Mary Balogh by A Counterfeit Betrothal; The Notorious Rake

Author:A Counterfeit Betrothal; The Notorious Rake [Rake, A Counterfeit Betrothal; The Notorious]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

2

THE CARRIAGE HAD TRAPPED THE EARLIER HEAT OF the evening and not lost it during the storm. Lord Edmond Waite settled gratefully into the seat beside Mary. It was chilly outside in only shirtsleeves—and a somewhat damp shirt at that.

He looked across at her. Huddled inside his evening coat, she looked even smaller than she was. He felt all the unreality of the moment. Lady Mornington, of all people. And not only was she seated in his carriage, alone with him, his coat about her shoulders, but she had cuddled on his lap and given passionate kiss for kiss. And she had made love to him on the table as fiercely as he had made love to her.

Lady Mornington! He felt rather like laughing—at the whole bizarre situation, perhaps. At himself.

Lady Mornington was everything he had always most shunned in a woman. She was independent and proud and dignified—not that she had any reason to think herself above people like himself. It was common knowledge that she had been Clifton’s mistress for years until he had dropped her quite recently. Or until she had dropped him—in all fairness, he did not know who had put an end to the liaison.

And she was an intelligent woman, one who liked to surround herself with artists and brilliant conversationalists. Her literary salons were highly regarded. The woman was a bluestocking, a breed he despised. He liked his women feminine and a little mindless. He liked his women for his bed.

He had always looked on Lady Mornington with some aversion. Not that he knew the woman, he had to admit. But he had had no desire to know her. She was not even physically desirable. She was smaller and more slender than he liked his women to be. There were no pronounced curves to set his eyes to roving and his hands to itching. And she was not pretty. Her dark hair was short and curled—he liked hair to be set loose about his arms, to twine his hands in, to spread over ample breasts. She had fine gray eyes. That had to be admitted. But they were intelligent eyes, eyes bright with an interest in the world and its affairs. He far preferred bedroom eyes. And then, the woman must be thirty if she was a day.

He had not been pleased to discover that Lady Mornington was one of Mrs. Rutherford’s party to Vauxhall. Or the Hubbards, for that matter. He had not expected any fellow guests of high ton. He was still smarting from the ton’s censure over his jilting of Dorothea—the iceberg. Not that they had been officially engaged, of course. But everyone had been expecting it, and the obligation had been there. He could not deny that.

And he was still nursing a broken heart over Felicity’s desertion. Beautiful golden-haired Felicity Wren, whom he had wanted for years, even before she was widowed, and who he had assumed was his earlier in the year, though she had teased him with a pretended preference for her faithful hound, Tom Russell.

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