Stealing the Bride by Elizabeth Boyle Read Free Book Online Page A

end of the Season and had spent the entire spring courting every eligible daughter and young lady in London in search of his baroness. Thus far, he’d been refused thirty-two times. By every miss, lady, and even a few widows. It had taken him to mid-June to find his way to the front door of Lamden House.
    Diana knew all this because Mrs. Foston, her companion for the last thirteen years, had a remarkable skill at uncovering every bit of gossip pattering its way through the London drawing rooms. According to the widowed lady, even Miss Tilden had refused him. And that lady had always been London’s premier old maid, an eccentric of the first order.
    Why, she wore breeches and had named her six pugs after the Royal Dukes!
    So if Lord Nettlestone had called on Miss Tilden before he’d considered calling on Diana, that could mean only one thing.
    Diana had become a spinster. The last spinster.
    Oh, the very notion was too terrible even to consider.
    Though not as terrible as being the next Lady Nettlesome, a proposition her father had suddenly taken great interest in.
    It was as if he had finally looked up from his newspapers and endless correspondence and decided to take an immediate course of action to deal with the problem of her unmarried state. And so he had amended his promise of years earlier that she could pick her own bridegroom.
    Now she could choose between Nettlestone and Penham.
    Choose between Needles and Pins? She’d rather start collecting pugs with royal names.
    Diana shuddered and glanced across at the seat where the viscount lounged, a deck of cards in his hands. He was playing a game of chance with only himself—and losing.
    So much for knights in shining armor and her girlhood dreams of valor.
    But sometimes, just sometimes, things could work out the way they should, she told herself, as Lord Cordell’s hired carriage rolled past the last of London’s gray scenery and out into the countryside. The green hills and valleys brought her a measure of comfort—for she knew only too well that back at Lamden House, her disappearance would be causing no end of havoc.
    I’m so sorry, Papa. But this is the only way, she thought, clinging to her conviction that her elopement with Lord Cordell was the right decision. It was the only one she could make to secure the future she wanted so desperately.
    And the one she would do anything to avoid.
     
    Finding Diana wasn’t as easy as Temple had boasted. He and Elton followed the lovebirds’ trail along the Manchester road as far as Broughton, but then it was as if they had disappeared.
    “I wonder if…” Elton muttered as yet another innkeeper swore not to have seen them.
    “Wonder what?” Temple asked, willing to try anything to find the errant bride and her worthless groom. Seated beside his driver atop the Duke of Setchfield’s second-best berline—one liberated from the Setchfield liveries during the dead of night—Temple scanned the empty countryside hoping to catch a glimpse of his quarry. The duke would be livid that Temple had taken such a liberty without his express permission, but they’d needed a vehicle large enough to carry Diana and Mrs. Foston back to town.
    As for Cordell, Temple intended to let him rot in the nearest gaol.
    “Well, if I were heading north,” Elton was saying, “and weren’t looking to be caught, I might take a less conspicuous route.”
    “Such as?” Temple prodded, glad for the day he’d hired Elton.
    Flipping the ribbons and steering the horses out of the inn’s yard and onto the road, Elton said, “I wouldn’t be taking the Manchester road, like those two young fools from White’s were headed.”
    “Wouldn’t that be the best route?” Temple asked. “More posting houses and better road, I’d think.”
    “The Manchester road is the obvious choice,” Elton said, with a smug smile and his one eye glittering. “With the right driver and fresh changes of horses, you could make Gretna Green in about two and