The Viscount's Revenge (The Royal Ambition Series Book 4) by M. C. Beaton Read Free Book Online Page A

he might at least have made some push to tell her that she had been successful at the ball. She had sat out only three dances. But Richard would probably take credit for that as well as say he had told all his friends to dance with her.
     
    “I must go to bed,” she said, rising wearily to her feet.
     
    “I’ll sit here for a bit,” said Richard. “I have to make plans. I have to decide the best place to waylay the coach.”
     
    “As to that,” said Amanda thoughtfully, “I thought the best place would be on Fern Hill. It is very steep and has trees on either side. The coach will be going very slowly, so there is no danger of them charging past, and we will be screened by the trees until they arrive.”
     
    There was a little silence and then Richard said, “Just what I had decided on myself.”
     
    “No, you didn’t,” said Amanda in great irritation. “You didn’t think of it at all. You only say that so that you can take the credit. You’re always doing things like that.”
     
    And then, to the dismay of both, she burst into tears and ran from the room and upstairs to bed.
     
    Amanda flung herself on the bed and sobbed her heart out. She had always looked up to Richard, followed him in all his boyish, and then manly, pursuits. Richard always told her what to do. It was Richard who had to teach her to read and write, Richard who had taught her how to shoot and how to fish. But the hard fact that her brother saw her neither as a woman nor as an intelligent girl but merely as some sort of small boy, tagging at his coattails, cut her deeply. Because they were twins and loved one another, Amanda had assumed they thought alike and were of the same character.
     
    But for the first time Richard appeared in her eyes as a rather… yes,
callow
young man.
     
    Were all men so? Were they young and clumsy like Richard or old and sneering and bitter like Lord Hawksborough? And he
was
old, thought Amanda, scrubbing her eyes dry with a corner of the sheet. He must be thirty if he was a day. And to think at one point she had thought him attractive!
     
    Now all she wanted to see was the look of fear on his lordship face as he looked down the barrels of the Colbys’ pistols.
     
    Her eyes began to close. There was Miss Devine to get even with, of course. But when she and Richard had pawned the stolen jewels and gambled successfully on the stock exchange with the proceeds and had thousands and thousands of pounds, then they could deal with Miss Devine.
     
    Amanda walked off into a dream where she entered a London ballroom wearing a gown made wholly from diamonds, on the arm of a handsome man with
fair
hair and
blue
eyes.
     
    But, in reality, still wearing her green ball gown and with her coronet of ivy crushed into the pillow, Miss Amanda Colby fell fast asleep.
     

3
     
    The following day was warmer as the wind moved around to the southwest. Great fleecy clouds scudded across a hazy blue sky. The whole countryside seemed in motion. Leaves of gold and brown and red and amber flew before the wind, dancing across the burnt stubble as if dancing on tiptoe, swirling in clouds, up and up, as if trying to reach the heavens, and then swooping down again to continue their headlong dance across the fields.
     
    Amanda slept late and awoke to the sound of a shutter banging somewhere downstairs. She was amazed to find she had slept in her clothes, and stripped off and washed herself from head to foot, standing in a flowered china basin and pouring cold water from two brassbound cans over her body.
     
    She scrubbed herself down with a huckaback towel until she glowed, and then quickly donned her faded, yellowing underwear and an old gray wool round gown. She pulled a chintz mobcap over her hair and ran downstairs. The house appeared to be empty. Richard would have gone into Bellingham to spy out the land, but there was not even a sense of her aunt’s presence. She ran up again and pushed open her aunt’s bedroom door. The