Delicious by Unknown Read Free Book Online

detailed Michael’s doings and whereabouts for a week. The message was unmistakable. Her aunt knew who Michael was—Verity was never to embarrass her again.
    When she’d burned the letter and stopped shaking, the skies had opened. What would normally have been a pleasant walk to the village had turned into a veritable slog, and she’d sat, for much of her train journey south, in stockings that had become drenched despite her galoshes.
    And then, after she’d found a good place of lodging, put on dry clothes, and gone through much trouble to make herself presentable, did her luck improve? No. One’d think Stuart Somerset had a price on his head, the way he avoided his own residence. Not even a servant to answer the door and tell her the whereabouts of the master. What kind of a man bought a four-story house—six stories, if she counted the basement and the attic—without hiring a staff for it?
    She’d knocked on his door at eight, retreated to a pub a quarter mile away, where she drew many inquisitive looks from the regulars, and returned at nine. And ten. And now eleven.
    Ten o’clock was to have been her last try—the third time either the charm or an unmistakable sign that it was not to be. But she couldn’t give up. Couldn’t face the prospect of returning to Fairleigh Park without having accomplished a single one of her objectives.
    She had it all thought out. First, she would become Stuart Somerset’s cook. Then she would become his lover. Then, since it was her understanding that he was some sort of a lawyer and an MP, he could, as a favor to her, prove her identity. And once that was done, he would of course jump at the chance to marry her.
    She would have loved to see Bertie’s face at the wedding.
    The letter from her aunt, however, took the wedding entirely off the table—Verity dared not contest the truth, not when Michael was exposed and vulnerable. And Stuart Somerset didn’t get to where he was in life by marrying domestic servants with no known provenance. But with his help, she could still hurt Bertie.
    Bertie had come to value her as a cook. And he was beginning to believe that he had in her a talent to rival that of any betoqued Parisian chef. It would be a blow to his gastronomic aspiration were she to defect to his greatest nemesis—and make his brother’s table the most celebrated in all of England.
    And then let him see his adventuress in bed with his brother. Oh, that would work wonders. On her own she could not hope to wound Bertie: She didn’t matter enough, as she’d so belatedly learned. But in league with his brother, well, the least bit of nothing having to do with Stuart Somerset sent Bertie into a rage.
    It was only fair that Bertie should know a little of the pain that blinded her. She hadn’t been able to eat or sleep for weeks. Let him toss and turn. Let him lose his appetite for once.
    But the door to 26 Cambury Lane did not open.
    She kicked it. Still it did not open. Her big toe now throbbed awfully.
    She hobbled onto the sidewalk and faced a choice of directions: toward the pub, to wait another hour in agitation, or toward Sloane Square, for a hack to take her back to her inn. A choice between folly and defeat.
    Her feet started in the direction of the pub—reckless, as her choices often were. Sense wasn’t her strong suit. Had she more sense, she would not be here like this, a random caller with a recitation of browraising goals.
    Instead, if she visited this particular house at all, it would be because the respectably married noble-woman she should have been had met Stuart Somerset at some soirée or another and decided to make him her piece on the side. She’d be fascinated by his unusual childhood and beg him to tell her titillating particulars—Had there been rats as big as cats in his house? Had he been illiterate? How had it felt to be hungry and poor?—then she’d whisper what details she’d gathered to her friends, tittering and perhaps shuddering