Rapture Becomes Her by Shirlee Busbee Read Free Book Online Page A

herself as erect as a woman half her age and even now a look from her hazel eyes had been known to drop grown men to their knees. Emily had always loved her outspoken, gruff great-aunt, but never more than when Cornelia fixed Jeffery with that eagle-eyed stare and caused him to pale and stammer and retreat at a gallop.
    “I did have some help from Flora,” Emily admitted, smiling. Cocking her head to one side, she asked, “Did you know about the hidden staircase in the big wardrobe in the best room at The Crown?”
    Seating herself in a yellow chintz wing-backed chair near the fire, Cornelia cackled with glee. “Lord, yes! I had to use it once myself.”
    Staring at Cornelia, astonished, Anne blurted, “Never say that you ran a smuggler ring, like Emily?”
    The old squire’s marriage to a young woman only a few years older than his daughter had been the talk of the neighborhood when he had married a twenty-year-old, Anne Farnham, nearly a decade ago. Emily had been aghast at the marriage—Anne was only two years her senior and until the old squire had presented his bride to her, she had never laid eyes on her or guessed he was contemplating marriage. Cornelia had been openly scornful of the new young wife, grumbling in her carrying voice, “Nothing like an old fool, blinded by a lovely face.”
    It had been peculiar welcoming such a young bride, but it would have taken a harder heart than Emily or Cornelia possessed not to warm to the little brown-eyed sprite the old squire had married. Full of laughter and sunshine, a smile always on her lips, Anne had danced into their lives and enchanted them all. Emily decided years ago that it was those huge, heavily lashed brown eyes of Anne’s that melted the coldest heart. Certainly none of them, she admitted fondly, had been able to resist Anne when she fixed those speaking eyes on one and oh, so, meekly suggested some modification to a routine or décor that hadn’t been altered in forty years.
    But even if Anne hadn’t been a darling, Emily and Cornelia would have welcomed Anne into their hearts for one simple reason: Anne had been deeply in love with her much-older husband. Even if she had been a harpy, rather than the delight she was, Emily and Cornelia would have forgiven her much for being a doting wife to her not-always-considerate husband.
    Looking at these two women who meant so much to her, Emily knew that the risks she had taken tonight had been worth it. And she would continue, she thought with a clenching of her jaw, to take those same risks until they were all safe and out from under Jeffery’s thumb.
    “Smuggling?” Cornelia said in reply to Anne’s question. “Good gad, no!” A sly smile curved her lips and her hazel eyes gleaming, she murmured, “My husband had discovered I was meeting Lord Joslyn there, and Flora’s great-grandmother came running up the stairs to warn me.”
    Since it was well known that Cornelia’s marriage to her husband had been an arranged match and that they both loathed each other, neither Emily nor Anne was particularly shocked by her words. It was precisely the sort of explanation they expected from her.
    But the identity of Cornelia’s long-ago lover startled a gasp from Emily. “Lord Joslyn?” she exclaimed.
    “Hmm, yes, the sixth viscount . . .” She tapped her lip and looked thoughtful. “Or was it the seventh?” She shrugged. “Probably both of them—the Joslyns are very handsome men.”
    At Anne’s expression, Cornelia snorted. “Oh, get that die away look off your face. It was a long time ago.”
    “Um, I think I met the eighth viscount tonight. There was a man . . . an American. Who else could it be?”
    The object of two pairs of intent eyes, Emily flushed and muttered, “Jeb found him drowning in the Channel and had no choice but to rescue him.” Briefly, she related the sequence of events.
    “Oh, my! How exciting!” exclaimed Anne, picking up a silver-backed brush from the dressing table nearby.