Free Why Earls Fall in Love by Manda Collins Page B

lying.”
    Seeing the sincerity in her eyes, Con wished for a large hole to appear in the ground beneath his feet and swallow him whole.
    “Besides,” Georgina continued, “I intended them to be. So you are voicing only the opinion for which I devoutly wished.”
    Her words penetrated his wall of self-loathing well enough to reach his brain. “What do you mean, ‘devoutly wished’?” he asked, furrowing his brow. “Do you mean to tell me that you wish for people to find your gowns and hair unattractive?”
    “Precisely,” she said, as if rewarding a particularly slow student. “I dress so that no one will notice me.”
    “Good God, why?” he asked, genuinely puzzled. “Why would someone as lovely as you are do such a thing?”
    At his compliment, she blushed. “I thank you for the kind words, but you must know that it’s not true. It’s just that I seem lovely in contrast to my terrible clothes and hair. That’s all.”
    Con reached out and grasped her by the chin so that he could look into her eyes. “Let us settle one fiction now, Georgina,” he said firmly. “In a pretty gown, in a terrible gown, in a lovely hairstyle, in a hideous hairstyle, you are a stunning woman. And no amount of downplaying your looks will make that untrue.”
    He saw something flicker in her eyes at his words, some realization that there was truth in what he said. At least that’s what he hoped. If she did not believe him, then he wasn’t sure how else to show her the truth of what he said aside from demonstrating it with his body. And that was far more improper than he was prepared to embark upon in his aunt’s back garden.
    “I…” She blinked, and shook her head as if to clear her thoughts. Pulling away from his hand, she took a step back. Con felt bereft at the loss of contact. “I thank you, my lord,” she continued. “I do not for a moment believe you, but I thank you all the same.”
    Realizing that he would have to continue this conversation later, Con gave a brisk nod. “Now, about this fellow last night,” he said, glancing around at the ground to give her time to recover her composure. “He was definitely made of flesh and blood. Look here again at the footprints he left.”
    “So it really was just a trick of the light that made him seem ethereal?” Georgie said, sounding relieved. Con cursed himself for a fool for making her reveal so much about her husband. Now that he knew just how awful Mowbray had been, he didn’t for a moment think that Georgie would have conjured him out of hope. Fear, perhaps, but she didn’t strike him as the overly fanciful type to see ghosts and goblins in every dark shadow.
    “Undoubtedly,” he said. “Just as the man we saw at the ruins today.”
    “Not my imagination, then.”
    “Not unless we share an imagination, madam.”
    She relaxed visibly. “You don’t know how much it relieves me to hear you say that. But how can this person look so much like my husband? For I am quite sure in the light of day that he is dead.”
    “Maybe,” Con said, putting his hands on his hips as he looked up at her window again, “we are looking for someone who looks enough like your husband from a distance that he would cause you to mistake him for your husband.”
    “Like a relative,” Georgie said with a gasp. “Of course! It must be some distant relative of Robert’s. He never spoke very fondly of his family. I think his parents were both dead, and since he died before I returned to England, there was no occasion for me to meet any of his other family members.”
    “Do you know where his family hailed from at least?” Con asked. If one of Mowbray’s distant cousins had been lured into perpetrating a hoax on Georgina, then he would need to visit Mowbray’s relatives in order to find out if there was some male cousin who bore a resemblance to the man.
    “I believe they hailed from Cornwall,” Georgina said with a frown. “Penrith, I think he said.”
    Con nodded. He