An Escapade and an Engagement by Annie Burrows Read Free Book Online Page A

completely the wrong idea about her and Harry. He had already
made her feel stupid and selfish. If she admitted that she had fallen into the
relationship in a fit of pique with her grandfather, and was now quite keen to
wriggle out of it again, she would never live it down!
    She was going to have to appear to agree to his terms. Oh,
Lord, and that meant that she would have to meet Harry again and tell him to his
face that she did not love him. Could never marry him.
    It would be painful. Very painful. But in a way would it not be
a fitting punishment for the way she had led Harry on these past months?
    Though she still could not understand why on earth Lord Ledbury
was so keen to act as a go-between. Just when she had been relying on him to put
an end to what was becoming an increasingly untenable situation, he was coming
to their aid—as though he had every sympathy for what he assumed was a pair of
star-crossed lovers.
    ‘Why are you doing this?’
    He took a deep breath. ‘I am going to ask you to do something
for me that means I shall have to take you into my confidence. I am going to
trust you to keep what I am about to tell you to yourself. Just as you are
trusting me to keep my mouth shut about your continuing relationship with
Lieutenant Kendell.’
    He was going to trust her with a secret? A great deal of her
irritation with him ebbed away. Even if his words did contain that thinly veiled
threat about him keeping quiet so long as she kept quiet, nobody had ever reposed any confidence
in her upon any matter whatsoever. On the contrary—all her life her male
relatives had been drumming it into her that she was completely useless.
    ‘I want you to help a…a friend of mine.’ He frowned. ‘Perhaps
it is best I go back to the beginning. You know I was wounded at Orthez last
February?’
    ‘No.’ But hadn’t he said something about not being able to
sleep because his leg troubled him? She looked down at it. Then her eyes flicked
to the cane she recalled he’d made use of when he’d limped into Lucy’s ballroom
the previous night.
    She caught her lower lip between her teeth, feeling really
ashamed of all the nasty things she’d thought about him just because he’d looked
so grim-faced.
    ‘Stupidest thing, really,’ he admitted, looking a bit
uncomfortable. ‘My horse got shot out from under me, and instead of jumping
clear I let the damn thing roll on me. Clumsy. I was pretty well out of it for a
while. And then I came to in the field hospital, with Milly defending me like a
tigress from surgeons whose sole idea of a cure is to amputate anything that
looks the least bit untidy. So, you see, she saved my leg.’
    He held up one finger as though keeping score.
    ‘Then, eventually, I got sent back to England on a transport,
while the rest of my regiment pushed across the border into France. Milly’s
father, who was the regimental quartermaster, gave his permission for her to
come with me as my nurse, thank God, else the fever I contracted would most
probably have carried me off.’
    He held up another finger.
    ‘I was weak as a kitten all through last summer. And
desperately hard up. But thanks to Milly’s ingenuity and Fred’s skill at
foraging—perhaps I should mention Fred is, or was, my batman—I slowly began to
recover. And then winter came, and I took an inflammation of the lungs. It
looked as though I was done for, but they both stuck with me even though by this
time I could not even pay their wages…’
    ‘But you are a wealthy man!’
    ‘I am a wealthy man now, ’ he
corrected her. ‘Before Mortimer died I had to live on my pay. And what with
doctors’ bills and so forth…’
    ‘But surely if you had applied to your family, they would
have…?’
    ‘I have already told you that you are not alone in being
disappointed in your male relatives, Lady Jayne. I wrote on several occasions,
but never received any reply.’
    ‘How can that be? Did they not receive your letters? Do you
suppose