Read Online Forever and Ever by Patricia Gaffney - Free Book Online Page A

fine, smooth delivery! By the time she turned the final page and read the last eloquent paragraph, she felt as tightly wound as a top.
    But another survey of her audience—dreamy-eyed again, half smiling, utterly satisfied—helped to restore her composure. “Well,” she said, closing the book with a quiet snap and laying it on the desk at her back. “How did you like it?” She leaned against the desk casually, to signal the start of the informal discussion period that always followed the readings, especially when a book was finally finished.
    “Oh,” said Cora Swan, “I loved it.”
    “Oh, yes, it was
sooo
nice,” echoed Chloe. “Do let’s read it again right now.”
    The ladies laughed gently at that, while a few nodded in wry agreement.
    “What did you think of Emma?” Sophie prodded.
    “Well, I liked ’er ever so much,” said Susan Hatch. “She was so handsome and clever, and smart as any of the men, except for Mr. Knightley.” Susan was a parlor maid at Lynton Hall, but she had hopes of one day being the housekeeper; she appreciated smart heroines.
    Mrs. Ludd, the Morrells’ housekeeper at the vicarage, said, “I thought she got just what she deserved—a handsome husband and all that money.”
    “I was glad when she decided to stay with her father until he passed on,” offered Mrs. Nineways, the churchwarden’s wife. “Whatever else, she always did her duty by her father.”
    “That’s true,” said Mrs. Thoroughgood. “She was a very dutiful daughter.”
    “I suppose she made some mistakes,” Susan acknowledged, “but it all come out right in the end.”
    “That’s right.” “Yes, indeed.” “Right in the end.”
    “She was a snob.”
    Heads craned; breaths were drawn in. Everyone in the room looked at Mr. Pendarvis in amazement, as if he’d just called Emma Woodhouse a prostitute.
    He softened the piercing, gray-eyed stare he’d locked on Sophie and smiled at the ladies, suddenly boyish and self-effacing—and almost immediately they smiled back at him, charmed. She noticed he had on the same dark coat and trousers he’d worn the day they’d met, with a clean white shirt and no necktie. And she could feel herself falling under the same spell as before, responding to the same potent male energy he radiated with such effortlessness. If she hadn’t known otherwise, she’d have made the mistake of thinking he was a gentleman, engaged in a gentleman’s profession. Which certainly proved the wisdom of the adage about judging books by their covers.
    “Are we to assume from that remark,” she asked coolly, “that you truly are familiar with
Emma
? With something more than the last ten pages, I mean,” she added with false sweetness.
    “Well . . . no, ma’am,” he admitted, and his candor, she saw, had the effect of endearing him to the ladies even more. “I got the gist of it, though, and I’d say the lady’s a snob. And a busybody.”
    “Oh?” Sophie pushed away from the desk. “And why is that?”
    “Well, take this Harriet character, for instance. Isn’t she supposed to be a friend of Emma’s?”
    “Yes, but she—”
    “Then why did Emma talk her out of marrying what’s-his-name, the farmer who was in love with her?”
    “Robert Martin,” she said tightly, hiding her annoyance behind a patient expression. “Because she didn’t think he was the right man for Harriet.”
    “Because he was a farmer?”
    “A yeoman, yes, and although Harriet was illegitimate, Emma believed her father was of noble birth—mistakenly, as it turns out, but—”
    “So
then
it was all right for her to marry a farmer? Because her father turned out not to be a lord?”
    “She—yes—but the point is—”
    “What business is it of Emma’s anyway?” he pursued, still in the smiling, courteous, self-deprecating style that hid, she was sure, a world of antagonism. He’d drawn one boot up on the bench and was clasping his knee, seeming completely at ease. The more relaxed he