Read Online A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) by Julie Anne Long - Free Book Online Page A

he could bed her. I could go on and on. Politicians, even Prinny, yearned after her. She was showered with jewels; they all competed for her attention. And for her grand finale, she married the Earl of Wareham when he won the right to do it in a card game.”
    Adam received all of this information like little blows.
    “Of course. Of course she did.”
    Then he lifted his ale and drank half of it in a few gulps.
    “Played another man for the honor of marrying her, the earl did,” Colin continued blithely. “And I wish I could say she lived happily ever after, but then the Earl of Wareham died just a short while after they were married. Rumor has it she killed him, which was absurd, because nearly everything he owned was entailed. And then Mr. Miles Redmond—you know the Redmond famous for exploring exotic lands and who crawls about studying insects and whatnot? He gave a lecture in London on poisonous spiders. There’s one in the Americas called the black widow—apparently the females kill and eat the male after they mate. The ton loved it. they took to it instantly. That’s what they called her. Ceaselessly.”
    There was a beat of silence while Adam mulled this.
    And then he raked his hair back in his hands. “Oh, God.”
    Too late realized he’d said it aloud. He hadn’t meant to.
    “I imagine she’s heard rather a lot of those two words in her day.” Ian said idly.
    “No. It’s just … something I said to her today …”
    “Iniquity” was what he’d said to her. One must be stealthy to stop iniquity in its tracks, to be specific. He’d said it in jest. And her head had jerked toward him as though he’d struck her.
    His lungs tightened in shame. It wasn’t as though he could apologize for it. What on earth could he say? “If I’d known you were a renowned tart, I’d have chosen my words more carefully?”
    “Did you introduce Mary Magdalene into the conversation?” Ian wondered.
    Adam just shook his head slowly.
    “Whatever it was, old man … don’t berate yourself. I sincerely doubt your ‘wild bird’ has an innocent or fragile bone in her body.” Colin said this with marked admiration. “She’s always known precisely what she wanted, how to get it, and she got it, too, when she married Wareham. And that’s the thing the ton never could forgive her for. I admire her for dozens of reasons, from those green eyes of hers to the ambition, and she’s a good egg when it comes right down to it, but the woman is silk-encased cast iron and quite formidable. Her sort does nothing without a reason.”
    Her sort. And now he remembered what Maggie Lanford said. She’s not our sort.
    He saw again the countess’s hand flattening against her rib cage, the stunned hot spots of pink in her cheeks.
    And just then he realized he’d just flattened his own hand over his ribs. As if her pain were his own.
    He surreptitiously moved it and closed his hand safely around his ale. Tightly.
    Fragments of what he knew about her orbited his mind. A petite woman with innocent freckles and a soft, carnal blur of a mouth and blazing green eyes and a glacially aristocratic accent that apparently caved like rusty armor when she was good and startled to reveal … what he suspected was her true self. Or part of it, anyhow. That feisty temper and Irish accent and the quickness with a retort.
    He sensed she’d learned the rest of it: the imperious demeanor, the accent, the boldness, the innuendo-soaked flirtation. From a protector, no doubt. Or from having protectors.
    For actresses must be skillful mimics, of course.
    Why would a woman become a courtesan? What led her to the decision to live forever on the outskirts of polite society? That was, until one fateful card game.
    He stifled a stunned, slightly hysterical laugh. It occurred to him that he hadn’t said any of those words—“courtesan,” “actress,” “protector”—aloud in possibly years, if ever, so alien were they from his daily life. And from the