How to Woo a Widow by Manda Collins Read Free Book Online

might be a rogue and a roué but I would not like for my fiancée’s name to be sullied with gossip.”
    She turned from brushing out her skirts to stare.
    “Fiancée? Are you mad?”
    “No more mad than any fool in love, I should think,” he returned.
    “But, Tony, I cannot marry you.”
    “Why the devil not? You just made love to me on that dashed uncomfortable bench. If that doesn’t imply a certain level of commitment I don’t know what does. Though I will grant you I didn’t much care at the time.”
    “But nothing has changed, Tony. I am still James’ sister. I am still older than you by any number of—”
    He held up a hand as if asking for silence.
    “If being James’s sister and our age difference are the only two objections you can give…”
    “But they are…”
    Tony stepped closer, pulled her to him and gave her a hard kiss.
    “You are right. They are perfectly nice objections and I am wrong to sneer at them. But what if I am able to fix them?”
    She stared at him as if a horn had begun to grow from between his eyebrows. “How can you ‘fix’ our age difference? Or the fact that James was my brother? I hardly think they can simply be…”
    “Hush, darling or you’ll spoil the surprise. Give me a week.”
    “A week?”
    He frowned. “It looks like a perfectly normal little bower but it’s really an echo chamber. Extraordinary.”
    “Ha. Ha.”
    “You’d better get out there to your mount before someone comes and steals your horse.”
    He patted her on the rump and merely shrugged when she turned and gave him an outraged stare. “I shall see you next week. Promise me you won’t go haring off and marry someone else in the meantime.”
    “I hardly think it’s necessary, but you have my word.”
    “Excellent,” he said to her retreating back.
    When she was gone, he let out a long sigh. How the devil was he going to convince her to marry him?
    But with the memory of her taste still in his mouth, he knew that he’d find a way. He had to. There was simply no other way around it.
    And for the first time since he’d returned from the Peninsula, Tony let out a whoop of joy. “I suppose there is something to this love nonsense,” he told his horse as he set a foot in the stirrup and mounted.
    As if in response, the horse shook his head and breathed out a huff.
    “Quite right, old man,” Tony agreed. “Quite right. We humans are a mad bunch.”

 
    Chapter Six
     
    Portia spent the intervening week alternately trying to forget that the incident in Hyde Park had even happened and obsessively recalling every tiny detail.
    She tried to forget while she was at Hatchard’s while she browsed the latest novels from the Minerva Press. But the title Almack’s Affair reminded her of the kiss last Wednesday night.
    She tried to forget while she and her Mama indulged in an ice from Gunter’s, after an afternoon of shopping in Bond Street. But the tart lemon flavor reminded her that Tony liked lemon curd.
    She even tried to forget while seated in Lord Vale’s box at the opera. But the soprano’s gown was exactly the shade of Tony’s eyes in the throes of passion.
    It would have been more useful to count the things that did not remind her of Tony, which included Mrs. Woolton’s pug and her own pinkie toe. Though she was quite sure she could find some connection between Tony and the toe if she thought hard enough.
    As for the remembering? Well, that was confined mostly to the nights, while she lay in her distressingly empty bed.
    She now sat in the drawing room of her house in Berkley Square exactly one week after the Hyde Park Encounter (as she had taken to calling it). And read page 34 of Madame D’Arblay’s Evelina for the third time and tried not to think about the fact that it was one week after the Hyde Park Encounter. Tony had promised to call on her one week later and she trusted that he would.
    She’d given up on the novel and was trying to unravel a knot in her needlepoint when