The Major Meets His Match by Annie Burrows

Author:Annie Burrows
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin Historical
Published: 2017-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Once Harriet was dressed there didn’t seem to be anything to do but go and lay back down on the bed again. Where she stared up at the ruched canopy. For about five minutes. It was just too hard to stay here, with nothing to do, when she so badly ached to do something.

She strode to the window and imagined going out there and...

Doing what?

She whirled away in frustration. She had no idea where to start, that was the trouble. Because she was so ignorant.

An ignorant, naive country miss, that was all she was. A girl who was no good for anything in London but to serve as the butt of jokes made by sophisticated, heartless males with nothing better to do with themselves than make sport of ignorant, country...

She was going round in circles. On the carpet as well as in her head.

Though at least she hadn’t yet yielded to the temptation to kick anything. She’d learned her lesson on the dressing-table stool.

See? She wasn’t a complete idiot. She could learn some things. When it came to the hardness of dressing-table stools or men’s hearts, that was.

From then on, her day followed pretty much the same pattern. For hour after hour, it seemed to Harriet, she either lay on the bed staring at the ruched canopy, or paced up and down, glaring at the carpet. She had just reached the stage where she was cursing the canopy for its inability to inspire her with a clever plan of campaign and the carpet for being entirely too frivolous with its stupid swirly patterns that only encouraged her mind to go round and round in circles, when the door flew open.

‘I cannot believe Hugo could be such a tyrant,’ said her mother, stalking across to the bed on which Harriet was currently lying. ‘Besides which he has no right to confine you to your room. He is not your father.’

Goodness. Harriet sat up, slowly, stunned to see her mother so worked up on her behalf.

‘Get up and get your hat on. You are coming out with me.’

‘With you?’ Golly. Mama had never invited her to go anywhere with her before. Not even to church. Although that was because Mama frequently forgot what day it was when she was deep in some piece of experimentation and so rarely attended Saint Martin’s herself.

As her mother disappeared into the dressing room, Harriet swung her legs to the floor.

‘The things he said,’ Harriet heard her mother exclaim, although in a rather muffled voice since she’d just opened the door to the armoire and stuck her head inside. ‘As if it was my fault you have an enquiring mind and have been asking awkward questions.’

Ah. That explained Mama’s sudden interest in her daughter. Uncle Hugo must have declared his conviction that Harriet took after her and said it as though it was an insult, and Mama had obviously taken it personally.

‘This will do,’ she said, thrusting a relatively plain bonnet at her. ‘I

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