Free Lady of Desire by Gaelen Foley Page A

bag as she carried it back over to his secretaire. There was probably something in it that would tell him her name.
    “All I did was make an innocent little wager on a horse race.” She jerked the mouth of her satchel open and rather violently began throwing her star-shaped hairpins into it.
    “How much did you lose?”
    “Oh, the wager wasn’t for money. I had already spent my pin money for the week; so, you see, I wagered against a couple of my suitors for a kiss. It was all in fun—I was sure my horse would win anyway. He was the favorite. Unfortunately, he went a little lame in the final furlong and finished third.”
    Blade’s smile flattened. “Exactly how many men did you end up kissing? ”
    “Exactly zero. My brother arrived on the scene with my governess before I did it. Can you believe Robert actually made me renege on my vowels? Honestly! The next thing I knew, he was drawing up my betrothal to—”
    Blade lifted his eyebrows as she nearly blurted out the name. His curiosity was intense.
    “A family friend,” she finished warily, then gave a heavy sigh. “I meant no harm. But Robert says I must be ever so careful about such things or I will end up ostracized from Society like Mama.” She turned away and gazed broodingly into the fire, twining a lock of hair around her finger.
    So, that was it, he thought, watching her for a long moment in silence. The harpies of the ton had sent her mother packing, leaving the daughter torn between filial loyalty and the quite understandable need not to be blackballed herself.
    She turned to him with an air of distress. “You mustn’t think badly of her, Blade. Mama never
meant
for all the other ladies’ husbands to fall in love with her. They just
did
, and they would woo her, and Mama, well—Mama was a ‘frail vessel,' as Robert says.“
    “Robert?”
    “My eldest brother. Why is it that no one ever complains when a man takes a mistress, but let a lady take a lover, and she is called all sorts of names?” She paced across the room. “It isn’t fair! Nobody ever remembers Mama’s genius, or the marvelous essays she wrote on the rights of women, or the rounds she drove about London making sure her gentlemen friends got out of bed and into the House of Lords to cast their votes on important matters of state—and no one ever even
mentions
the heroic death she died!”
    Momentarily entranced by her gown floating weightlessly about her neat, trim legs as she paced, Blade had to shake himself back to attention. “How did she die?”
    She sighed and stopped her agitated pacing, leaning her hips back against the chest of drawers. She rested her pampered hands on the edge of it. “Mama loved France. She had gone to the Sorbonne and had countless school friends among the ladies of the Ancien Regime. When the Revolution came, she and one of her lovers, the marquess of Carnarthen, got involved in smuggling the aristocrats’ children out of France to escape the guillotine, but she was eventually caught and executed for a spy.”
    “My God,” he murmured. “Is this true?”
    “It is.” She returned to her chair, sighed heavily, and sat down again, looping the leather strap of her satchel over her shoulder. She rested her elbow on the table, laid her cheek in her hand, and gazed at him, restless and pensive, the very sketch of tempestuous youth. “Do you see my plight? I want to be like her— I want to be something
more
, but how can I when I can’t even move, pinned down under all Society’s endless petty rules, plus the added millstone ‘round my neck of being expected to atone somehow for my mother’s sins?”
    “Wagering your kisses on a horse race does not sound much like atonement to me. It sounds to me as if you’re deliberately flouting Society.”
    “Maybe I am, a bit—but can you blame me for resenting them? My mother was worth more than all those pompous hypocrites put together, but they banished her and now she’s dead. I never even had a