Stealing the Bride by Elizabeth Boyle Read Free Book Online

there?”
    “There is nothing of the sort,” Pymm ruffled, trying to shake loose Colin’s iron grasp. “You are getting as suspicious as that wife of yours.”
    At this, Colin smiled. “If Georgie were here, she’d have your head for not telling Temple the truth.” Colin released him.
    Pymm staggered free, paling at the notion of Georgie’s wrath, but only momentarily. He brushed Colin’s warning aside by smoothing his rumpled coat with all the air of a wounded dandy. “You’ve been at sea too long, Danvers. You’re seeing mermaids where there are none.”
    “No, sir, I have made enough runs of late between England and France to know there are rumors aplenty afloat.”
    “And what would they have to do with Lamden’s foolish chit of a daughter?” When Colin had no response, Pymm harrumphed, and caught up his hat and walking stick. “You know better than to listen to idle gossip and fish tales. Good day, my lord.”
    Colin stood for a few moments and tried to make the connections between the reports he’d heard of late and Lady Diana.
    But it was as Pymm said, all an unlikely tangle. Not that Colin was ready to give up. He served his country with the same determination as Pymm and Temple, and what he suspected could mean tyranny and more war for all of them.
    As he started for the door, one of the young bucks called out, “Eh, Danvers. Where is your cousin off to in a pig’s whisker?” The man glanced to his friends and grinned. “He isn’t considering joining Penham and Nettlesome, is he? Perhaps thinking of stealing the bride for himself?”
    This question was followed by a round of hearty laughter, as if there had never been such a joke.
    “Temple? Leg-shackled to Lamden’s daughter?” Lord Oxham said. “Never.”
    Heads nodded sagely from Temple’s brethren of confirmed bachelors and rakes.
    Colin paused only for a second before he asked, “Would you care to wager on that?”

Chapter 2
    T he fate of Lady Diana Fordham was hardly as dire as her father would have had the patrons of White’s believe. She hadn’t been kidnapped or taken against her will, or carted away in the dead of night.
    For earlier that same day, at precisely half past noon, she and her companion, Mrs. Foston, met Viscount Cordell in front of Madame Renard’s millinery shop and got into his hired coach to begin their journey north.
    She knew what she was doing was going to once again cast her name into the scandal pot, but she had no other choice.
    If anything, her earlier brushes with dishonor, when she’d thrown over Lord Danvers at the time of his court-martial, the Almack’s debacle, and the foolishness over her early morning appearances in the park, would be nothing to the tempest she was currently embarking upon.
    She wouldn’t have even been in this muddle if it hadn’t been for…
    Shaking her head, she let that thought fall away. Ten long years of waiting. Well, she was done with waiting for the suitor who never arrived.
    Oh, there had been men who’d called, men seeking her fortune, but she’d sent them packing, their ears ringing with the peal she’d rung over their greedy heads.
    Then after all these years of waiting and hoping for the one man she’d marry, something else had happened. Diana found herself cast amongst those poor oddities who sit against the walls at dances. Hapless ladies who have their hostess desperately searching for an escort to guide them to the supper table.
    She didn’t even want to say the word.
    Yet on the day that Lord Nettlestone came to call, she saw only too clearly in the drawing room mirror what the rest of London already knew: she’d become a spinster.
    At nine-and-twenty, she could hardly be counted as one of the dewy-eyed, properly innocent debutantes who flooded the city each spring.
    Instead, she was just another curiosity to be pitied—and most definitely not emulated.
    If that wasn’t bad enough, it was well known that Nettlestone had vowed to marry before the