Read Online Simply Love by Mary Balogh - Free Book Online Page A

home.”
    She had, she supposed, been forgiven. She did not know if he still disliked her, but that did not really matter. She smiled and nodded and would again have turned away.
    â€œWill you have a seat, Miss Jewell?” He indicated the chair close to the one he had been occupying.
    She had hesitated too long, she thought, and courtesy had compelled him to offer to prolong their encounter. She would rather have moved off somewhere else. She did not like being close to him. Ashamed as she was to admit it, she did not like having to look at him.
    And how difficult it was to look at him as if he were any normal man, not to focus only on the left side of his face, not to look away lest he think she was staring. Did some people who knew about her find it equally difficult to look at her, to treat her as if she were a normal woman? But she knew very well that there were such people.
    She sat straight-backed on the edge of the chair and folded her hands in her lap.
    â€œYou are a brother of Viscount Ravensberg, Mr. Butler?” she said politely, her mind having turned blank to all the many possibilities of interesting conversational topics.
    â€œI am,” he answered.
    And there was nowhere else to go with the topic. She did not even know who Viscount Ravensberg was. But he took pity on her.
    â€œAnd son of the Earl of Redfield of Alvesley Park in Hampshire,” he told her. “The estate adjoins that of Lindsey Hall, Bewcastle’s principal seat. My brothers and I grew up with the Bedwyns. They were all hellions—but then so were we.”
    â€œBrothers?” She raised her eyebrows.
    â€œJerome, the eldest, died of a chill taken while rescuing farm laborers and their families from flooded homes,” he said. “Kit and I are the only two remaining.”
    There must have been much nerve damage to the right side of his face, she thought. It was immobile, and his mouth was rather lopsided as he talked.
    â€œIt must have been hard to lose a brother,” she said.
    â€œYes.”
    She did not usually have undue difficulty making conversation, but everything she had said during the past minute or two was markedly stupid. Her mind, meanwhile, chattered incessantly with questions she knew she could not ask.
    What happened out there in the Peninsula?
    In which battle did it happen?
    Did you sometimes wish you had died?
    Do you sometimes still wish it?
    He must have been extraordinarily,
impossibly
handsome once upon a time.
    â€œWhat an utterly foolish thing to say,” she said. “As if you could possibly reply that no, it was not hard at all.”
    His one dark eye met hers with a hard, bleak look for a moment as if he were about to make a sharp retort. Then it twinkled, and surprisingly they both laughed. The left side of his mouth lifted higher than the right in a lopsided grin that was curiously attractive.
    â€œMiss Jewell,” he said, “shall we agree, for both our sakes, to pretend that last evening did not happen, that we have met here for the first time this evening?”
    â€œOh.” She relaxed back a little farther on her chair. “I should like that.”
    His left hand was resting on his thigh. It was a long-fingered artist’s hand, she thought. She hoped she was wrong about that last point—or that he was left-handed. She looked up into his face.
    â€œI have been feeling horribly intimidated all evening,” she was surprised to hear herself admit.
    â€œHave you?” he asked her. “Why?”
    She wished she had not said it. But he was waiting for her reply.
    â€œJoshua—Lord Hallmere—offered to bring my son here for the summer so that he would have other children to play with,” she explained. “But he is only nine years old, and I have never been separated from him. And so, when I hesitated, the marchioness invited me too and I accepted because I did not want to disappoint my son. But I did not expect to be