no other names. Though that was not precisely objective, she had rather keep her disgrace as private as possible.
    “So you ran away because you couldn’t stomach marrying the old fellow your father chose for you?”
    “I never stopped to consider what I could endure, Mr. Demowery. I’m afraid I did not weigh the matter as carefully as I ought,” she said, gazing earnestly into his handsome face. “I just took offence—”
    “And took off.” He smiled—not the crooked, drunken grin of last night but a friendly, open smile. “Yes, I see now what a passion-driven creature you are. Oh, don’t go all red on me again. The colour’s too bright and you must think of my poor head. I ain’t fully recovered, you know.”
    She drew herself up. “Actually, I am seldom ruled by emotion. This is the first time I can remember ever behaving so—so unsensibly.”
    “Sounds sensible enough to me. As you said before, people shouldn’t be forced to marry. M’ sister felt the same. Bolted, when m’ father tried to shackle her to some rich old prig. They tried to get me to fetch her back, but I