Read Online Double Deception by Patricia Oliver - Free Book Online Page B

daughter. She could well imagine the lively conversation that would be going on at that very moment between her Aunt Mary and the irrepressible Penny.
    Could she get away by pleading a megrim? she wondered rather desperately. Or dare she introduce a topic more inspiring than the unseasonable break in the weather, upon which her ladyship had droned on for quite five minutes? Or should she try something quite unpardonably gauche, like dropping the fragile Limoges tea-cup Lady Sarah had just passed her onto the writhing mass of blue dragons, whose furious golden eyes glared up at her from the floor?
    Athena was rescued from having to resort to mayhem by the sound of the Saloon doors opening. She turned eagerly, expecting to see Perry come bounding in, a contagious smile on his handsome face. She was disappointed.
    The butler stood on the threshold, his impassive features set in their normal rigidity, his colorless eyes fixed on a point in the far distance, his mouth pursed into what Penelope had dubbed his stewed-prune look.
    "Mrs. Augusta Rathbone and Miss Viviana Rathbone, milady," he intoned in his driest, most toneless voice.
    Lady Sarah moved not a muscle, but Athena, who was looking directly at the butler, received the full force of the Rathbone ladies' entrance.
    Mrs. Rathbone entered first, and her aplomb and style were such that, for a moment, Athena fancied the newcomer to be Lady Macbeth herself, borne along by the force of her overweening passions. She was a splendid figure of a woman, tall and stately, her white hair swept up into a fashionable knot beneath an elaborate straw bonnet that even Athena's untutored senses recognized as the dernier cri. Her traveling gown, in a warm wine-red lustring trimmed with blond lace, was deceptively simple in its elegance, and Athena did not doubt that it had cost more than she herself spent on clothes in a year.
    Although Athena knew that Mrs. Rathbone could not be much less than seventy years old, she had to admire the youthful manner in which the visitor swept into the Saloon and advanced upon her childhood friend with arms outstretched in a charming gesture of affection.
    "Sarah!" she exclaimed in a throaty contralto that filled the room with resounding echoes. "My dearest, dearest Sarah! We meet again after so long. Do not get up, dear," she added in that wonderfully musical voice, although she must have seen as well as anyone, Athena noted with amusement, that Lady Sarah had made no move to do so. That did not prevent her from embracing her hostess effusively.
    "I shall just sit here beside you and be comfortable," she continued, suiting action to words by seating herself gracefully on the blue-striped brocade settee and removing her red kid gloves. "You have no idea how I long to recall those marvelous times we had at Mrs.... Mrs. . .. what was that dreadful woman's name, dear? Hawkins?"
    "Hawthorne," her hostess supplied, with a faint smile breaking through the sedate mask she had worn all afternoon. "Mrs. Iphigenia Hawthorne, I believe. And surely you exaggerate, my dear Gussie, when you call those days marvelous. The woman was a veritable dragon, as far as I recall. If your brother had not kept us supplied with pastries during his visits, we might well have starved to death."
    "Ah, yes, dearest, dearest Adrian." Mrs. Rathbone sighed theatrically, one elegant white hand brushing her brow briefly. "What a handsome devil he was, too, Sarah. And more than a little taken with you, my dear, as I recall."
    Had Athena considered it at all possible, she might have said that Lady Sarah blushed, but her attention was drawn to a second visitor who appeared suddenly—and with quite deliberate theatricality, Athena thought—in the doorway.
    "Ah, there you are, love," Mrs. Rathbone purred in her wonderful voice. "Allow me to introduce my darling granddaughter to you, Sarah," she said, flinging out an arm dramatically in the direction of the young lady who stood poised on the