Free Edith Layton by The Chance Page A

you? After all, you so looked the part the other day.”
    Brenna’s jaw set tight. She forced a light laugh. “And not today? The less I dress, the better I look? Thank you for the compliment. It’s usually only the gentlemen who see that.”
    Annabelle flushed. She watched her visitor leave. Only when she heard the front door close did she relax. “Well, what did you think?” she asked as the door to the connecting room opened.
    “She’s not his lover,” her mama said. “If she’d a claim, she’d have made it. I asked Lady Claire, who knows everything, and Mrs. Teller, who makes up everything she doesn’t know. Neither of them had heard of any such liaison. Dalton’s had his share of ladybirds, but everyone knows their names, and no one ever heard of any dark, foreign-looking chit. She comes from Shropshire? The Fords, from Shropshire? I don’t know them. I’ll have my Betty ask her friends to find which of them come from there. Servants know every scrap of gossip. We’ll discover all, don’t you worry.
    “But whatever the wench’s past, and she looks as though she must have one—did you hear that laugh?” the countess asked, diverted. “A courtesan’s, mark my words. Be that as it may, I doubt she has a past with Dalton. The dates don’t agree, for one thing. For another, as he said, he’s too clever to have asked us in if they had been lovers. He’d hardly have forgot she was there if they were. She’ll be gone at week’s end. The rest is up to you. He’ll be ready to do anything for you if you take him back now.”
    “He’d be ready anyway,” Annabelle said. “But she likes him. She’d have him if she could,” she mused.
    “Well, why not? There’s an income,” Lady Wylde said. “Good family. Good friends and entrée anywhere. But you could do better.”
    “And I could do worse,” her daughter said, thinking of all the things her visitor hadn’t said, things she’d read in her eyes when she’d spoken about Rafe. Things she herself hadn’t seen in him, but only sensed. Things that made her too uneasy to dwell on now. “But Lud!” she sighed. “That hair! Still…that’s why God made razors. All right. I’ll give it a week more, at least. Then if she’s left as she said she will—we’ll have him in for tea. Not too soon, though. There’s no sense rushing things. The Season hasn’t even started yet. He’ll keep.”
    “Like mullet on ice,” her mama said, and laughed. “I’ve been speaking to the servants too much!”
    Annabelle didn’t laugh. Her lovely eyes narrowed. She raised a finger. “Yes. Exactly. Good point. Let’s not keep this to ourselves, Mama. We can’t. You’ve been asking around about her. They’ll wonder why. Who knows who might discover the real answer? Let’s nip it in the bud by letting the story out to show we don’t care. If I do decide to have him, it won’t do for it to look as though I was his second choice, even for a night.”
    “As if there were a chance of that!”
    “But I’ve been a second choice before,” Annabelle said.
    Her mama’s laughter stilled.
    “And I’ve been the object of gossip before as well,” Annabelle went on, a note of pain she wasunaware of in her voice. “I won’t have it again. Let me clearly be the wronged party this time. Why not? It might have been innocent on her part—but it might not have been. We can’t give her the benefit of the doubt. Doubt gives too many easy answers to gossipmongers. The woman set a trap. It wasn’t his fault. We were clever enough to realize it and absolve him. There it is, and so we’ll say.”
    “Why, just so,” her mama said. “Isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”
    Annabelle smiled. Life hadn’t treated her well, but her mama always did. But now Life might have just decided to make it up to her. If not by getting her the man she wanted with all her heart, then at least by giving her one who’d devote himself to her with all his heart. She’d see. She