Someone to Trust by Mary Balogh

Author:Mary Balogh
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

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By the time Colin arrived at the Earl of Riverdale’s house on South Audley Street, it was the middle of the afternoon and the weather was threatening to turn nastier than it already was. Gray clouds hung low and billowed across the sky at the mercy of a wind that was unseasonably chilly and was using the street as a funnel. It was almost but not quite raining.

There were no fewer than three carriages drawn up before the house, a sure sign that the Westcotts were rallying around one of their own. He did not hesitate anyway. If he did not call now, he never would, and he would forever have to live with a guilt he knew he had no need to be feeling. Unfortunately, one could not always control guilt. It took up house at the very center of one’s being and simply refused to budge even when one informed it that it had chosen to occupy the wrong host.

They were all there in the drawing room—all the ones who were currently in town, anyway. The Dowager Countess of Riverdale sat to one side of the fire that had been lit against the chill of the day with Lady Matilda Westcott predictably hovering over her, a bottle of something in her hand—probably smelling salts held at the ready should her mother do something as uncharacteristic as succumb to a fit of the vapors. Lord and Lady Molenor sat side by side on a love seat. The Dowager Duchess of Netherby occupied a sofa, Lady Jessica Archer on one side of her, Wren on the other. The Duchess of Netherby was seated on a chair beside them, the duke on a chair in the far corner of the room. Alexander stood with his back to the fire, his feet slightly apart, his hands at his back. Elizabeth was sitting on the chair across the hearth from the dowager countess with her mother perched on the arm, one of her hands patting her daughter’s back. And some of Mrs. Westcott’s family were there too—her brother and sister-in-law, their son, and their daughter with her husband.

Colin could not have felt more like an outsider if he had tried after he had been announced and had stepped into the room. And he was not at all sure anyone was glad to see him, except perhaps Wren, who got immediately to her feet and came toward him, both hands outstretched.

“Colin,” she said, taking his hands and kissing his cheek. “It is so good of you to have come. The weather is turning wretched, is it not?”

“It is probably going to start raining at any moment,” he said, squeezing her hands before releasing them. Elizabeth, after one brief incurious glance, was not looking at him or at anyone else for that matter. She was sitting with straight spine, not quite touching the back of her chair, her hands clasped in her lap. She was dressed simply and neatly. So was her hair.

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