Like No Other Lover by Julie Anne Long Read Free Book Online

relish.
    “We’ve planned a salon for everyone to greet each other this afternoon,” Violet said sweetly. “Everyone should be recovered from their journeys by then.”

    Miles felt a trifle guilty about avoiding breakfast—because “avoided” was precisely what he’d done, and he wasn’t proud of it—by taking Ramsay out for a long ride over his land. But it turned out to be the wisest thing to do, as the ride and the weather did marvelous things to his mood, and his mind soared across the sea to Lacao as he galloped the length of the park, up to the rise over which he could see the other ocean, the Atlantic, undulating soft and gray in the distance. He thought of the ships that Lord Rutland’s money would finance, and the hopeful letters sent to naturalists, men he admired greatly, the country over.
    And when he had his replies, he relished being able to tell them he could make it happen easily and soon, on a scale and scope none of them had dared dream of before.
    Once he married Lady Georgina, of course.
    He returned Ramsay to the stables and walked back to the house, arriving happily dirty and perspiring and resolved. He gamely swabbed his torso with hot water and soap to ensure he smelled as little like horse as possible, submitted to a ruthlessly clean shave at the hands of his valet, dressed in a spotless, flawlessly cut coat and crisp cravat and shining boots, replaced his spectacles on his face, and prepared to step further into his future.

    The salon was held in a wide room too stocked with furniture and carpet to echo much despite the fact that the ceilings might as well have been the cliffs of Dover: they soared, high and white. Curvaceous settees striped in cream and brown sprawled amidst prim chairs propped on gilded legs. Two enormous fireplaces intricately carved in harvest motifs—nuts and vines, plump vegetables and fruits—were brilliant with fires, and conspired along with Isaiah Redmond’s modern gas lamps, globes of soft light balanced on tables, to cast the entire gathering in a painterly light. Molding echoing the harvest motif encircled the top of the room like a great cuff, and two chandeliers of twisting brass birch twigs had been lit for the occasion. An extravagance of wood and fire, but then again, the Redmonds had the money to pay for all of it.
    The room exhaled Redmond wealth and history and comfort; the way a church always seems to exhale peace and prayers.
    But it was also the room, Miles recalled, where he and Lyon had played at soldiers by ducking behind the settees and aiming fireplace poker muskets at each other, and where they had pretended that the vast spreading carpet—scrolled in interlocking roads of cream and brown and oxblood—was instead a great sea of boiling lava (this was Miles’s idea; he had read of volcanoes and lava), which meant they couldn’t walk on it. They were instead compelled to traverse the room by leaping from chair to settee to table to settee to chair again, which is what they’d been doing before they were caught. Naturally, as a result of all their leaping, a marble bust—some somber blank-eyed, anonymous, quarter of a man—Miles never could understand the purpose of busts—crashed to the ground and had not, sadly, bounced. It shattered.
    They hadn’t been thrashed, interestingly. His father instead decided to make it their first lesson in commerce: he’d explained the cost and provenance and fragility of every single thing in that room, what those things meant to the family, and what it meant to be a Redmond. And even then Miles had felt the weight of his own history and the duty to the name encase him like armor.
    Now strangers and old friends clustered toward one end of this familiar room. A late arrival was Lord Milthorpe, a Sussex neighbor, member of the Mercury Club and friend of his father’s who had come to stay for a few days to discuss investments with Isaiah. As his father had predicted, he looked decidedly uneasy,