Read Online Beyond the Sunrise by Mary Balogh - Free Book Online Page B

highly favored by the Portuguese royal family and one who had fled with them.
    Was the fact that she was French of any significance? he wondered. Her father had after all been a royalist émigré in England. Perhaps he had never returned to France. Captain Blake did not know. Besides, her mother had been English, if he remembered correctly. Her nationality might be of no importance whatsoever. But she had changed her name. She was now Joana, not Jeanne. In order to disguise a truth she preferred to hide?
    And yet the Beau had decreed that Captain Blake escort the woman to Viseu, a journey of several days—for a woman traveling by carriage anyway.
    Hell and damnation! Captain Blake thought with sudden anger. He filled the empty room with a few other more satisfying oaths. But they changed nothing. He was to spend the next few days dancing attendance on a woman he would rather never see again. For severaldays he was to be subjected to her beauty and her charm and that something else that he was very much afraid he might not be able to resist if she decided to unleash it on him.
    He had better put in an appearance at her reception after all, he supposed, in order to make some arrangements for the following day. He wondered if she had yet been informed of the glad tidings and how she would feel about having to accept his escort.
    Probably nothing at all. Probably she would treat him, as she treated any man, as her servant who owed her service and homage as her right. It angered him that his escort would probably mean nothing more than that to her.
    And it angered him even more that it mattered to him.
    Bloody hell!

    *   *   *
    Yes, he would certainly come to her reception now, Joana thought with some satisfaction. Though there was a little annoyance too after Lord Wellington’s messenger had left her. She would have liked to discover if he would have come anyway—she was almost convinced that he would. And she had looked forward to persuading him herself to escort her back to Viseu. It would have been a challenge she could have enjoyed.
    But Arthur had not left anything to chance—or to a woman’s wiles. He had simply sent an order to Captain Blake.
    Well, at least, Joana thought, he would come. And she paused in the act of dabbing perfume behind one ear. She had had a purpose in making his acquaintance, a purpose in inviting him to her reception—indeed, he was the reason for the reception—and a reason for wishing to spend a few days in company with him on the road to Viseu. It surely did not matter how he was persuaded to fall in with her plans. Did it?
    He was not, after all, one of her numerous flirts. Anything but. The man as she remembered him—tall, almost shabby in his dress, awkward in his manners, his face marred by the scars of battle, his blue eyes direct and almost hostile, his blond hair cropped close to his head—was not the sort of man with whom she would think of dallying.
    And yet his very differentness from her usual type of suitor, his total differentness from Luis, was in itself a challenge. She shrugged and got to her feet. That was not a thought to be pursued.
    And yet she looked forward to the evening, she thought as she glanced at herself critically in the looking glass one more time. She was not especially fond of the Marquesa das Minas. She found her rather insipid, rather a bore. Rather like her clothes—all white, always white. She was not sure quite why she had decided to dress the marquesa in unrelieved white after her year of mourning had come to an end. Perhaps the contrast with black? Perhaps the image of helpless fragility that she wished the marquesa to project?
    However it was, she always wore white as the marquesa. It was perhaps a blessing, she thought with a private smile shared only with the looking glass, that she was not only or always the Marquesa das Minas.
    But perhaps the boredom of her life was not entirely her fault