Valentine by Jane Feather Read Free Book Online Page A

events. At least he knew the price of his birthright now. It was certainly high, but he had a feeling it might have its compensations … once he’d established supremacy.
    “Why must we make a friend of him!” Theo exploded. “Isn’t it bad enough that we have to be neighbors without inviting him for dinner?”
    “I will not be deficient in courtesy,” Elinor said icily. “And neither will you. I suggest you mend your manners, Theo.” She swept from the room, leaving her daughters in uncomfortable silence.
    “You really have vexed her,” Clarissa said after a minute. “I haven’t heard her use that tone in ages.”
    Theo pressed her palms to her flushed cheeks. She was in a turmoil, her chaotic thoughts chasing each other in her head. “I don’t understand
how
she could have considered his proposal, Clarry. It … it’s … oh, I don’t know what it is.”
    “You’re not being practical,” Emily said. “Such arrangements are made all the time. It’s the solution to so much—”
    “But he’s detestable!” Theo broke in. “And he’s a Gilbraith.”
    “Ancient history,” Emily said calmly. “It’s time to forget that.”
    “Emily, I’m getting the impression you want me to marry him!” Theo stared incredulously at her eldest sister.
    “Not if you don’t want to, love,” Emily said. “And if you find him detestable, then there’s nothing more to be said. But you’re not a romantic goose, like Clarry, who’s looking for a parfit gentil knight on a white charger—”
    “Oh, that’s so unfair, Emily,” Clarissa declared. “I’ve no intention of marrying,
ever.”
    “Wait till your knight rides up,” Theo teased, forgetting her own troubles for a minute in this familiar discussion.
    But Clarissa was frowning. “I wonder why the earl chose you, Theo. Surely it should have been me, as the elder.”
    “I expect Mama steered him away,” Emily said. “She’d know he wouldn’t suit you.”
    Emily was more in her mother’s confidence than the others and knew how Elinor regarded Clarissa’s romantic leanings and how she worried over her sometimes fragile health. The Earl of Stoneridge didn’t strike Emily as the embodiment of a romantic hero, or particularly gentle either.
    “Well, I can’t imagine why she thought he might suit
me,”
Theo said, helping herself from the sherry decanter on the sideboard. “Ratafia, Emily … Clarry?” Her sisters found sherry too powerful a brew, but, then, their tastes hadn’t been formed by the old earl, who’d educated his favorite granddaughter in all such matters with meticulous care.
    She poured the sticky almond cordial for them and sipped her own sherry, frowning. “I suppose, since she knew he wouldn’t suit Clarry, and for some reason she thought the idea in general to be worth pursuing, I was the only option. Unless he’d be prepared to wait for Rosie.”
    The thought of their grubby baby sister peering myopically at the immaculate earl as she instructed him in the anatomy of her dissected worms sent the three sisters into peals of laughter.
    “Heavens!” Emily gasped, choking over her ratafia. “Look at the time. We have to change for dinner.”
    “We aren’t supposed to dress formally, are we?” Clarissa went to the door. “Mama didn’t say anything.”
    “No, and I for one shall wear the simplest gown I possess,” Theo declared. “And I hope his lordship turns up in satin knee britches and looks like the overweening coxcomb that he is.”
    “I don’t think he’s a coxcomb,” Emily said seriously, as they went up the stairs.
    Theo said nothing. She wasn’t yet ready to confide in her sisters what had happened in her bedroom. If that kiss hadn’t been the act of a coxcomb, she couldn’t imagine what would qualify. The fact that she’d enjoyed it was something she preferred to forget.
    Sylvester, even if he’d been inclined to appear at the manor in full evening regalia, couldn’t have done so, since he’d