Free The Unexpected Marriage of Gabriel Stone (Lords of Disgrace) by Louise Allen

were well enough known for that to be ineffectual as a pressure point—Gabriel must find something else. It might amount to blackmail, but he had no qualms about that in this case. And probably Woodruffe would prefer it to facing him down the barrel of one of Manton’s duelling pistols, which was Gabriel’s fall-back plan. It wouldn’t be difficult to work up some kind of quarrel with a man as objectionable as Edgar Parfit.
    But if Caroline was being mistreated then the whole business became more serious, for if her father blamed her for Woodruffe’s withdrawal then she could suffer more than bruised wrists.
    Gabriel lifted the bottle of brandy from behind the log pile, poured himself two fingers into a horn beaker and sipped while the heat of the spirits settled the faint nausea that came with some ruthless self-examination. He had shaken his head over Caroline’s lack of foresight beyond her aim of retrieving her brother’s estate, now he wondered if he had been equally thoughtless.
    He had landed himself in this situation on a sudden impulse when Alex Tempest had reported overhearing Knighton at White’s talking about his advertisement in The Times . He had been brooding on what to do about his unease over Caroline’s welfare and Alex’s gossip seemed like the answer on a plate, so he’d snatched at it.
    Pretend to be a hermit—there would hardly be competition for the post—combine an amusing small adventure with the opportunity to soothe his nagging conscience over Caroline, get himself out of his London rut for a while. It had all seemed like the perfect answer.
    Perhaps if things had not fallen into place so easily he might have reconsidered the masquerade and found some other way of discovering how Caroline was faring. But the necessary delay while his ‘agent’, otherwise known as Corbridge his valet, had negotiated on his behalf, and he ostensibly travelled from Wales, had given him time to grow an impressive beard and for his untrimmed hair to develop an unfashionable shagginess. He had to shave twice a day to maintain an acceptable appearance for a gentleman and the resulting thicket of neglected growth was enough, he was confident, to hide his identity from a self-obsessed man who had only seen him closely in a poorly lit gaming hell.
    The Welsh accent that he had learned to mimic when he had stayed with his Great-Aunt Gwendoline near Caernarvon as a boy had come back easily. Alex had been so amused and impressed by his disguise that they had even tried the imposture out on Alex’s wife, Tess, although with Gabriel in ordinary clothes and not his monkish robe. Lady Weybourn had carried on almost five minutes of polite social chit-chat in Green Park with Mr Petrus Owen, the gentleman from Wales, before her husband’s poorly suppressed laughter had made her suspicious.
    It was a shock to find Caroline at the chapel when he’d returned from his morning dip in the lake and he’d been surprised, too, that she had failed to recognise him. With the painful discipline of self-examination that he had imposed on himself recently Gabriel pondered whether his reaction to that lack of recognition was hurt pride. They had, after all, discussed becoming lovers—one would expect a woman under the circumstances to have looked closely at the man she was proposing such a bargain with.
    ‘Coxcomb,’ he muttered to himself. Caroline had been in turn embarrassed, mortified, shy, angry and afraid during both of their encounters. It would have been a miracle if she had recognised him in the street, let alone hiding behind all those whiskers. Which cover all my best features , Gabriel thought with a grimace as he tugged at the offending growth.
    He needed to talk to her again, reveal his true identity and discover the truth about her situation. That might be easier said than done, because catching her alone so that any startled reaction was not observed was not going to be easy. He found that it was not just the fire