Read Online Once Upon a Tartan by Grace Burrowes - Free Book Online Page A

if the match involved a lady of any standing.
    “You censure him for this?” Her tone was careful, merely inquisitive.
    “Of course I censure the bas—the beggar. Living on one’s expectations is foolishness, and threatening to drag a woman’s good name through the courts, when that woman was previously considered adequate to mother one’s children… Of course I censure him. What was his name? Merridew?”
    “Merriman. Third son of the Marquess of Spielgood.”
    “For God’s sake… A third son, no less. He should be horsewhipped. I hope your brother dealt with him.”
    “My brother paid him off.”
    And from the way she took to studying the burn, Tye divined that this was the real hurt. Not the gossip, not the labeling, not Merriman’s legal posturing and dishonorable conduct. The real shame, for Hester Daniels, was that her brother had been put to embarrassment and expense on her behalf.
    “He doesn’t blame you.”
    She glanced over at him fleetingly, then resumed her perusal of the burn, the banks, the fields and hills beyond. “I beg your pardon?”
    “Your brother does not blame you. He blames himself. If he’d been more attentive, you would not have taken up with a bounder like this Merrifield idiot.” Her lips quirked at his purposeful misnomer, the smallest, fleeting breach in her dignity. He wanted to widen that breach.
    “Matthew did not approve of the match. Because my older sister was not yet betrothed, my father kept his agreement with Jasper private. Then too, Mama wanted me to have my own Season once Genie was engaged.”
    “But your father died, and there were no more Seasons for you.” She nodded, and Tye might have seen her blinking at the book in her hands.
    “I had only Jasper’s word for the fact that Altsax had agreed to the match. The solicitors could only tell us my father had instructed them to draw up the settlements. He never signed them or sent them to Jasper’s solicitors.”
    Now this purely stank. “How would breach of promise have been proved if there were no signed agreements?”
    She set the poetry aside and smoothed a hand over her skirts, putting Tye in mind of his younger sister’s habit of twisting a lock of hair when unnerved. “Jasper proposed to me in the park one afternoon, directly after I’d concluded my mourning for Altsax. Before one and all, his lordship put a ring on my finger and kissed my cheek.”
    “That is utter rot .” He wanted to throw her bloody, bedamned book into the water. “The bastard ambushed you, caught you unawares, and set you up so you could not refuse. He must have been very deep in debt indeed, and my guess is old Spielgood cut him off.”
    She abruptly found Tye worthy of study. “Do you think so?”
    “For God’s sake, Miss Daniels, I know so. Younger sons face a choice—I know, my brother was one. They can either try to be more noble than their titled fathers and brothers, or they can spend their lives pouting because they were born two years or two minutes behind their older sibling. This Merriberg fellow was entirely beneath you, you’re well rid of him, and he’s lucky your brother didn’t arrange a bare-knuckle encounter with him in some dingy alley.”
    Her lips were threatening to turn up again. “You are carrying on like a brother now.”
    She sounded approving , damned if she didn’t. Tye wrestled the urge to hunt down Jasper Merridamn and introduce him to some of Tye’s favorite pugilistic theories.
    “I am a brother. I have three younger sisters, not a one of them married, and if I understand anything, it’s the perils of Polite Society.”
    “You truly think I’m well rid of him?”
    She sounded plaintive, which left Tye wanting to have a word with the woman’s brother. “Has no one told you as much?”
    “Aunt has. My cousin Augusta. Fiona.”
    But she hadn’t heard it from her menfolk, or apparently from her own mother. Tye schooled himself to sound older and wiser, and not bloody angry on her