Read Online Bared to the Viscount (The Rites of May Book 1) by Lara Archer - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Lara Archer
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and move gracefully in silks. Pretty to look at, for a viscount to show off to his friends.
So it was really just as well things had gone as they had tonight. That she’d stumbled upon the two over-eager lovers and John as well in the woods.
All illusions were wiped away.
She’d been right, utterly right, to tell John no.
And she’d stick by that no , even if he came and begged her again.
If she still felt a sharp, hungry pulse go through her at the thought of saying yes , she would just have to find a way to kill that impulse.
John’s life would not be ruined just because a plain country mouse had let herself come halfway to falling in love with him.
Chapter Six
Mary was definitely avoiding him.
John tried to talk to her after church on Sunday, but she vanished into the sacristy with a mumbled excuse about hanging up vestments—though her brother was clearly still wearing his vestments, right there on the church steps, while the two elderly Dalton sisters pinned him down with a long story about their tabby’s new litter of kittens.
He stopped by the schoolhouse the next day, but Mary spied him coming up the walk and cued the children to sing a rousing rendition of “Jerusalem the Golden” in four-part harmony, with Mary singing loudest of all. All sixteen verses. And she no doubt would have told them to sing a reprise if he hadn’t eventually taken the hint and gone away.
He even sent her a note saying he’d gotten Mr. Dockett’s boy to climb the hill to confirm water was indeed streaming underground, just as she’d said, and he would have men begin the well the moment she gave him her opinion of the exact spot to dig.
Surely that would bring her running, he’d thought, for how could she resist? But she only sent back a hand-drawn map with a large X and the words “Just here, sixty-two paces east of the willow” as though she’d become a pirate after all.
Without him.
Maybe what they’d done together in the woods had truly been of no moment to her. She certainly didn’t seem to have been affected by it. She seemed her normal self—self-possessed, confident, briskly going about the business of the church and the school and the town, quite without the need of him.
Had it really meant so little to her?
The thought hung on his chest, a dull gray weight.
He’d been short-tempered and irritable for days. His housekeeper had set out blackberry jam for his tea yesterday, in a little dish hand-painted with blackberry vines, and at the sight of those green thorny twisting branches, he’d actually yelled at her to take it away. She’d scorched his beef for dinner that night, and he deserved it. And his valet wasn’t much happier with him. John kept shifting fretfully in his seat whenever the poor man tried to shave him, and that morning had tossed aside four different neckcloths because each one seemed tighter and more abrasive than the last.
He really couldn’t let things go on like this.
Sooner or later he was going to have to go to Thomas Wilkins and confess what had happened up on the hill, but he kept hoping Mary would come around on her own before that mortifying conversation became necessary.
Unless…she was right to be refusing him.
What if he was being foolish in this insistence that they marry?
Certainly, she’d been very clear—painfully clear— that she had no interest in becoming his wife, that she’d be quite miserable forced into the role of viscountess.
And he couldn’t imagine it any more easily than she could: Mary Wilkins frittering away her time in ballrooms, with ostrich feathers in her hair and the Parkhurst family rubies weighting her neck. Mary Wilkins standing for hours in full court dress to make her bow to the queen. Sitting with his mother in the evenings, embroidering pillowcases and gossiping about other women’s hairstyles and china settings and shoes.
It would be like...taking a wild deer and penning it up in city
So it was really just as well things had gone as they had tonight. That she’d stumbled upon the two over-eager lovers and John as well in the woods.
All illusions were wiped away.
She’d been right, utterly right, to tell John no.
And she’d stick by that no , even if he came and begged her again.
If she still felt a sharp, hungry pulse go through her at the thought of saying yes , she would just have to find a way to kill that impulse.
John’s life would not be ruined just because a plain country mouse had let herself come halfway to falling in love with him.
Chapter Six
Mary was definitely avoiding him.
John tried to talk to her after church on Sunday, but she vanished into the sacristy with a mumbled excuse about hanging up vestments—though her brother was clearly still wearing his vestments, right there on the church steps, while the two elderly Dalton sisters pinned him down with a long story about their tabby’s new litter of kittens.
He stopped by the schoolhouse the next day, but Mary spied him coming up the walk and cued the children to sing a rousing rendition of “Jerusalem the Golden” in four-part harmony, with Mary singing loudest of all. All sixteen verses. And she no doubt would have told them to sing a reprise if he hadn’t eventually taken the hint and gone away.
He even sent her a note saying he’d gotten Mr. Dockett’s boy to climb the hill to confirm water was indeed streaming underground, just as she’d said, and he would have men begin the well the moment she gave him her opinion of the exact spot to dig.
Surely that would bring her running, he’d thought, for how could she resist? But she only sent back a hand-drawn map with a large X and the words “Just here, sixty-two paces east of the willow” as though she’d become a pirate after all.
Without him.
Maybe what they’d done together in the woods had truly been of no moment to her. She certainly didn’t seem to have been affected by it. She seemed her normal self—self-possessed, confident, briskly going about the business of the church and the school and the town, quite without the need of him.
Had it really meant so little to her?
The thought hung on his chest, a dull gray weight.
He’d been short-tempered and irritable for days. His housekeeper had set out blackberry jam for his tea yesterday, in a little dish hand-painted with blackberry vines, and at the sight of those green thorny twisting branches, he’d actually yelled at her to take it away. She’d scorched his beef for dinner that night, and he deserved it. And his valet wasn’t much happier with him. John kept shifting fretfully in his seat whenever the poor man tried to shave him, and that morning had tossed aside four different neckcloths because each one seemed tighter and more abrasive than the last.
He really couldn’t let things go on like this.
Sooner or later he was going to have to go to Thomas Wilkins and confess what had happened up on the hill, but he kept hoping Mary would come around on her own before that mortifying conversation became necessary.
Unless…she was right to be refusing him.
What if he was being foolish in this insistence that they marry?
Certainly, she’d been very clear—painfully clear— that she had no interest in becoming his wife, that she’d be quite miserable forced into the role of viscountess.
And he couldn’t imagine it any more easily than she could: Mary Wilkins frittering away her time in ballrooms, with ostrich feathers in her hair and the Parkhurst family rubies weighting her neck. Mary Wilkins standing for hours in full court dress to make her bow to the queen. Sitting with his mother in the evenings, embroidering pillowcases and gossiping about other women’s hairstyles and china settings and shoes.
It would be like...taking a wild deer and penning it up in city
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