The Gilded Web by Mary Balogh Read Free Book Online Page A

Peterleigh.”
    He closed the remaining distance between them and held out a hand. “I will wish you good day, then, ma’am,” he said, “and not distress you with my continued presence.”
    He thought for a moment that she would reject his offer of friendship. She looked at his hand before extending hers and placing it in his grasp. He looked up at her as he raised her hand to his lips. She looked quite steadily back, though her color heightened.
    â€œGood day, my lord,” she said. Her voice was low and quite calm.

    A LEXANDRA STOOD WHERE SHE WAS for several moments after Lord Amberley had left. Then she drew a deep breath and crossed the room to the window.
    What a dreadful ordeal! And how ridiculously unnecessary. What could have made the earl feel that he must come and offer her marriage just because his brother had made such a ghastly mistake? And why had Papa allowed him to speak to her when she had been unofficially betrothed to the Duke of Peterleigh all her life? Men had strange notions of honor.
    She did not think she would have recognized the Earl of Amberley if she had passed him in the street. Indeed, she had scarce looked into his face earlier that morning, and anyway he had been wearing a dressing gown on that occasion. She had gained no impression of his looks or his coloring or his height—or even his age.
    It had been a shock to find when she turned to him after Papa had presented him to her that he was a fashionable and distinguished-looking gentleman. And a young one too. He could not be nearly as old as his grace, and probably not much older than James. He had dark thick hair—though not as dark as hers—and blue eyes. They were kindly eyes that looked at one very directly and appeared to smile. He had a good-humored mouth. He was not particularly tall, though she had had to look up to him when he had stepped close to her. But he was powerfully built. She guessed that he was not quite the effete gentleman of James’s accusation.
    She had found his appearance quite disconcerting. Her memories of that morning would be humiliating enough even if the Earl of Amberley had turned out to be a plain, aging man. She had felt quite mortified to know that this young and elegant gentleman had seen her lying on a bed, her hair loose about her, her skirt twisted up under her and exposing almost all of her legs. She would dearly have liked to turn and run to her bedchamber so that she could hide her face in the covers of her bed. She had stood still instead and forced herself to both look at him and listen to him. She had even spoken. She had had to call on all the training of years for the discipline necessary to contain her discomfort.
    She had found the whole interview quite thoroughly embarrassing. She had had little to do with gentlemen since her arrival in London the month before, and nothing whatsoever to do with them before that. She had lived an appallingly sheltered life at home. For years she had longed for her marriage and a home of her own and London, longed for freedom, though she had always known that in marrying the Duke of Peterleigh she would merely be changing hands from one severe taskmaster to another. But oh, being a wife would surely offer her more by way of independence and responsibility and self-respect than being a daughter. And a wife in London!
    Yet she had found London bewildering and disappointing. She found that she was not at all equipped to mix socially with her social equals. While one part of her longed and longed to be gay, to abandon herself to the pleasures of the Season, the other part of her shied away from letting go of the discipline and the dignity of a lifetime. And this same part of herself led her frequently to long for escape, as it had the night before at the Easton ball.
    And so she knew little about how to talk to and how to deal with a gentleman. She really had not taken at all well with the
ton.
She had not even