How I Met My Countess Read Free Page B

this time; instead she smiled down at his dark, fathomless eyes before she stole one last glance at Lord Clifton as he turned the corner and was lost from her sight.
    For she rather liked the cut of his jib as well.
    Though she hadn’t thought much of him the first time she’d met him. Quite honestly, she hadn’t liked him a bit.
    Arrogant and proud and too lofty for his own good.
    How Lucy wished she could still claim that sentiment, for it would be far easier to reconcile herself to that vision of him than to the truth—for it held all the pain threatening to break her heart all over again.

Chapter 2
    Hampstead, seven years earlier

    Where the devil did it go?” George Ellyson complained as he made his way around his “map room,” as he liked to call his large, well-lit study.
    The room took up half of the third floor of his house, with skylights overhead that flooded the room with illumination despite the cloudy day and the rain pattering against the panes. In the corner, a Franklin stove warmed the entire space, giving it a cozy, comfortable air.
    But this sanctuary under the eaves, which seemed more suited for a quiet scholar or a gentleman scientist, was Mr. Ellyson’s domain, and right now he paced about it like a lion with a thorn in his paw, thumping his cane down with each step to have yet another way, one suspected, to emphasize his ill humor over his lost map.
    Justin Grey, the Earl of Clifton, glanced over at his half brother, Malcolm, and shrugged.
    This is England’s mastermind of intelligence?
    Master of a grand mess , he could almost hear Malcolm thinking.
    The two men did not have the same mother, but they shared their father’s determined spirit and a resolute temperament—qualities that now saw them venturing across the Channel to the Continent to conduct, as their illustrious taskmaster, Mr. Pymm, liked to call it, “England’s other business.”
    But first, they had to pass muster with the man before them.
    Thump. Thump. Thump . Mr. Ellyson and his cane progressed down the long wall of cubbyholes, where he kept a vast collection of rolled-up maps of all sorts. City maps, coach routes, old parchments that revealed faint, shadowy lines, paths only sheepherders might recognize, but for a man trying to slip past Napoleon’s guards and troops in the Pyrenees such knowledge could prove invaluable, life-saving even.
    “Perhaps if—” Malcolm began, but he was cut off with a wave of the cane and an expletive that would have turned a sailor’s ears blue.
    “Let me think,” the man blustered. “Where the devil did that gel put my map?” This was followed by a litany of cursing that had both the earl and his brother cringing.
    Words that could curl a man’s ears, let alone send the “gel” who’d lost this map running for the timbers.
    Clifton pitied the chit when she showed up. But then again, if she was a servant in this house, she was most likely used to Mr. Ellyson’s harangues.
    So he and Malcolm continued to learn several new turns of phrase as they stood at attention, for they hadn’t been invited to sit.
    Perhaps, Clifton mused, this lesson in profanity was also part of their initiation into ser vice. A rite of passage every gentleman endured with Mr. Ellyson, if only to gain the privilege to serve their country.
    “I’ll send her packing,” Ellyson railed, shaking a finger at both of them as if they might have some share in this missing map. “I will.”
    “Sir, if I may—” Clifton asked, stepping forward, his hand reaching out.
    “Don’t!” Ellyson snapped, the cane flying up and at the ready. “Don’t touch the maps.”
    Clifton backed up and retook his place next to a grinning Malcolm. Growing up, it had usually been Malcolm about to be caned, not Clifton.
    So no doubt his brother was enjoying the rare sight of the lofty Earl of Clifton being chastened like an errant lad.
    Never in his comfortable life had the earl ever been as disconcerted as he had been over