A Rogue's Rescue by Donna Lea Simpson

Author:Donna Lea Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Beyond the Page Publishing
Published: 2013-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Ingram, standing in an alcove of the Conyngton’s ballroom, watched Ariadne, seated in the chaperones’ area, and thought about their conversation of the previous day. She was not only clever but witty and with an unexpectedly whimsical turn of mind. And her assertion that she believed in him had touched him more deeply than he liked to admit. He had learned to be casual about the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” but they still found their mark, and with every piercing volley had hardened his vulnerable heart. Lately he had begun to feel frozen, finding more pleasure in the hearty and hardy company of the villains that thrived in the sour underbelly of London life than in company that could be called good.

Ariadne Lambert had thawed a little corner.

After working out their plan, they had gone on to talk of other things, and she had invited him to lunch. She had, she said, an excellent French cook, a talented gardener, a lazy footman, and a miserable maid. It showed that her priorities were first, her stomach, then her garden, with only a passing interest in social appearances and personal appearance. After lunch they had gone for a long walk on the Embankment from Battersea Bridge to Chelsea Bridge. Olivia Beckwith had never arrived, sending a note of apology with some scrawled reference to a familial emergency involving her youngest child.

He glanced again at Ariadne, sitting at her ease on the edge of the ballroom floor, her toe tapping to the music as she nodded to the occasional acquaintance. She wore again the hideous gown from the Vauxhall incident, having found, she told him, some measure of comfort that a sartorial mistake could have been put to some use.

As they had walked the riverbank, she had somehow winkled out of him his familial history, such as it was. How he and his mother had been abandoned by his aristocratic father, even though the man had legally married the woman he never acknowledged as his wife. He spoke openly of his childhood on the streets of London among the lowest of the low, pickpockets, rag and bone men, mud larks. And then the surprise when he found himself, as a young man, accosted by a solicitor and told that he was the legal heir, after some search and doubt, of the Viscount Ingram’s estate.

Somehow during that afternoon, as they stood gazing out at the Thames winking and twinkling in the sun, he had found that he had her hand firmly clasped in his. When he had taken it he did not know, but the lady did not object. Every time he glanced over at her, he found new parts of her to admire, how straight her nose was, how full her generous mouth, how sculpted and perfect her high cheekbones, and how intelligent and beautiful her luminous gray eyes. By the end of the afternoon he would have leveled a facer on any man who dared call her plain.

Finally they

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