Cheryl Holt Read Free Page B

sniffed, offended at having his competency maligned. “She demands an interview without delay.”
    “Bloody hell.”
    Balancing his elbows on the desktop, he buried his face in his hands. After a solid week of excessive revelry, he was tired, hungover, and grouchy. His head pounded unmercifully, a painful throbbing behind his eyes, and his stomach roiled, protesting his aborted attempt at eating some food. He’d be damned lucky if he didn’t pass out from exhaustion and immoderation.
    Now this. As if he’d agree to being confronted by some . . . some . . . woman. He’d already gone a few rounds with Georgina, and it wasn’t even noon. He wasn’t about to compound his annoyance by engaging in verbal fisticuffs with a pushy, determined commoner.
    “Tell her no, Rutherford. Send her packing.”
    “I tried, sir. She won’t go.”
    “What do you mean, she won’t ‘go’?”
    “Well, I informed her that you were too busy, but she just barged in.”
    How bizarre. “Have her forcibly removed.”
    Two spots of color marred the servant’s cheeks. “I wouldn’t recommend it, sir.”
    “Why not?” John chuckled. “Is she too large to carry? Is she brandishing a weapon?”
    “No,” Rutherford answered hesitantly, “but she seems quite aggrieved. And a bit mad. I do believe she’d be capable of bodily harm if provoked.”
    From one corner of the room, his half brother, Ian MacDonald Clayton, laughed uproariously. “This is a woman I’m dying to meet.”
    “Shut up, Ian,” John grouched. A renewed hammering shot through his head, so potent that he began to worry that the top might fly off.
    “Oh, chat with her, Wakefield,” Georgina chimed in from the other corner. “It might be amusing. We could use some entertainment in this dreary domicile.”
    John glared back and forth, at his only sibling and his mistress, wondering if there was some way he could magically vanish. Would either of them notice if he simply disappeared? Wouldn’t it be fun to find out where he’d end up?
    Anywhere but here would be a vast improvement.
    “What do you suppose she wants?” he asked Ian. His brother had a unique insight into the lower classes, being a member himself, a fact he took great relish in flinging at John on a regular basis. As if commonality were a noteworthy boon.
    “Your assistance. What do you think?”
    “I knew that,” he grumbled. “But on what topic?”
    “Obviously, there’s some injustice afoot that shefeels only you—as the lord—can put to rights.”
    At Ian’s mocking emphasis of the word
lord
, John glowered. Ian loved to sarcastically remind John of his exalted position, one that would have been Ian’s in a fairer world, and one that John, himself, had never desired. The issue was an implicit wedge between them, and Ian could be so caustically derisive.
    John could hardly alter the British laws of inheritance and entailment.
    During numerous quarrels, he’d told Ian and their ass of a father that, if it was possible, he’d have dropped it all in Ian’s lap, would have gladly let him assume the whole, damned nuisance.
    If Ian had been in charge, John could have been in London where, at this very moment, he could be playing cards and wooing gorgeous women. Instead, he was stuck in the country, cleaning up the estate books after years of neglect by dear old da, and about to be challenged by an excitable, hysterical female.
    “It doesn’t sound as if she’ll leave without making a fuss,” Ian injected rationally. Always rational. Always reasonable. That was Ian. “You might as well see her.”
    The accursed scapegrace was grinning, anxious for the pending fracas, ecstatic to witness John squirming and on edge, and John seriously considered strangling him, just leaping over the desk, grabbing him by the throat, and . . .
    “Oh, do, Wakefield,” Georgina added, her sultry tone grating on his shredded nerves.
    He scowled from one to the other, sighed heavily, then said to Rutherford,