The Captain's Christmas Bride by Annie Burrows Read Free Book Online

though she might find inspiration amongst the stiff leather spines.
    Yes, what excuse could she possibly come up with to explain this evening’s fantastic sequence of events? Without, that is, confessing the whole truth, which would land her friends in the very trouble she’d already declared she wanted to spare them.
    Or laying the entire blame upon his shoulders, which it looked as though she was equally reluctant to do. Which came as quite a surprise. He would have thought she’d have been only too willing to throw him to the lions. Instead, she’d drawn the earl’s fire down on herself. Although from the look on her face now, she hadn’t really thought it through. She’d acted on impulse. And backed herself into a corner.
    Alec supposed he had to give her credit for speaking up in his defence. He hadn’t expected her to demonstrate the slightest shred of honour over this affair, not given the way it had come about.
    ‘Don’t say another word,’ he advised her. He’d come in here seething with resentment at the way she’d trapped him. But she’d drawn the line at letting her father think he was a fortune hunter as well as a despoiler of innocence. It would cost him nothing to return the favour.
    Besides, he could see she was floundering in a welter of equally unpalatable choices. Whatever lie she might choose to tell her father next was only likely to plunge them both into even deeper water. And he was used to thinking on his feet. Alec knew, only too well, that no matter how meticulously you planned an assault, something always cropped up that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen. The success or failure of many a mission had depended on his ability to adapt to such new challenges.
    ‘My lord,’ he said, turning to her father, ‘I am sure your daughter did not know what she was doing. She is so naïve—’
    ‘No, I won’t have you taking the blame, and everyone saying you are a fortune hunter when it is no such thing,’ she cut in, hotly. ‘I may not have planned for things to go so far, but—’ She broke off, blushing. ‘Papa—you...you saw how he was with all the ladies. So curt. So dismissive. How he refused to take any notice of me at all.’
    The old earl’s wintry gaze turned on her. He regarded her coldly for some moments. ‘I have spoiled you,’ he said. ‘You saw a man who wouldn’t pay court to you, and decided you must have him, by hook or by crook.’
    It hadn’t been like that. It hadn’t been the least like that. She had detested him.
    So why was she implying that it was? Why was she willing to shoulder the blame herself? She could easily have painted him as the very sort of opportunistic fortune hunter her father had taken him for. Instead, she was clearing his name.
    And he couldn’t even contradict her story, not without exposing what she’d really been up to out there... Ah! So that was it. A matter of saving face. She’d rather her father think
he
was the man she’d wanted to seduce all along, than for him to know how very far her true plans had gone awry.
    He gave a sort of mental shrug. If that was the way she wanted to play it—fine.
    ‘Well,’ said the earl with weary resignation. ‘At least this one is an improvement on the last fellow you fancied yourself in love with. At least nobody will blink at the connection. Only the manner by which it came about.’
    ‘Yes, Papa. He is the Earl of Auchentay, as well as being a naval captain, is he not? And you always did say I should marry within my own class.’
    ‘The title is hollow, sir,’ he felt duty bound to point out. ‘My lands are mortgaged—’
    ‘But still in your possession?’
    ‘Aye, but not likely to bring in any revenue, beyond what I get for renting the house and land. Which isn’t very good land, either.’
    ‘You won’t be needing the rent so very much now you are marrying into my family. Julia’s dowry will enable you to buy half-a-dozen Scottish properties, I dare say, if you had a