Free Attempting Elizabeth by Jessica Grey Page A

that?”
    Mrs. Younge stood up quickly from her chair. “You little viper,” she spat. “I thought you were just a spoiled, stupid girl but you are —”
    “Yeah, yeah, appearances can be deceiving.” I rolled my eyes with deliberate insolence. “Take you, for example. And now this is going to be all awkward—you storming around, alerting Wickham that the plan has gone horribly awry, yadda yadda yadda . I’m not spending the rest of the day hiding in my room again, so save us all the trouble and stay out of my way. Pack your bags and get out of town and all that, but I don’t want to see you, okay?”
    “You do not have the authority to fire me.”
    “Did I forget to mention that my brother is already on his way here? Oh, oops! Silly of me. Yeah, my brother is on his way here to throw you out on your ass, so might as well beat him to the punch. Have a nice life. Tell Wickham to go screw himself. I hear the Militia is hiring, he might want to get an actual job as the heiress stealing seems to not be working out.”
    I thought for a minute she was going to leap across the room and throttle me. Instead, she turned with a strangled scream of frustration and fled the sitting room.
    I crossed my arms behind my head. It was really quite satisfying to verbally abuse her like that. I supposed that made me a horrible person, I’m sure she had circumstances in her life that I knew nothing about that had turned her into the person she was—every character has a backstory—but I didn’t really care. She was about to throw a fifteen-year-old girl under the bus so she and her lover could benefit from said fifteen-year-old’s money. And she was going to use her influence as a woman in authority over Georgiana to convince her to run away from her family and marry this guy. It basically amounted to child sex-trafficking in my mind. And I was not okay with child sex-trafficking. Especially when I was the child involved.
    After a moment of basking in my bad-ass glory, I decided to investigate the rest of the bottom floor of the townhouse. I’d really only seen the sitting room, the short distance between that room and the front door, and the stairs that led up to the second floor where the bedrooms. I wandered from room to room taking in the gracious furnishings. I’m sure it was nothing compared to Pemberley, or even the townhouse Darcy kept in London, but to me it was pretty awe inspiring. Both of my parents worked and were relatively well off, but the kind of money this house spoke of was beyond my comprehension. And it wasn’t ostentatious at all, nothing screamed “Hey look at me; I cost lots of money!” the way some houses did back home. The house and furnishings and fabrics just sort of whispered of the wealth that provided them. Obviously the Darcys had taste. Classy, moneyed taste.
    Eventually I ran out of rooms to wander through. I hadn’t heard much from Mrs. Younge, other than some crashing and banging upstairs and the occasional concerned looking maid running up and down the stairs. One could only hope it meant she was packing her stuff and getting the heck out of Dodge. I felt bad for the maids though. There seemed to be three of them, and they were all very young. Then there was the butler, Hodges, who I’d met before our little walk the day before.
    I meandered back to the sitting room. Georgiana’s sewing sampler was sitting on the settee where I’d dropped it during my verbal sparring match with Younge. None of the stitches that I’d set “yesterday” were placed. While I’d been sitting there for that half hour mindlessly letting Georgiana’s hands work away on the sampler an entire row of small roses to the left of the verse had been filled in. Now, the pale pink thread that I’d used was threaded through the needle, but only two stitches had been set in that color.
    I sighed. I didn’t want to have to think through what was actually happening. My brain hurt.
    It was time I face it. There was