Read Online A Field Guide to Vampires by Craig Batty Alyxandra Harvey - Free Book Online

the parasol. My sudden weight took him by surprise, nearly toppling him. One of them grabbed my elbow.
    I opened my mouth to scream.
    A gloved hand closed over my chin, fingers digging into my lips. “None of that now.”
    And then suddenly I was free, sailing backward without warning.
    “Get off her!”
    I hit the trunks, bruising my shoulder. A hat box fell to the ground. I pushed my hair out of my eyes just in time to see Colin rearing back to punch the ringleader.
    “No!” I leaped forward, grabbing his arm. The momentum of his swing had me sliding forward but at least it stopped his fist from connecting. They glared at each other as thepassengers began to trickle around us, returning to their cars. Colin frowned down at me.
    “Violet,” he muttered, shaking me loose. “Are you daft?”
    “Are you?” I shot back as the crowd pulled us away from them.
    “I could’ve taken that tosser,” he said, clearly insulted.
    “I know that, but they were rich, or rich enough, anyway. Do you think they would have shrugged it off if one of them had had their nose broken by a manservant from third class?” And no doubt he would have done just that. He was taller than each of them and had broader shoulders, for all that he was only eighteen years old. And he’d survived the alleys of London, whereas the others hadn’t likely ever made it east of Covent Garden.
    “Did they hurt you?” His voice was gentle, his blue eyes searching.
    “No,” I shook my head. “I’m fine. Thanks to you.”
    “What the devil are you doing wandering about alone?” he snapped. “And dressed like a bloomin’ lady, the way you are. You have to be careful now, princess.”
    And there was the Colin I knew.
    “ ’Tisn’t proper,” he insisted as he led me along the platform like a petulant child. His Irish accent always thickened when he was upset. I jerked my arm out of his grasp.
    “Proper?” I echoed, nodding to my mother, who was flirting with no fewer than two earls from our compartment and three gentlemen from the car behind us. As if any impropriety Imight muster could even hope to compete with my mother’s expertise.
    She still didn’t know I’d discovered her real name: Mary Morgan. Mary Morgan was just another poor girl, scratching out a living, trying to keep her belly full while she yearned for pretty dresses and carriage rides. Celeste Willoughby was a gifted widow, crushed by the tragic death of her husband, leaving her young, beautiful, and with child.
    Never mind that Mother had never married.
    Or that she sometimes claimed my father was a great lord who had dallied with her when she had been a lady’s maid in Wiltshire. I couldn’t even be sure she’d ever stepped foot out of London. More often than not, she just muttered that I ought to be grateful she’d kept me at all. I’d only gotten that much out of her because she’d had one too many glasses of sherry.
    Mother thought drinking sherry was dignified and sophisticated.
    And if one glass was what the
Beau Monde
drank, then surely three glasses must be three times more sophisticated.
    She was right, I supposed. Not about the sherry, of course, but that I ought to be grateful. She could have left me at some drafty orphanage or sent me to the workhouse—something she pointed out to me on a weekly basis. I was pretty enough to be useful now; pretty girls, after all, can marry rich no matter what their station. And even better, I was not so beautiful as to draw any attention away from her. My place was comfortably in her shadow.
    If there was one thing she craved even more than expensive liqueur, it was to be the toast of polite society, to be invited to lavish dinner parties and weekends in the country. And Mary, with her Cockney accent and her questionable past, could never accomplish such a feat, no matter her physical attributes.
    Mrs. Celeste Willoughby, however, could.
    Colin sighed. “You’d best go. And I should see how Marjorie’s getting