A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) by Julie Anne Long Read Free Book Online

was hardly an advertisement for it.
    Still, love of the kind Lady Fennimore described, the kind that owned you, gave you no choice but to surrender, surely wasn’t so common that it should be renounced. No matter the course it ran.
    For he’d never known it.
    One of the Deadly Sins paid him a fleeting visit: Envy. He was susceptible because a beautiful woman had just embedded herself like a splinter in his consciousness. Suddenly, he wanted to feel again.
    “I think there is no question of the sin, Lady Fennimore,” he told her gently. “But you can repent the sin and not the love.”
    He hoped she wouldn’t decide it was a heretical notion.
    Lady Fennimore blinked. Her head tipped in birdlike consideration; her eyes fastened on him fiercely. He hadn’t been lying; her eyes were lovely, a pale, crystalline blue, enormous and vivid in her sunken face. He imagined her suddenly as a lush young woman in the arms of a lover, at the mercy of a passion stronger than everything she’d grown up believing to be right.
    “Why, if that isn’t a clever solution, Mr. Sylvaine,” she allowed almost reluctantly, eyes narrowed now. “I shall do just that.” She sounded pleased, as though he’d given her an alternate route to London, one in which the roads were less rutted, and the coaching inns served fresher beef. She settled back into her pillows with satisfaction.
    He was tempted to pantomime mopping his brow. Instead, he said:
    “Would you like me to pray with you?”
    “If you would. I do like the sound of your voice,” she conceded drowsily. As though everything else about him was wanting. “Something from Common Prayer. You choose it.”
    He bit back a smile and slid his fingers into the old, familiar pages. Reflecting that there was nothing common at all about any of the people he knew.
    SHE MIGHT HAVE been born in a dirt-floor cottage warmed by peat, with cattle poking their heads in the windows and noisy siblings heaped up in the bed like so many kittens, but she hadn’t lived in the country since she was a small child.
    And Mother of God, it was quiet.
    Damask Manor the house was called. It only just escaped being a cottage by virtue two or three rooms (there were ten of them) and the outbuildings, but it possessed a measure of charm: An arbored walkway led up to the house; three gabled windows looked out over Pennyroyal Green; it was made of sandstone and glowed in the afternoon sun, and all the rooms a family would live in faced south and were filled with light. A wide staircase led up from a foyer marbled in squares of black and white. The gardens were simple and small and meticulously groomed (by a gardener, yet another person who needed to be paid) and would be awash with roses, she’d been assured, come June. A small bit of farmland was attached to it and could be worked. It was an eternity away from Grosvenor and St. James’s Square and all the estates the earl had owned, all of which were entailed and in the hands of his heir, a petulant, chinless young man by the name of Percival.
    But Damask Manor was hers to keep. Because the earl had won it in a card game.
    Much like her.
    It was fate, one might say.
    At the moment, it felt much too large for her, her glowering maid, and the small staff she could just barely afford to keep. She suspected she could shout, and it would echo the way her voice had today when she’d shrieked like a fishwife at the vicar.
    She swiped her hands down her face again at the memory. The shame of it. So few people knew of her origins. She really must go up to bed early tonight and hope the shreds of her composure magically knit themselves back together whilst she slept.
    A maid of all work had gone to collect the mail from a shop called Postlethwaite’s in town while she was at church, and while Henny saw to the preparation of lunch, she inspected her letters. No invitations, no flowers, no gifts had arrived. She ought to be accustomed to that now, but more than a decade’s