His Reluctant Lady by Aydra Richards

Author:Aydra Richards [Richards, Aydra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-01-13T18:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

Poppy had managed to avoid her inconvenient husband for a solid week. This was accomplished by the clever and cunning tactic of having not once stepped foot outside of her room. Although she now had time and more to devote to writing, every page had turned out excessively, depressingly maudlin. Mr. Plessing would have cast them into the fire or dismissed them as unsellable.

She would have to pay a call upon him soon to deliver what installments she had managed to finish thus far. She wondered if he had heard of her marriage. Just as easily she dismissed the thought—of course he had. All of London would have heard of it. There had been too many people at the duchess’ dinner party for the news not to have spread like a wildfire.

A week confined to her room—of her own accord, yes, but still confined—had left her feeling out of sorts and restless. She would have dearly loved to explore the house in which she now resided, but had judged the chance of encountering her husband a price too high.

If only her room had windows facing the front of the house, she could have kept watch for his comings and goings and slipped out of the room in his absence. Surely he did not spend the bulk of his days within the residence—but she could not bring herself to ask of the housekeeper, who delivered her meals to her room, whether or not his lordship was at home.

Poppy sighed, tapping her pen upon the page before her, knowing she’d rendered this sheet, too, unusable, so it mattered little whether or not ink splotches marred it. Miss Julia Ainsworth, her current heroine, had devolved into a helpless waif, given to wandering the moors and brooding over the ruins of her life. Her plight echoed Poppy’s own miserable situation too closely for comfort, and since Poppy could see no way out of her own conundrum, how could she be expected, then, to rescue poor Miss Ainsworth?

A burst of feminine laughter from somewhere down the hall startled her from her dilemma, and Poppy’s brows furrowed at the sound. Victoria and Isobel had both made themselves scarce over the past week. While Poppy had not taken them to task for the mischief that had resulted in her immediate and unwanted marriage, for there could be no purpose served by it, both girls had understood even without such recriminations that their scheming had gone a bridge too far. The consequences thereof had hurt them as well. The invitations they might have otherwise received had ceased; for the first time the girls who had so recently been the toast of London had instead found themselves shunned.

The twins had been so subdued since her marriage that to hear them laughing now was surprising in the extreme. Abandoning her writing desk, she laid down her pen and crept to the door. It had gone past tea time, and Mrs. Sedgwick had delivered a tea tray some time ago—but she had made no mention of Westwood.

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