Lord Perfect by Loretta Chase Read Free Book Online Page A

Peregrine Coptic, one of the keys to deciphering
hieroglyphs, if he could get through Homer creditably.
    Thus, by Sunday, Peregrine knew that
he would go mad if he didn't find out why Olivia Wingate was a Leper
and an Outcast, and what the Family
Curse was.
    This is why, on Sunday night, long after his uncle had
bade him good night and gone out, and most of the household had gone
to bed, Peregrine began writing to Olivia Wingate.

    THE LETTER FROM Lord Rathbourne arrived in care of Mr.
Popham the print seller late on Friday. Bathsheba waited until she
was at home to read it. With trembling fingers she opened it.
    His lordship's secretary had written it. The message
declining her services was short and scrupulously polite.
    She stared blindly at it for a long time after she'd
absorbed the meaning. A too familiar icy feeling trickled through her
veins. Then the heat came, setting her face aflame.
    She told herself it wasn't the same, but the memory
burned in her mind as though freshly branded there, though three
years had passed.
    It was a few months after she'd buried Jack. A note
arrived from her father-in-law, written by his secretary. It
accompanied the long letter he'd received, he believed, from her.
This letter, which Bathsheba had never written, maundered on about
Jack's death and his "beloved daughter Olivia." The writer
sought forgiveness. And money, of course. It was horrible. "Let
us be reconciled in Jack's memory and for his child's sake"…
and more in that vein. For pages and pages the letter wheedled and
begged, a shameless attempt to take advantage of Jack's death and his
father's grief.
    It was written in her mother's hand.
    Mama hadn't even had the decency to exploit the
situation in her own name. If she had, Bathsheba might never have
known about it, never suffered a moment's distress on that account.
    But no, Mama must pretend to be Bathsheba.
    And so it was Bathsheba who received Lord Fosbury's curt
reply. It was Bathsheba who was mortified.
    And when she wrote to Mama, the answer was as she might
have expected: "I did it for you, my love, because you are too
proud and overscrupulous."
    That was the last letter Bathsheba had from her mother.
Her parents moved on to St. Petersburg, where Papa died of a liver
ailment. Mama remarried soon after and went away without a word to
anybody, including her daughter. Bathsheba wished she missed her
family, but she didn't. Her childhood was filled with incidents like
the letter to Lord Fosbury. Small wonder she'd been willing to endure
anything, in order to have a life with Jack instead.
    "What is it, Mama?" Olivia said.
    Bathsheba looked up. She had not heard the girl come in.
"Nothing," Bathsheba said. She tore Lord Rathbourne's
secretary's note into very small pieces and threw it on the fire.
    "You've been weeping," Olivia said.
    Bathsheba hastily wiped her eyes. "I must have got
a cinder in my eye," she said.
    It was nothing, she told herself. She had known this would happen. She'd
merely lost a potential pupil. She'd find others. This was nothing
like the humiliation of Lord Fosbury's note. It was ridiculous to
feel angry… disappointed… hurt.
    The visit to the Egyptian Hall had been her first
venture into a part of London that Society frequented. Her exchange
with Lord Rathbourne had been her first conversation with a gentleman
since Jack's funeral. The newness of the experience had unsettled
her, that was all.
    This explanation wasn't completely persuasive, but it
got her through the rest of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
    On Monday she conducted her drawing class as usual, in
the room she rented two floors above the print shop. When the class
was over, she went down to the shop as she usually did, to find out
if anyone had enquired about drawing lessons.
    A tall, familiar figure stood at the counter.
    She stood and stared like a gawking girl who'd never
learnt any manners at all, her gaze roaming over the broad shoulders
and down the straight back and down and