Ravished by the Rake by Louise Allen Read Free Book Online Page A

sailing in a moment—aren’t you coming on deck?’ Averil called from the next compartment, just the other side of one canvas wall.
    Courage, Dita,
she thought, clenching her hands into tight fists.
You can’t stay here for three months.
She had grown up knowing that she was plain and so she had learned to create an aura of style and charm that deceived most people into not noticing. She was rebellious and contrary and she had taught herself to control that, so when things went wrong it was only she who was hurt. Or so she thought until her hideous mistake with Stephen Doyle meant the whole family had had to deal with the resulting gossip. And in India she had coped with the talk by the simple method of pretending that she did not care.
    But I do,
she thought.
I do care. And I care what Alistair thinks of me and I am a fool to do so.
The young man she had adored had grown up to be a rake and the heir to a marquisate and she could guess what he thought about the girl next door who had a smirched reputation and a sharp tongue.
Hypocrisy.
Had the tender intensity with which he had made love to her eight years ago been simply the wiles of a youth who was going to grow up into a rake? It must have been, for he showed no signs of remembering; surely if he had cared in the slightest, he would recall calling her his darling Dita, his sweet, his dear girl …
    ‘I’m coming!’ she called to Averil, fixing a smile on her face because she knew it would show in her voice. ‘Just let me get my bonnet on.’ She peered into the mirror that folded up from the dressing stand and pinched the colour into her cheeks, checked that the candle-soot on her lashes had not smudged, tied on her most becoming sunbonnet with the bow at a coquettish angle under her chin and unfastened the canvas flap. ‘Here I am.’
    Averil linked arms with the easy friendliness that always charmed Dita. Miss Heydon was shy with strangers, but once she decided she was your friend the reserve melted. ‘The start of our adventure! Is this not exciting?’
    ‘You won’t say that after four weeks when everything smells like a farmyard and the weather is rough and we haven’t had fresh supplies for weeks and you want to scream if you ever see the same faces again,’ Dita warned as they emerged on to the deck.
    ‘I was forgetting you had done this before. I cannot remember coming to India, I was so young.’ Averil unfurled her parasol and put one hand on the rail. ‘My last look at Calcutta.’
    ‘Don’t you mind leaving?’ Dita asked.
    ‘Yes. But it is my duty, I know that. I am making an excellent marriage and the connection will do Papa and my brothers so much good. It would be different if Mama was still alive—far harder.’
    In effect,
Dita thought,
you are being sold off to an impoverished aristocratic family in return for influence when your family returns to England.
‘Lord Bradon is a most amiable gentleman,’ she said. It was how she had described him before, when Averil had been excited to learn that Dita knew her betrothed, but she could think of nothing more positive to say about him.
Cold, conventional, very conscious of his station in life
—nothing there to please her friend. And his father, the Earl of Kingsbury, was a cynical and hardened gamester whose expensive habits were the reason for this match.
    She only hoped that Sir Jeremiah Heydon had tiedup his daughter’s dowry tightly, but she guessed such a wily and wealthy nabob would be alert on every suit.
    ‘You’ll have three months to enjoy yourself as a single lady, at any rate,’ she said. ‘There are several gentlemen who will want to flirt.’
    ‘I couldn’t!’ Averil glanced along the deck to where the bachelors were lining the rail. ‘I have no idea how to, in any case. I’m far too shy, even with pleasant young men like the Chatterton brothers, and as for the more … er …’ She was looking directly at Alistair Lyndon.
    As if he had felt the scrutiny Alister