Read Online Compromised Miss by Anne O'Brien - Free Book Online

him,but would not retreat. ‘I agree your age is irrelevant. Mine is not. I did not think you obtuse, my lord.’
    ‘Obtuse?’ His eyes hardened, unused to being challenged.
    ‘I am firmly on the shelf, with nothing to recommend me as a wife, fit for nothing but to be governess to my brother’s children.’ She stated the uncompromising truth without a quiver, her chin raised.
    His face remained stern. ‘I commend your shining honesty, Miss Lydyard, but marriage can be the answer—if you are not determined to be so stubborn.’
    ‘What will your family say with a plain nobody like me for a bride, trailing behind you on your expensive doorstep, somewhere I expect, in Mayfair?’
    ‘I have no idea, nor do I care,’ he replied, struck by the sad little image. ‘It seems to me, Miss Lydyard, that you sell yourself short. You are hardly a nobody. Your family is perfectly respectable.’
    But Miss Lydyard did not retreat. ‘Respectable! How damning a word is that? Compared with the Hallaston family, the Earls of Venmore, we are parvenus indeed. It takes no intelligence to guess the on dit of the Season. A common smuggler as the Countess of Venmore! As bad as Lady Lade. I can’t wed you, my lord.’
    At which he smiled, for the first time with some level of genuine humour. It lit his face, softening his mouth, rendering her instantly breathless. ‘ Not as bad as Letty Lade. She, as I recall, before she was elevated to society, was a servant in a brothel and mistress of Sixteen-String Jack, who ended on the gallows. I doubt you, Miss Lydyard, have any such claim to fame.’
    His face was alight with laughter, atrociously handsome despite the disfiguring bruises and the vicious path of the knife on his cheek. Harriette was forced to look away,forced to take a steadying breath as her dreams shattered before her eyes. He was not for her. To know that he had offered for her under duress, driven into an honourable gesture by her despicable brother, was entirely shaming for her. Without Wallace’s spiked accusations, the Earl of Venmore would never have noticed her, much less invited her to share his life and his bed. She took another breath against the sharp dejection and wished with all her heart it could be otherwise, but she could not, would not, let him be a sacrifice for her brother’s greed. It would humiliate her—and him. Marriage on such terms, when all he had shown her was kindness, would be beyond tolerance for both of them.
    ‘Why did you do it?’ His soft question surprised her.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Take on the appearance and identity of Captain Harry?’
    ‘A family obligation.’ She walked away to look out towards the cliffs where seabirds wheeled and dived in a joyous freedom, finding it easier not to face him.
    ‘It’s a hard burden for a family to ask of a young girl.’ To her dismay he followed her to stand at her shoulder, a solid physical presence so that she was immediately aware of the heat of his skin against hers, the sheer dominance of his tall figure. But she would not allow herself to feel vulnerable.
    ‘It’s not just an obligation.’ She felt an inexplicable need to defend herself to him. ‘It’s the excitement, too. Lydyard’s Ghost is my own. So is Lydyard’s Pride, this house that I love but can’t afford to keep and where my brother refuses to let me live.’ Unaware, animation coloured her words and her face. ‘The smuggling runs have become part of my life. Without them, what do I have before me? I am unwed and unlikely to be so, whatever mybrother might say. So I must die of boredom—a neverending round of embroidery, painting, sedate walks under my sister-in-law’s caustic eye. When Zan first took me on a run…’ She flushed, regretting having laid herself open to his interest. ‘It’s in my blood, I suppose.’
    ‘Zan?’ he asked.
    ‘Alexander Ellerdine. My cousin. My friend. He showed me the…the satisfaction of it. And since Wallace would not, I took on the