The Two Paupers by C. S. E. Cooney

Author:C. S. E. Cooney [Cooney, C. S. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairchild Books
Published: 2015-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

***

The worst thing Gideon ever did to Analise was invite her to the Farmer’s Ball.

That was the night of his revenge. It didn’t begin with the publisher pouncing on her and announcing how much she loved Analise’s manuscript, how she thought it was just so darling, and needed only one or two of teensiest revisions to be an absolute smash, let’s talk contract, let’s talk advance, let’s talk promotional tours—but that’s how it ended. It began when Analise showed up at his mother’s house dressed in her normal clothes.

He hadn’t told her who he was.

He hadn’t told her where he came from, or what the house looked like. He’d invited her to supper, half reluctantly, even roughly, telling her, “My mother wants to meet the neighbor who keeps feeding me soup.”

So Analise had shown up at Ochre Court with a fistful of ragged flowers and a ribbon in her hair. She was dressed neatly, if eccentrically, in a worn green velvet skirt with a flutter of lace at the hem, a button down shirt of paler green with embroidery on the collar and no visible ink stains, and her sturdy boots. Obviously this was an effort for the girl who often wore nothing but pajamas and a red scarf for days in a row, as she curled in her window seat and scribbled endlessly on her heap of papers. She’d partially pulled back her thickety red hair with wooden combs. She wore pearl earrings. Not real pearls. The small locket her dad gave her when she left the farm. An heirloom from a grandmother. Pot metal.

When the Ochre Court butler opened the enormous front doors to her ring, Gideon had placed himself near enough to observe her without being seen. He heard her anxious, “I’m sorry—I think I have the wrong house. Is Gideon...Does someone named Gideon have a...Is there someone named Gideon Alderwood here, by any chance?”

“Mr. Alderwood is in the Gold Salon, Miss Field,” the butler intoned. “But Mrs. Beckett-Alderwood asks that you be brought directly to the ballroom.”

“The...Excuse me, the what?”

And Gideon didn’t know, watching her, whether he wanted to lean against a wall and laugh helplessly at her expression, or sweep her out the door again with a sneer and a, “Go back to the garret where you belong,” or step out and reassure her that it was only one of his mother’s stupid parties, and not a single guest could rival her in imagination or kindness or that inimitable way she wore a scarf. Not to mention that her soup was a miracle from the gods, and that he would give up both his hands just to eat from hers.

He did not do any of that. He merely fell in step behind her, softly and several paces away. She was too preoccupied keeping up with the butler and taking in the splendor of Ochre Court to notice the new shadow she had acquired.

If an invitation to the Mannering’s Gentry Moon Masquerade at Breaker House was

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.