Read Online A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal by Meredith Duran - Free Book Online Page A

stop, evidently struck by a thought. “I do beg your pardon. If you can’t read—”
    “I can read,” she cut in. “And I’ll tell you why I learned—so nobody would
read
me something that wasn’t on the page. So don’t think to be pulling
that
trick.”
    He gave her the sort of smile she saw on tired mums with crabby infants: there was no real feeling behind it. “I’m chastened,” he said, and resumed his stroll.
    Rolling her eyes, she followed.
    They turned a corner and the hall opened into abroad balcony appended on either side by flights of stairs that curved down toward each other. That door down there was probably the exit. “There’s my stop,” she said, making for the stairs.
    His hand on her arm halted her. Had he squeezed or tugged, she would have shaken him off and maybe given him a sock in the gut for good measure: she was ready for it. But he didn’t even take proper hold of her. His fingers laid themselves on the spot right above her elbow, a steady, warm touch that somehow stopped her dead.
    Queer thought: he had a magic touch to him. She’d bet she wasn’t the first lady he’d caught with two fingers.
    “Please,” he said.
    She turned back, eyeing him. It had been a long time since somebody had spoken that word to her. She liked the irony that
he
should be the one to speak it. He looked exactly as the master of this house should—richly dressed, too handsome by half, and radiant with that indefinable air that all rich people seemed to have: a sense of being comfortable, completely at ease, not afraid of anybody or anything.
    And why would he be afraid? The world would see in one glance that he mattered.
    She had to swallow hard to get the lump out of her throat. Stupid, but he made her feel bittersweet. He probably had chances and possibilities that she didn’t even know existed. He took them for granted, while a girl like her would need to sell her soul to get even a glimpse of them.
    “What’s your angle?” she said on a deep breath. “Why are you so interested in the old earl’s bastard? And don’t give me any nonsense.”
    He lifted a brow. “Evidently I didn’t make myself clear,” he said. “Nell, you aren’t a bastard.”
    Looking at the girl gave Simon a headache. Or perhaps
vertigo
was the more accurate term. Each time he glanced into her thin, sullen face, he felt his brain waver under the strain of processing the message delivered by his eyes. She was remarkably similar to Lady Katherine—minus a few stone, a few hundred pounds in fashionable clothing and jewelry, and twenty-two years of tender rearing.
    To say nothing of the black eye she was sporting. He’d find out who had done that.
    He wondered how Kitty would like the knowledge that her twin was a guttersnipe from Bethnal Green. Nell was living proof that cosmetics and high fashion were not required for an Aubyn to be striking. But she also illustrated how very much Kitty’s looks owed to pampering. Both sisters’ eyes were a pleasing dark blue, but they required a complementary color to tip into violet, and Nell’s current outfit—a ridiculously oversized jacket and sagging breeches—suggested that dirty gray was not among these colors. Her spareness emphasized the cheekbones for which Kitty was so admired, but also brought into prominence the cleft chin and square jaw which Kitty so often hid behind her fan.
    He could not wait to introduce them to each other. Kitty had been very persuasive when contesting Simon’s bid to have Lady Cornelia declared dead. It had been part of a strategy to strengthen his contestation of the will, and Kitty had been ardent in her opposition.
I feel in my heart that she is alive
, she’d wept to the judge.
    How surprised she would be to learn that she’d been right.
    Of course, it remained possible that this girl was an imposter, some by-blow of Rushden’s with the luck to resemble Katherine and the wits to adopt the missing heiress’s name. God knew Cornelia’s