TO LOVE A THIEF by To Love A Thief (V1.0)

Author:To Love A Thief (V1.0)
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter Nine

The barnacle scraping and hull polishing continued: deportment and conversation in the morning, reels before dinner to build the appetite, cards with Lord Lindsey midday to break up the lessons. And, though the process certainly wasn’t entirely painless, Lily began to take on the sheen of gentility; it had been there, all along, of course, beneath the barnacles. She could now conduct skillfully vacuous conversations, eat rather than devour, and respond to questions about her life in Sussex with some knowledge and a good deal of imaginative embellishment. The quiet of Aster Park seemed less oppressive and alien now; her head didn’t swim in astonishment when her meals were placed in front of her three times a day.

Her curtsies were things of beauty; her walking left Gideon Cole in despair.

And nothing Gideon said, no threats or cajoling or irony, could seem to alter it. Perhaps her walk and the angle of her chin were built into her, she thought, the way her own spine was built into her. She’d presented that theory to him; he’d merely regarded her with a look of mystification and amusement.

During the four nights following their picnic, Lily stared at her ceiling while Alice snored next to her, wondering whether Gideon was stretched out in a chair in front of the fire in the library. So far her courage had failed her, or her judgment had come to her rescue—or perhaps they were working in tandem to preserve her virtue, though this seemed unlikely—but she had not returned to the library.

Yet.

But by her fifth day, when she was five pounds away from freedom, she began losing at cards. In earnest.

“What happened, Miss Masters?” Lord Lindsey asked as she prettily shrugged away another loss. “Have you lost your knack, or have I improved?”

“Surely it’s the latter, Lord Lindsey.”

And Lily would apologize for being such a poor opponent and arrive for her afternoon quadrille lessons with empty hands.

The first two times it happened, Gideon teased her. The third time, he glanced down at her hands… and then into her face…

And then he smiled, that slow, devastating, heart-stopping smile.

He knew, the beast.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.