Lady in Green by Bárbara Metzger Read Free Book Online Page A

servant brought. “Ah,” he sighed, swirling the dark liquor around in the glass while his friend waited impatiently. At last Lord Gardiner took a swallow of his drink, savoring the flavor. “I have indeed been a paragon of virtue,” he finally confirmed. “No opera dancers, no chorus girls, no bits of muslin.”
    “What, no females at all?” Cholly nearly choked on his own drink.
    The earl looked down his aristocratic nose, which was just slightly out of line. “That’s not what I said. At Mother’s insistence I frequented the haut monde instead of the demimonde.”
    “Nearly took a turn seeing you at Lady Bessborough’s.”
    “Precisely. So all of my, ah, companions this past week have been ladies.” He took another sip. “And see what it’s gained me.”
    Cholly nodded his head in sympathy. “They’re the devil when it comes to being crossed. Why, m’sisters—”
    “No, the women didn’t wreak such havoc on my body, not directly, at any rate. This”—he indicated the leg propped on a footstool in front of him—“I received when I was forced to climb out a window. The lady’s husband came home unexpectedly. The trellis broke, equally unexpectedly, by George. My face, on another night, was rearranged by footpads.”
    “Jupiter, I would have thought you were too downy a bird by now to be taken like that.”
    “And so I thought, too, but it was four in the morning with not a hackney to be seen, if a person could have seen anything through the fog. I had sent Mother off from Lady Bessborough’s in our carriage, and then accepted a ride home—her home, naturally—from a certain widow who shall, of course, remain nameless.”
    “Of course,” Cholly echoed, searching his mind for likely candidates.
    “A widow who is received in all the best drawing rooms, incidentally. I must say I was delighted with her charms, until she rudely shoved me awake and out of her bed. The servants mustn’t see me there when they lit the fires in the morning. The lady’s reputation would suffer.” He took another sip of the brandy.
    “But what of the footpads?”
    “I think they’ll be more careful picking their target in the future. Just because a chap is clunch enough to leave a warm bed in the middle of a cold night doesn’t mean he’s an easy mark.” Lord Gardiner ran his fingers through his dark curls, wincing at the lumps and bruises. He couldn’t tell which were from the attempted robbers, which remnants from the dowager’s fire poker. “And that’s not the worst of it,” he confessed.
    Cholly refilled his own empty glass. “Deuce take it, there’s more?”
    The earl shifted uncomfortably on his chair. He nodded. “There was one more lady. A regular dasher, with some old dragon living with her to lend countenance. Bold as brass she asks me to take her for a ride in the country while the dragon visits an ailing cousin. She wants me to pull in at a quaint little inn she knows outside of town. Quaint wasn’t the word I’d have used. Rundown, ramshackle maybe, not quaint. And you know how I never stay at even mediocre inns.”
    Cholly was starting to smile. “And I know the way your man Ingraham is always following you around with your own bed linen and stuff. Tender skin, ain’t it?”
    The earl flicked a speck of dust off his dark sleeve. “But the jade says that way she can be sure no one will recognize her, so I take a room. Blast it, quit laughing, she was a convincing armful!”
    “And?”
    “And those sheets were so filthy, my butt’s the color of a baboon’s behind!”
    When Cholly finished wiping his eyes, he told the earl, “What you need is a wife!”
    “I need a wife like your picture of Babette needed that third arm. What’s a rash compared to a nose ring?”
    Cholly put his handkerchief away. “Mightn’t be so bad, y’know.”
    “What? I can’t believe my ears! Never say you’re thinking of becoming a tenant for life?”
    “Been thinking, that’s all. ’Sides,