How To Bed A Baron Read Free Page A

himself. He cleared his throat, and began again.
                  “Perhaps I should have said, I need you to pose as my betrothed, if only for a few days. My mother thinks I’m engaged, and I want to tell her gently that I am not.”
                  Serena pursed her full lips in thought, too polite to tell him that he was being a fool.  There was a time when she would have laughed out loud at that bit of nonsense. After ten years apart, she had perhaps grown a bit more pensive, or at least a touch more controlled, for she did not speak right away, but sipped her beer.
                  “May I ask what has happened to your actual fiancée?”
                  “She deserted me on the road to Gretna Green.”
                  Serena raised one elegant brow but as he knew it would not, her elegance did not last long. She set the tankard down on the wooden table with a resounding thwack that made a woman at a nearby table jump. Serene stared at him, heedless of the good English beer that had sloshed out over her hand.
                  “The trollop.” His old friend did not soften her words or her glance as she glared at him, as if he, and not Miss Catherine Middlebrook, had somehow offended. “Was she possessed by madness?”
                  Arthur tried to repress a smile, but failed. Suddenly, the humiliating incident that had sent him to this public house in the first place took on a sheen of comedy. “No. The lady was carried off by a mad Scotsman.”
                  Serena almost rose to her feet when she heard that, pushing back from the bench. “God’s teeth! A mad Scot, in Oxford? We must call the magistrate at once, and see what can be done. How far do you think they have gone? And why in the name of God are you sitting here, listening to me, when your future wife has been absconded with?”
                  Serena was about to leave him flat and call for the innkeeper to send for the militia, no doubt, when Arthur caught her hand in his. At his touch, she stopped cold, her torrent of words drying up.
                  “She was in love with the man, Serena. She left me because she loved another.”
                  She sat down again, and blinked, looking for all the world as if he had struck her between the eyes with a mallet. “Some woman left you for a blinking Scotsman?”
                  Arthur could not repress his smile, for she sounded so shocked, as if she could not fathom how any woman, anywhere on Earth, might prefer another to him. “She did.”
                  Serena settled back on her bench, still blinking. “She was a trollop and a madwoman then.”
                  “She is a lady,” Arthur said. “I fear I cannot have you name her as anything else in my presence.”
                  “The devil with that!” Serena blazed anew, this time at him. “I’ll call her anything I please, and to her face, if she has the mischance ever to meet me in the street. I will call her out, and run her through for you.”
                  Arthur found himself laughing then, feeling for the first time that perhaps he had been saved by that mad Scot from a mistake he would have regretted for the rest of his life.
                  “Calm yourself, Serena. Please do not call her out on my account. She has no affinity for swords or pistols and would simply cry. Then her Scot would meet you in her stead, and then I would have to kill him, if I could, and we would all come to ruin.”
                  Serena listened to the Gothic tale he spun as if he was talking the plainest of sense. She nodded, and drank her beer down in one long draught, in an attempt to cool her temper, he supposed. She finished it, but did not call for another. She looked at him and took his hand in hers. For some reason, he felt