Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 03] Read Free

many enjoyable hours avoiding Tessa’s poisonous company, but now with her cousins away from London with their new husbands, Sophie had no one.
    Except Graham.
    Of course, Graham had his own house in London, or at least, his father, the Duke of Edencourt, did. It was surely much larger and grander than this simple house. Yet Graham avoided his home as much as possible. The stories Graham told of his three elder brothers made Sophie much happier about her own lack of siblings.
    And the time that Graham spent with her made her much happier about her chosen solitude. He nevermade her feel odd about her extreme height—for his own quite surpassed hers—nor did he twit her about her lack of fashion or her penchant for scholarly pursuits. At least, he did so only in a fond and lazy way that made her feel as though he actually approved.
    He was very intelligent himself, though he rarely exerted himself to show it, and his breezy insouciance was a welcome antidote to her own more thoughtful bent.
    He was also extremely enjoyable to look at. He was tall and lean, but solid with muscle and more than enough shoulder to fill out his dandy’s coat most appealingly. His fair hair curled back from a high brow, and sea green eyes gleamed over sculpted cheekbones and jaw. Most decorative indeed.
    Sophie only wished she could return the favor. She was too aware of her not-quite-blond ginger hair and her spectacles and the nose that Tessa had pronounced “the Pickering Curse,” with a decided bump where no bump should be.
    She watched Graham as he stood brushing industriously at his trouser knees. As well he should, for Lady Tessa was not inclined to treat her servants well, either in manner or in pay, and therefore was picked up after accordingly. Sophie had given up on trying to keep tidy any but her own chamber and this parlor—where she spent these precious rare hours with Graham.
    In any case, those he could spare from his busy calendar of gaming, carousing, wenching and generally living up to his reputation as the layabout youngest son of the Duke of Edencourt. As Graham himself said, with three elder brothers to stand between him and thetitle, such activities were practically his required duty to perform!
    “After all, someone has to wear the wool of the black sheep.” He’d sighed melodramatically, then grinned. “And I look very fine in black.”
    Now Sophie, still seated on the carpet with her outrageously and unfairly long legs tucked beneath her, rubbed absently at the sore spot on her palm and gazed up at the most intelligent, difficult, contradictory man she had ever had the pleasure to know.
    Not that she’d known many men at all. Until she’d come to London, she’d managed to go years without speaking to anyone but the mistress and all-female servants at Acton Manor.
    She’d come to be fairly comfortable with the two men the other cousins had married. At least she didn’t break things when they were in the room. Yet it wasn’t until she’d met Graham that she’d ever really come to know a man at all.
    It was Graham himself who’d set her at ease. “I am not in the market for a wife—ever!” he’d told her. “Furthermore, I, handsome bloke that I am, am entirely out of your reach. So you see, we might as well be friends, for there isn’t a chance in hell that we will ever be anything else.”
    Comforted by that, and won over by a mind that finally equaled her own, Sophie was quite satisfied with the friendship.
    Mostly.
    Graham was great company—when he remembered to call at all. He was too handsome for his own goodwith that chiseled jaw and, most detrimental to his character, a rakish smile that made any woman he met forgive him for everything. In advance.
    It seemed she was no different. At the moment, he’d not made a move to return to his previous seat on the sofa. Sophie knew the signs.
    He was becoming restless. It was always so. He’d tire of the games and petty machinations of Society and