The Scarred Earl by Elizabeth Beacon Read Free Book Online Page A

jealousy stood in for the love, generosity and solidarity that seemed to bind the Seaborne clan together. Belle would inherit everything he had to leave. And when he found he’d become Lord Calvercombe, it seemed thefinal joke of fate to come home and find his cousin gone and no clue to her whereabouts. So any hope he still had for the future was wiped out.
    He didn’t dare let himself think her truly lost—the one hope of redemption for his whole rotten clan. So he had to find her, rather than succumb to the ridiculous hope that he might build a life on shaky foundations with some spoilt society lady and see it crash round his ears when she laughed in his marred face.
    ‘Wherever have you been, Per?’ Miss Helen Seaborne demanded a little too loudly as Persephone did her best to slip into the dwindling crowd as if she’d never been away.
    Silently cursing little sisters and their over-eager tongues, Persephone shrugged with would-be carelessness. ‘I went for a walk in the gardens to clear my head, sister dear. Since it’s been a long and exciting day, I needed a little peace to gather my senses. You dare to call me Per again and I’ll retaliate in kind, Hel,’ she added in a fierce aside meant for her sister’s ears only.
    ‘Neither of you will do any such thing,’ Lady Henry informed her daughters with alook neither of them quite managed to meet. ‘This is still Jack and Jessica’s special day and I won’t have you two arguing like fishwives just because they can’t hear you at the moment.’
    ‘They can’t hear anyone but each other when they’re together nowadays,’ Penelope Seaborne put in with obvious disgust at such mutually obsessed lovers.
    ‘Which is exactly how it should be when two people love each other as deeply as those two clearly do,’ her mother said with an understanding smile at her youngest daughter’s moue of distaste. ‘One day you will understand, my love,’ she said and laughed when Penelope gave a disgusted shudder and fervently declared,
    ‘Never!’
    ‘Well, I think they’re very lucky and I wish I might love any man half as much as Jess does our cousin, even if I can’t quite understand why anyone should,’ fifteen-year-old Helen declared, halfway between the romance of being almost grown up and the brutal frankness of nine-year-old Penelope.
    ‘What, love a man, or love Jack specifically?’ Persephone asked, reluctantly intrigued by the workings of her little sisters’minds and the changes maturity was threatening before she felt prepared for any of them to move on.
    ‘Jack, of course. He’s all very well and I know he’s a Duke and fabulously rich and not particularly ugly, but he’s only Jack when all’s said and done.’
    ‘True,’ Persephone agreed seriously enough, ‘but Jessica has known him for ever and still thinks he put the stars in the sky, so I suppose love must be blind.’
    ‘Wait until you’re in love, my dearest, then you can tell me how it feels to trust a man to do so for you,’ their mother advised, too seriously for Persephone.
    A moment later she wondered why his lordship the Earl of Calvercombe had chosen to emerge from the spring garden at the worst moment possible and felt her mother’s eyes on her when she refused to meet his gaze or Lady Henry Seaborne’s.
    ‘I doubt I shall ever love a man so completely,’ Persephone argued as she squirmed at the very notion of ever loving such an aloof and cynical one.
    ‘I don’t think a woman can sensibly consider herself immune to such folly until she’s cold in her grave, my love,’ Lady Henry objectedmildly enough, but her eyes dwelt thoughtfully on Lord Calvercombe while she did so.
    The shock of seeing her wise, sensible and almost cynical best friend tumble fathoms deep under Jack’s rakish spell had been bad enough, Persephone decided, but he’d made bad worse by stumbling so totally into love with Jess it sometimes seemed as if he could scarcely string two sensible words