Read Online Taming Beauty by Lynne Barron - Free Book Online

still, the things one never wanted to learn in the wilds of Cornwall.
    “What do you mean the mail coach doesn’t come through Breckenridge?”
    “My boy, Tom can ride to Brideford with your missive,” Mr. Poole, innkeeper-cum-smithy, offered with a nod to the strapping young man working the bellows at the forge. “Course he can’t go ‘til tomorrow, seeing as I’ll need him here today. But if he leaves at first light he can meet the mail coach, hand it off and it’ll reach London midweek, weather permitting.”
    “Midweek?” Lilith repeated, tapping the sealed letter on the edge of the counter upon which sat piles of metalwork in various stages of completion.
    “Course, it’ll cost you a pretty penny.” Mr. Poole swept his rheumy gaze from Lilith’s artfully tussled curls to the tips of her kid-skin boots, now more brown than white. “But you’ve the look of a lady with a few pennies to spare, and all of them pretty.”
    Lilith couldn’t decide if the old man was flirting with her or insulting her, another oddity for a woman who prided herself on spotting a flirt before he’d opened his mouth to deliver the first salvo. The not knowing left her feeling all topsy-turvy and out of sorts. “Damn and blast,” she muttered before turning to find the boys digging through a pile of discarded horseshoes on the other side of the dimly-lit building.
    “You wouldn’t be Lord Malleville’s bride, would you?” Mr. Poole asked with a chuckle.
    “Me, Malleville’s bride?” Lilith replied with a laugh. “Not bloody likely.”
    “I only ask on account of I heard as how his lordship is to marry an earl’s eldest daughter, a lady rumored to be as pretty as the day is long. And Cornish days are longer than most.”
    On surer footing, Lilith leaned one hip against the counter and offered up a smile. “Why, Mr. Poole, you’ve a rake’s heart hiding under that apron, haven’t you?”
    “Don’t pay no mind to him,” called out a cheerful, feminine voice as a trio of women entered the smithy dressed in their Sunday best. “Flirting comes as easy to him as breathing, but he’s harmless.”
    Mr. Poole didn’t so much a blush as he introduced his wife, her mother Mrs. Carter, and Miss Sarah Parkhurst. Finally, a bit of luck to offset an otherwise unlucky morning.
    “Well, land sakes, aren’t you a pretty little thing?” Mrs. Poole exclaimed, taking hold of Lilith’s hand and squeezing. “Miss Lilith Aberdeen, you say? Are you any relation to Viscount Aberdeen?”
    “Only very distantly.” Lilith gently disentangled her finger from the lady’s grasp.
    “I saw the viscount once,” Mrs. Carter said, beaming a smile missing a goodly number of teeth. “In London, it was, years ago, before you were born, I’d wager.”
    “I seem to recall Rose making mention of a Miss Aberdeen in one of her letters,” Miss Sarah Parkhurst said, her gaze taking in Lilith’s gown and shawl and likely marking the cost down to the last pretty penny. “For the life of me I cannot remember what she wrote.”
    “I did have the opportunity to become acquainted with your sister this past winter when she was in Town shopping for her…” Lilith allowed her lips to form the word trousseau though not so much as a breath of air escaped.
    Truly, it ought to require a bit more effort, rattling the composure of a girl of perhaps seven and ten. Surely Lilith herself hadn’t been so blasted easy to unsettle at her age.
    “Now I remember.” The girl on the cusp of womanhood couldn’t help but rush to fill the awkward silence that followed the one unspoken word. “Rose wrote she’d met you in Hyde Park.”
    “Actually, it was at the theater,” Lilith contradicted, suspecting she was about to ruin the poor girl’s day, if not her entire week. “On opening night of Much Ado about Nothing. In the Earl of Dunaway’s box.”
    A mottled flush swept over the girl’s cheeks right up to her hairline. Pale brows took flight above