Read Online The Lady Risks All by Stephanie Laurens - Free Book Online

Cheshire gentleman, rather older than the usual suitor, but that had only made his attentiveness toward her twenty-year-old self seem more special. She’d been swept off her feet, and had for a short time lived in hope that she would find the sort of happiness her mother and sister had aspired to, until a kind matron had told her the truth. Jeffers wasn’t interested in her, only in her fortune.
    Bad enough, but when, shattered and dismayed, she’d told her aunts, they’d blinked at her uncomprehendingly. They’d known the basis of Jeffers’s interest, and of the existence of his long-standing and very expensive mistress, all along.
    Recollection of the railings and recriminations that had followed her rejection of Jeffers still held the power to make her shudder.
    Roscoe would be about the same age Jeffers had been . . . but she wasn’t twenty anymore.
    Hauling her mind from the distraction—from the face and the body that had, last night, invaded her dreams—she forced her mind to the here and now. “Next week . . . I’ll make sure the house will be presentable, and I’ll warn Cook that we’ll be entertaining and wish to show our best.”
    “Do that,” Gladys forcefully replied. She ran critical eyes over Miranda. “At least now it’s cooler, your gowns have long sleeves. Wraxby seemed taken aback when he last visited and your summer gowns showed too much skin. I’m quite sure that was one of the aspects that made him hesitate. Make sure this time that you give him no reason to question your respectability.”
    “Yes, Aunt.” Miranda pushed back from the table and rose. “I must speak with Mrs. Flannery.”
    Gladys dismissed her with a wave.
    Heading to the morning room for her daily meeting with the housekeeper, Miranda bludgeoned her brain into providing an image of Wraxby—a forty-something-year-old widower who lived in Suffolk, and who had spotted her in Bond Street and subsequently sought her out. She studied her mental picture of that stultifyingly reserved gentleman . . .
    She’d known Wraxby for nearly a year, Roscoe for just one evening.
    Yet Wraxby had never appeared in her dreams.
    “G elman is waiting downstairs and, as requested, he’s brought Jennifer Edger with him.”
    Seated in the admiral’s chair behind the massive desk in his study, Roscoe glanced up from the ledger he was perusing—the monthly accounts from the Pall Mall Club, which Gelman managed for him—and arched a cynical brow at Jordan Draper.
    Brown-haired, brown-eyed, garbed in a brown suit deliberately designed to make him appear innocuous, Jordan, returning from checking downstairs, crossed to the desk and took his customary seat on Roscoe’s right.
    “And how are they getting along?” Roscoe inquired. “Any hints of acrimony? Of Jenny wanting to slit Gelman’s throat, or vice versa?”
    Jordan grinned. “Actually, no. Your lecture last month appears to have borne fruit.”
    Roscoe snorted. “We’ll see.” He returned his gaze to the columns of figures. After a moment, admitted, “Regardless of whether they kill each other or not, the club’s doing well.”
    “Yes.” Jordan leaned forward, pointing to a series of subtotals and explaining his projections for the coming months.
    Roscoe listened and learned; he might have the world’s best head for figuring odds, but he remained eternally grateful that Jordan had, years ago, consented to leave his father’s country-based practice and throw his lot in with him. Over the last twelve years, while he’d grown and developed his now massive empire of clubs, dens, and hells, Jordan had stood, quiet and self-effacing, by his side—and made sure every last farthing was accounted for.
    Even now, while he thought in multiples of thousands of pounds, Jordan was likely to chase a shilling.
    In the matter of building his gambling empire, and in the even more difficult and ongoing challenge of managing what was in essence a massive enterprise built of myriad