Read Online False Angel by Edith Layton - Free Book Online

either.”
    Leonora was still grimacing at her own folly and looking back at her companions as she achieved the doorway of the bookseller’s, and so did not pay full attention to the gentleman coming out through the door. She almost collided with him, but her peripheral vision saved her from that embarrassment. She looked up with a great smile upon her lips at her narrow escape, and met the steady gaze of the Marquess of Severne. Even through her own blaze of embarrassment, she noted that he wore a rather strained expression as he began to make his bows to her.
    She wanted so very much to right the wrong she had done him the previous night, and to impress upon him her sincerity, and to give him some little hint of how very much she admired him, without causing him to think that she was pursuing him or calling on his friendship with her father to plague him. But she also had very much not wanted, nor expected, to see him so soon, nor to literally fall over him in public so as to seem that she was panting after him.
    It had been a long time since Leonora had had any dealings with sophisticated London gentlemen. And longer still since she cared a rap what any of them thought of her. She drew in her breath and sought the exactly right words to say as he straightened from his bow.
    “Lady Leonora,” he greeted her most correctly, schooling his face to impassivity, but not quickly enough to hide the hunted, beleaguered look in his startled, startling blue eyes.
    “Oh no!” thought Lady Leonora, in sympathy and pity for him, and despair and fury at herself. And then her hand went to her lips in horror as she realized that in her distress, she had spoken the words aloud.
    From Katie’s gasp and the interested stares of not a few patrons of the crowded bookshop, Leonora knew that she had erred again. She could only stand and stare at him mutely, as horrified as if it had been she who had received not only the insult, but a wet fish across the face as well. But the gentleman was not a reputed spymaster’s familiar for nothing. He only blinked as he quelled an involuntary start, and then said at once, smoothly and with a world of regret in his rich warm voice.
    “Oh, yes.” He sighed ruefully. “I’m afraid, my lady, that it does seem as if I’ve been following you about the Town, and that might well be discomforting for you, no matter how a lovely lady such as yourself may have gotten used to us poor smitten fellows forever tagging after you. But rest easy please, for it wasn’t Cupid, it was only that other mischief maker, coincidence, at work.
    “I know that we seem to be running into each other everywhere these days. And knowing that Hatchard’s is one of your favorite places, I deliberately avoided it today and came here so as not to appear to be hanging on your sleeve. However now, seeing you so radiant this morning, my lady, I begin to wonder if I haven’t been wasting my time by not following you as closely as your own shadow.”
    It was a very pretty speech, delivered in front of a growing and appreciative audience, and given, moreover, without the least hint of the insincerity its author felt, or its recipient suspected.
    At that point Leonora could have simply simpered, curtsied, and walked away from a social blunder that had been neatly turned into a small social coup for her. But she had never chosen the easy path. And his politic retrieve of a disastrous situation reminded her of another embarrassing time when he had saved her from herself. Even worse, for all his coolness, she detected a flash of humor in his sparkling eyes.
    She was tired of amusing him and disgracing herself, and furious with her own clumsiness. She knew she was not a graceless female, yet in all her dealings with him, somehow she always put her foot wrong. And as always, she was impatient with hypocrisy, even her own. She had been the one who had discovered his favorite bookshop, and she had been the one who had found herself patronizing