How to Impress a Gentleman by Allie Borne Read Free Book Online Page A

to his own needs.”
    “So, are you really in that deep?”
    “Yes, but don’t breathe a word to anyone. I had hoped to pay off my father’s loans but proved unable to win at high stakes betting. I am no gambling addict, mind you. As soon as September rolls around, I’ll have the cash I need to pay off my creditors, and my father’s. I am an expensive spouse to be sure and I will make a good match for the notoriously constrained Miss Beaumont.”
    “Constrained? Ha!”
    “Okay, okay, perhaps frugal is a better word.”
    “Aiden, you will soon discover how wrong either word is in describing Lindsay. Stubborn, unyielding, feckless, and selfish, perhaps, but she could not be mistaken as ‘frugal’ or ‘constrained’. Lindsay, well, God help the man that shackles himself to that baggage!”
    Aiden just shook his head and dropped the conversation. The truth was that Charlotte was the one that left him panting in lust. If his predictions were right, he’d be the one dragging Charlotte down the aisle as Charles heedlessly pursued Lindsay. He’d soon be giving Charles his condolences. The man seemed smitten and oblivious to it.
    ~ ~ ~
    Charles was intensely aware of his feelings for Miss Beaumont, and the rest of the Beaumonts for that matter. He loathed them. He detested the very air they breathed. He wished them all long suffering and misery and he hoped to arrange for himself a front row seat. Just watching Lindsay grin, seeing her round pink cheeks and pale soft skin, made his own, sun-hardened flesh crawl. How dare she smile and chat with him as if nothing at all were amiss between them; as if four long years ago his life weren’t torn asunder by her machinations. Seeing how she had moved on with her life with little thought of him, even daring to mention the navy as if it had somehow been his idea?!
    All this time he had been hoping that, perhaps, she had been unaware of his suffering and therefore not gone to his aid. Even that pretense was now obliterated. She would pay for her duplicity. Shackled to a handsome gambler like Aiden would be her just reward for the shallow manner in which she had disregarded his welfare and their friendship in pursuit of superfluous frivolity.
    He would take a walk before dinner to burn off some of this angst, or else shame himself by causing a scene the likes of which he was sure to regret.
    ~ ~ ~
    Lindsay strolled through the gardens and sat with Whitney in the gazebo by the creek. “Thank you for encouraging me to take some air, Whitney. I feel much more myself, away from the crush indoors.”
    “Well, to be true, I asked ye hear to tell ye a thing or two I heard from yer cousin, Lauren’s abigail.”
    “Oh?” Lindsay encouraged, grinning at the delicious likelihood of some tasty gossip.
    “Lauren, it seems, was fast friends with Charlotte Reynolds before she married this spring. So Ana, Lauren’s maid, spent quite a bit of time over at Charlotte’s household with Charlotte’s abigail, Lucille. And Ana says that Lucille would wax on and on over how Charlotte was to marry herself the handsomest and most devilish man on the market, Mr. Aiden Evers. She said, Lucille did, that she saw them panting over each other on more than one occasion. She even once opened up the linen closet during tea to find them in there, Aiden’s hand half way up Charlotte’s skirt.”
    “And you believe this, this gossip, Whitney?” Lindsay guffawed, feeling more than a little put out.
    “Course I do. Ana would not say it if she didn’t know it to be true.”
    “I should feel poorly for Charles, that his betrothed has treated him so unfaithfully; yet I cannot. He was most disloyal to me when I needed him most. If it wasn’t for Charlie taking my father’s money and running off for a position in the navy, I might have my mother still with me today.”
    “How do you figure that, Miss Lindsay? How is it Sir Charles fault that yer mother was sent away to molder in that awful