Improper Gentlemen by Mia Marlowe, Diane Whiteside, Maggie Robinson Read Free Book Online

outside.
    “Tomorrow.” She’d be destroyed and Talbot would be his friend again. They always made up after a fight.
    Simmons’s eyes met his, narrow and red in the lamplight. “Better be soon so I’ll have full use of her before I leave. I must board the next stage to make my recommendation to the governor.”
    “You have my word.” Ike tossed him a salute like the infantry captain he’d once been. Just a few more hours and he’d rule Wolf Laurel again, with Talbot at his back.
     
    The snow hurled itself against the windows in a fusillade of icy darts. The trees outside beat their branches against each other in a series of thunderous cracks.
    Charlotte moaned and pulled the quilt higher over her head. But nothing could stop the wind from howling or her father from yelling at her, again and again.
    “How dare you betray yourself and your family by spending hours with such riffraff!” her father yelled at her. They stood in his library, where the books were a distant blur and the velvet curtains rustled unhappily in the drafts. Even the gilded ceiling, normally warm and close, seemed far away and forbidding.
    “How dare you call them that?” She glared back at him from an arm’s length away. Her cheek was swollen and bleeding on the inside from where he’d hit her, the first time he’d ever done so. But she’d never allow an outrage to her friends. “You should be ashamed to insult such heroes.”
    She raised her hands, ready to fight, as Alex Pelham had taught her. Her stepmother and stepsisters’ faces swam into focus from behind her father’s shoulder, smirking like carnival masks. She ignored them in favor of the greater danger to her heart.
    “Insult?” Her father’s voice dropped to an icy needle. “You have ruined your reputation and the family’s name—and you say I dealt an insult ?”
    “Absolutely.” She folded her arms over her chest. Every inch of her eighteen-year-old frame vibrated with certainty. Anything she could do at the Soldiers’ Home paled before the sacrifices those brave men had made for their country. Surely playing card games, even poker, for hours, was respectable when conducted under the head nurse’s vigilant eye.
    “Go to your room, you impertinent whelp. You will have bread and water until you learn respect for authority,” her father snapped, tall and proud in his black broadcloth coat.
    She marched out to a chorus of her stepmother and stepsisters’ virulent whispers. They grew in volume as she climbed the stairs and the winds screamed louder among the trees. She could no longer hear the little voice in her head urging her to wait and explain everything to her father when they’d both calmed down.
    The stairs lengthened and flattened, surrounded by taller and taller walls, until they became the road out of Boston.
    She walked on and on, into the blizzard.
    The storm howled again and the quilt tightened around her until she couldn’t move her arms and legs. She thrashed wildly, fighting off the smothering blur.
    “Hush, darling. Hush.” A man’s rich voice, velvet-edged and totally unlike her father’s, pushed back the storm’s ice.
    “Help me.” She reached out, her eyes still shut. She’d had this nightmare so many times.
    Strong hands peeled the cloth away from the pillows and smoothed it over her limbs. He gently rolled it down from her face to lay it at the foot of the bed.
    She blinked up at Justin. His deep-set eyes were alive with concern under the blizzard’s white light.
    “Are you okay, Charlotte?” he asked very gently.
    She gulped.
    “Sounds like no.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, looking very different clad only in a nightshirt. “Do you want to talk about it?”
    She shook her head violently. Talk about where she came from—or her own stubborn stupidity in not giving her father an explanation?
    “That’s okay with me, sugar. A person’s past is their own business out here in the West.”
    She shivered. The big quilt was