Free A Rake's Midnight Kiss by Anna Campbell

helpmeet role she’d adopted too long with her selfish parent. Mr. Evans guessing herauthorship wasn’t quite as onerous as submitting to a husband, but he still might try to influence her choices. Now that freedom beckoned, she could hardly bear that.
    The vicar and Lord Neville swapped opinions over a table covered in folios. New acquisitions of his lordship’s, Genevieve supposed. She should be grateful that he shared his collection with the Barretts. But her charity with her father’s patron was in short supply. Since Mr. Evans’s arrival, Lord Neville had become a ubiquitous presence, like a grumpy rhinoceros guarding his territory. If she wasn’t tripping over one gentleman, she tripped over the other. She wished them both to perdition.
    It had been a difficult week. She’d only just come to terms with facing down her charming but inexplicably inefficient burglar. She supposed she should be grateful that Mr. Evans’s arrival at least provided distraction. No longer did she jump at shadows. Instead she jumped at the sound of one particular baritone voice.
    Mr. Evans glanced across to where she caught the evening light for her needlework. Behind her, the window was open in hope of attracting a stray drift of air. September had turned abnormally sultry and the parlor was stuffy. Or perhaps the crowded room was at fault. Her aunt, her father, Lord Neville, Mr. Evans. Not to mention Sirius and Hecuba.
    Irritated with the heat, Genevieve brushed back stray tendrils escaping her chignon. Mr. Evans continued to stare. Did his gaze hold a conspiratorial light? Or was that her guilty conscience speaking? The secret of her father’s work wasn’t hers alone. She’d had no right revealing it to a stranger.
    When the vicar had invited fifteen-year-old Genevieve to collate some notes on local churches into an article, she’d leaped at the chance. Any adolescent girl with pretensionsto intellectual achievement would find such a request flattering. Especially motherless Genevieve Barrett who craved her father’s attention. Even more exciting when the piece she wrote appeared in a journal.
    So the deception had continued and thickened until Genevieve’s work shored up the vicar’s fame and any suggestion that he share credit made him sulk like a child. Her resentment had curdled over the last year, as she realized that her father was content for this arrangement to last indefinitely.
    Then Lady Bellfield had bequeathed her the Harmsworth Jewel and her research had uncovered interesting and potentially explosive facts about the object. The chance of independence from her father had finally become a reality and she meant to seize it with both hands. When she’d told the interfering Mr. Evans that her whole future depended on the Harmsworth Jewel, she hadn’t exaggerated.
    But ruthless as she strove to be, that lost young girl still lurked in her heart. Even now when she was so angry that she could strangle her father with his clergy stole, she still loved him. She didn’t want to destroy his reputation, however unjustified it was. She just wanted to claim her work and use it as the basis for a life of her own.
    How on earth had Mr. Evans recognized her authorship so quickly? A sharp brain lurked behind those languid manners, but nobody would call her father’s latest pupil an academic specialist. A premonition of disaster shivered through her—and Mr. Evans already made her as wary as a fox in hunting season.
    Again she uselessly berated herself for succumbing this morning to guileless blue eyes and a ready smile and a voice that made her blood flow like warm honey. Mr. Evans had everyone dancing to his tune. Why was she the only person in this house to see that?
    She stabbed her needle into her embroidery with a savagery that threatened to burst her bloated peonies. Neither her aunt nor her father heeded her suggestions that Mr. Evans should move back into Leighton Court. When Genevieve had insisted that she didn’t