Someone to Romance by Balogh Mary

Author:Balogh, Mary
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-3494-2366-1
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2020-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

There had been only the one yellow rose, the day after the garden party. Since then the rosebuds had been pink again.

The romantic gesture no longer meant anything to Jessica. Quite the contrary. She was angry. Quietly furious. For the flowers were the only evidence that the Earl of Lyndale, alias Mr. Gabriel Thorne, still existed somewhere on the face of this earth. And even they were not proof positive. He might have ordered them in advance and left a little pile of signed cards to be delivered with them. He might be anywhere by now, even six feet underground. He might be on the high seas, making his way back to Boston to count his piles of money while he was being declared dead in England. She hoped there was a ferocious storm in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, tossing him about, breaking his limbs—preferably both arms and both legs. And his head. She hoped it would turn him a bilious green at the very least.

How dared he.

How dared he toy with her affections and make her begin to think that perhaps, just maybe, there was a possibility she might marry him and expect something like happiness with him? How dared he pretend that he intended to marry her, only to desert her when she was starting to lose her common sense? How dared he send her roses and play the pianoforte for her until she felt he had sucked her very soul into wherever it was the music came from? How dared he stroke her little finger? And kiss her among the roses, his booted foot on the edge of the bench beside her, his fingertips resting against her jaw, making her want to burst with . . . with desire?

Wherever he had disappeared to, she hoped he stayed there—forever. And she hoped it was a nasty place, overrun with snakes. And rats. If she never saw him again it would be too soon. No, that was a silly overworked expression. She never wanted to see him again. Full stop. Shoulders back, chin in air, nose in air, and all the rest of it. Lady Jessica Archer, ice maiden, unapproachable, unassailable—or something like that.

And then there was Mr. Rochford—that smiling liar. Far from being discouraged by Avery’s refusal to give his blessing to a proposal of marriage, the man was bearing his disappointment with tragic fortitude. He had come the very next day—much to her mother’s delight—to beg her to drive in the park with him, and she had gone because she did not want to admit to herself that she was disappointed it was not Mr. Thorne who had come. He had sighed and smiled and smiled and sighed and declared that the end of the seven years since his cousin the former earl’s unfortunate demise could not come fast enough for him.

“For His Grace, your brother—or ought I to say half brother?—assured me, Lady Jessica,” he had told her, “that he will welcome my suit with open arms once my father is officially the Earl of Lyndale.

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