Free Once Upon A Dream by Grace Burrowes Mary Balogh

and understated elegance and… Dash it
    all, he liked her, yet he felt guilty whenever he felt drawn to seek out her company, as though he were being unfaithful to Miss Everly—a thoroughly
    ridiculous thought. He had not in any way committed himself to the girl. He had not invited her here. And he deeply resented what Lady Connaught had tried
    to do that afternoon when she had invited first him and then Miss Thompson to walk with them. He was furious at the memory of her telling Georgette that
    Annette would have been ashamed of her.
    The matter came to a crisis one afternoon when almost everyone was gathered out on the wide lawn to the west of the house, some sitting, others strolling,
    a large group playing a spirited game of cricket. The duchess was playing a circle game with an army of toddlers, something that involved joined hands and
    a lot of chanting and falling down with shrieks of merriment. Michael had been talking for a while with Lord Rannulf Bedwyn and the Countess of Rosthorn,
    his sister, and with Kit Butler, Viscount Ravensberg, an acquaintance of his, and Kit's wife, who had come over with their children from Alvesley, the
    neighboring estate. He left them in order to watch Robert, who was on one of the cricket teams with two of his young friends. Miss Thompson was strolling
    some distance away with Bewcastle. He looked around for Georgette. She was not with either Lizzie or Becky. Becky was up to bat at cricket and Lizzie was
    sitting on the grass close to her mother and father, rocking her sleeping baby brother in her arms.
    And then he spotted her. She was seated cross-legged—
cross-legged,
Georgette?—on the grass looking up at Lady Connaught and Miss
    Everly, who occupied two of the comfortable chairs that had been carried from the house. His first reaction was alarm for her, but she did not look either
    trapped or sullen. Nor was she silently listening. She was talking animatedly and looking rather pleased with herself. What the devil? He hurried in their
    direction.
    "Yes," she was saying, "she is going to be our new mama, and Robbie and I can hardly wait. We love her a whole heap."
    A whole heap?
    "Indeed?" Lady Connaught injected a world of meaning into the one word. "And are we to expect a betrothal announcement any time soon?"
    "Oh," Georgette said, smiling sunnily, "he has not asked her yet. He is waiting for the right moment. But it is just a matter of—" But she had
    spotted him, and what she had been about to say went forever unspoken. She greeted him with that wide smile of hers in recognition of the fact that she
    knew she was in Big Trouble. "Oh, there you are, Papa."
    "Here I am," he agreed. "And poor Nurse would need a heavy dose of smelling salts if she were to see you sitting that way for the whole world to see."
    "Oh, not the whole world, Papa," she said, scrambling nevertheless to her feet and smoothing out her dress. "I must go and find Lizzie. Oh, there she is
    with the baby. I shall go and hold him for a while. Her mama and papa will let me." And off she went, leaving disaster behind her—or a colossal
    embarrassment at the very least.
    "I understand," Lady Connaught said with awful civility while her daughter looked down at her hands in her lap and smoothed out the glove on one hand with
    the fingers of the other, "that congratulations are soon to be in order, Lord Staunton."
    He stood looking down at them, his hands clasped at his back. They were a little apart from everyone else, having had their chairs moved into the shade of
    an old oak tree. They always seemed to be a little apart from everyone else.
    "I heard only the tail end of what my daughter had to say," he said. "I would be interested to know the identity of the new mama she believes she is about
    to have." Though he suspected he knew the answer.
    "Miss Eleanor Thompson," she said, "who has acquired ideas above her station, even if her sister was clever enough to reel in a duke for herself."
    "I believe, ma'am,"