Read Online How to Be a Proper Lady: A Falcon Club Novel by Katharine Ashe - Free Book Online Page A

she’d known nearly her whole life. Her life. Her reality. Not that world she’d been born into that now seemed a million miles away plus an ocean.
    But not all the men aboard belonged to her life. Big Mattie stood at the base of the mainmast, glowering over a young sailor at the lines. An intruder in her home. Like the other two sailors from the Cavalier . And Seton.
    She pivoted to him. He was watching her carefully. She tried to brush off the sensation of being known by him. He did not know her. He knew only a name from another time.
    “Do your men know?” she demanded.
    “Your true identity?”
    “My past.”
    “Only the three aboard this ship.” His expression remained sober.
    “And my men? Have you told them?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Why should I have?” His brow was firm, his look honest. Unnervingly so.
    She moved toward him swiftly, pulse racing, until she was as close as they’d stood belowdecks the day before. The gray sky framed his handsome face.
    “Who are you?”
    His clear gaze did not waver. “My identity has never been in question here.”
    “Why have you sought me out? What business is it of yours whether I return to England or not?”
    “Your sister is lately wed. Her husband wishes you found.”
    Amid the tattering of thoughts and emotions, something sharp twisted inside her. He had come aboard her ship with gain in sight. But she had known that all along; it should not bother her now.
    “You imagine that some stranger’s wish is sufficient to drag me back to England against my will?”
    “I do. But I prefer you to come willingly.” He said it simply enough, but a glint of fierceness entered his eyes. Instinct told Viola to retreat. She did not. She could not show weakness. A man like this would use vulnerability to his advantage.
    “Why can you not simply tell him—both of them—that you found me happy and hale, and leave it there? After all these years she must be satisfied with that.” If she cared at all. Serena had not returned any of Viola’s letters in those early years. Perhaps Serena had still loved her, but with Viola’s parentage known, her elder sister must have been ashamed. And her poor father . . . Rather, the baron.
    A hint of hardness flashed at the edges of Seton’s beautiful mouth.
    “Say her name.”
    Viola blinked. “Whose name?”
    “Your sister’s.”
    There was a fastness about his gaze now, a swift, assessing penetration that sought her insides and made them quiver. At the fringes of her consciousness clung the remnants of memory again—of sunlit parlors scented with lavender and roses, of eyelet and lace and silks of pale pastels and ribbons of jewel tones threaded through hems and hair. Of the scent of dry, old wood and damp mossy cliffs, the dust of books in the library and polish on the banister, sweet polish, lemon and thyme. Of emerald fields dotted with fluffy white sheep and meadows of wildflowers. She saw a kind, wide-lipped smile and a pair of mismatched eyes surrounded by dark golden hair. Her sister, her fondest companion, her best friend, the girl with whom she had lived every single day of ten years of life and whom she still loved.
    All this came to her with the mere thought of her sister’s name and the unrelenting gaze of an Egyptian pirate.
    Not only Egyptian. And no longer a pirate. A British privateer. Sent to seek her out? The illegitimate daughter of a smuggler and an adulterous woman now deceased?
    “Who is my sister’s husband?”
    “The Earl of Savege, Lord Carlyle’s close neighbor in Devonshire.”
    Viola’s stomach twisted. It just got worse and worse. A nobleman? A lord ? She must be glad for Serena, and wish for her happiness, and that it was a match her half sister liked. But there was no place there for her now, and she did not want it.
    “He will be disappointed when you return without me, no doubt. But he has no authority over me, even if he is an earl.”
    “You will return with me.”
    “I will