Desperately Seeking Scandal by Theresa Romain

Author:Theresa Romain [Romain, Theresa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

An opportunity might arise to further one’s relationship with the pursued—and if it does, be prepared to take it.

Readers uncertain what is meant by “further one’s relationship” might need assistance beyond the scope of this guide. The author offers his sympathies.

Vir Virilem, Ways to Wed for Wealth

Colin should have learned his lesson from the on-demandes of The Gentleman’s Periodical: The questions to which he didn’t already know the answer were the truly troublesome ones.

How far could I possibly fall? was a troubling question, asked by a fool who’d thought his journey to Berkshire would be nothing but time to fill before he could return to the real life of London. To Bright’s publication, and reporting on whatever the long-nosed editor thought would sell copies. And above all, a life of trickery. Endless trickery, from a writer who could hardly write, but whose livelihood depended on words.

Each day with Ada unspooled with startling ease and rightness. It was easy for Colin to forget that his every moment here was pretense—until he returned to the White Hare to share his observations with Samuel. The brothers turned them into pithy prose, written in Samuel’s elegant hand.

Day by day, there was less that Colin wanted to tell Samuel, more that he wanted to hold back, to turn over in his mind and let it flourish there.

Much like a beetroot. Which, by the bye, he now fed daily to Equinox, who deigned to let Colin ride him when Ada deemed such pursuits necessary.

He still preferred to walk, though. As he went daily from the village to Theale Hall, sometimes he took the bridle path, which threaded alongside the Talbot horse farm for much of its length. Here, he indulged a bitter curiosity, peering over the hedges to spy upon—that is, observe—the noble visitors. Wrotham sat his horse with a skill Colin would never achieve. His wife looked at her husband with shining eyes such as had never looked upon Colin.

After several days of this, Colin could deny the truth no longer: He was jealous.

He was jealous not because he wanted Lady Wrotham, but because he wanted something as honest and sweet as she and her bridegroom possessed.

Everything Colin wore, said, did was some gradation of a lie. The only person who knew the full truth about Colin’s identity—the writer of the questions that had split Ada from Wrotham, the fake suitor for a fortnight, the writer who could hardly read or write—was his brother.

The devil of it was, Colin’s desire to be with Ada was honest. But that was the only bit that could be. She’d made a bad bargain with him, and he didn’t intend to free her from it. She had asked him for two weeks of devotion, and she was going to get every minute of it.

He was selfish like that.

After a particularly trying day in which Colin had been asked to read everything from the names on horses’ stalls to a soliloquy from Hamlet, he was out of reasons to demur and wanted nothing more than to walk away from words.

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