Vixen by Jane Feather Read Free Book Online Page B

was a dead end if he was to honor Elizabeth’s unspoken wishes. “I suppose I could employ a governess—no don’t interrupt again,” he said sharply as Chloe’s now-familiar expostulation began. “The lass could be established somewhere in the charge of a respectable female.”
    “And do what?” Chloe demanded.
    It was not an unreasonable question, he was obliged to admit. However …
    “I don’t see any other solution. Your education isn’t yet complete—”
    “It’s perfectly complete,” she interrupted, forgetting the earlier stricture. “I can do everything any schoolroom miss can do, and a great deal else besides.”
    “Like what?”
    “I can mend a bird’s broken wing, and deliver a lamb. I know how to treat a sprained fetlock and foot rot—”
    “I don’t doubt it,” he interrupted in his turn. “But it doesn’t alter the facts.”
    “Why can’t I stay here?” She asked the simple question almost without emphasis.
    “And do what?” Hugo gave her her own again. “Lancashire is a long way from a come-out in London.”
    “Maybe not,” she said quietly.
    Now, what the hell did that mean? Hugo gave up. There was clearly nothing to be done tonight. “It seems there’s little choice for the moment. You’ll have to stay here tonight.”
    “I told you so,” Chloe said to Samuel with a sweet smile, gathering up the dirty plates.
    “Reckon you did,” Samuel said.

Chapter 4

    T HE DOG’S DESOLATE howling was a perfect background to crowding memories. Hugo sat at the pianoforte in the library, a single tallow candle throwing a pool of yellow light over the keyboard as his hands strived to pick out a melody from the past. It was a piece he’d composed for Elizabeth, but part of the refrain was missing from his memory.
    Impatiently, he swung away from the instrument, picking up his glass. He didn’t think he’d ever played it for her anyway. He drained the contents of the glass and refilled it.
    His love for Stephen’s wife had been a secret he’d kept from everyone but Elizabeth … a secret that the infatuated stripling both nurtured and fed upon during the two years he’d known her. They had never consummated their love. It would have been unthinkable for Elizabeth to have done so, and, despite the gnawing need he had suffered, he had enjoyed the purity of his feelings for her. It was such a contrast to the sewage in which he’d been wallowing.
    He remembered the first time he’d met her as if it were yesterday. She had said almost nothing the entire weekend, but he’d been haunted by her beauty, by the shadows in her blue eyes, by the sense of her fragility—and the longing to be of service to her, to rescue her from whatever was causing her such unhappiness, had become an obsession.
    It was just after his induction into the Congregation of Eden, as they called themselves, and a meeting was beingheld at Gresham Hall in Shipton. The society had been founded by Stephen and two of his cronies, and through his son, Jasper, its membership had quickly spread to the younger segment of London’s aristocracy, bored with the endless round of pointless pleasures, seeking experiences that would take them beyond the boundaries of the commonplace world.
    Hugo had just lost his father when he fell under the spell of the Greshams. Only seven miles separated Denholm and Shipton, and he’d known them slightly all his life. A motherless only child, lonely and directionless, he had eagerly accepted Jasper’s overtures after his father’s death, and came to see him almost as an older brother, and Stephen … not as a father, certainly, but the attention of such a worldly sophisticate, such a prominent member of Society, had flattered his youth and inexperience and compensated in some fashion for the loss of his father.
    Under Stephen Gresham’s leadership, nothing was forbidden the members of the Congregation; there were no risks that couldn’t be taken; there were substances that altered the