No Choice but Seduction by Johanna Lindsey Read Free Book Online

tomatoes, since she knew I was upset with her for keeping me at home, so I told her I chased off a thief with the rolling pin I’d been using.”
    “You got to help in the kitchen?” Judith said. “I wish I could do that, but our cook just feeds me a sweet and tells me to run along.”
    Katey was amused that the child was more interested in the cooking than the thief. “We only had one maid, Grace,” Katey said, nodding toward their sleeping companion. “So we all shared in the chores.”
    “Would your mother really have noticed a few missing tomatoes?” Judith asked.
    “Oh, yes, she knew exactly how many tomatoes were on her plants and exactly how many were ready for picking. She loved her garden. I did, too, come to think of it. I spent many an hour with her in our backyard.”
    The child didn’t notice the melancholy that had snuck up on Katey with those memories. God, she missed her mother. It was such a stupid accident that had taken her life last winter, a mere slip on a bit of ice.
    Judith sighed next to her. “That’s another thing we don’t have, vegetable gardens. My uncle Jason has lots of buildings at Haverston, his estate in the country, just for growing things indoors year-round. The gardens in our square in the city, though, just have flowers. Cook buys all our food from the market.”
    It was odd how one child might look at chores with envy, another might see them as a bother, and yet another could see them as merely a break from monotony.
    “So you lied to your mother?” the child asked baldly.
    Katey blushed, hearing it put that way. “I had to tell her about the thief. He was very real. I just didn’t want her to know that I stood there and did nothing to try to stop him. But it caused such a to-do in the village that the men were out hunting for that thief for days. It gave them something to talk about for nearly half the year. You should have seen how it put the ‘life’ back into them, if you know what I mean. So although my mother gave me a terrible scolding for risking my life and warned me never to do anything so foolish again, I learned something else from that incident. I learned how to remove the boredom from all our lives, if only briefly.”
    “So you often embellished events you witnessed?” Judith asked.
    “Yes, she got in the habit of creating excitement out of thin air,” Grace said as she sat up across from them with a yawn.
    “Not often,” Katey told her maid.
    “Often enough to make me the heroine of the village,” Grace grumbled.
    “You’ve enjoyed being the heroine. Why, the entire village cried when you left. They merely waved good-bye to me.”
    Grace chuckled. “Very well, so I did enjoy that part of it.”
    “I can’t imagine what it must have been like, not having something exciting going on all the time,” Judith remarked. “With my family, there is always something interesting happening. Why, my uncle James and aunt George went off just last month to chase pirates. And at the end of summer my cousin Jeremy married a thief who turned out to be the missing daughter of a baroness.”
    Katey blinked. Even Grace looked doubtful, then rolled her eyes at Katey as if to say, The chit has picked up your bad habits this quickly ? And it did sound as if the child was doing some embellishing of her own.
    Katey was about to laugh, but then Judith added, “Did you come here to meet your English relatives?”
    Katey went still. That was one subject she didn’t want to discuss. She’d had every intention of doing so on the voyage over and had been looking forward to it. And after they arrived in England, she’d gone straight to Havers Town, which, according to her mother, was the closest town to the Millard family estate in Gloucestershire. But once there, she’d abruptly changed her mind.
    “She did,” Grace answered the girl. “She just didn’t have the guts to knock on their door and took us off to Scotland instead.”
    “That’s not why we came