Irresistible Read Free Page B

there had been another, slightly larger, one month after that. That time she had hoped it was the last. Hope had blossomed over the winter, when nothing else had been forthcoming.
    But it had happened again. Just yesterday. A new debt, slightly larger than the second had been. And this time she had understood. She had spent a sleepless night pacing and understanding that her comfortable world had gone—perhaps forever. This time she was without hope. This would not be the last of such demands. Not by any means.
    She knew she would go on trying to pay. She knew she must. Not only for her own sake. But how would she pay the next one? With her savings? What about the next after that?
    She set down the pen and bowed her head. She closed her eyes in an attempt to ward off the dizziness that threatened. She must live life one day at a time. If she had learned nothing else during her years with the army, she had learned that. Not even always one day at a time. Sometimes it had been reduced to hours or even minutes. But always one at a time.
    A cold nose was nudging at her hand and she lifted it to pat her dog’s head and smile rather wanly.
    “Very well, then, Lass,” she said just as if the dog had made the suggestion, “one day at a time it is. Though to borrow some of Walter’s vocabulary, I find myself in one devil of a pickle.”
    Lass lifted her head to invite a scratching beneath the chin.
    The door of the sitting room opened and Sophia raised her head, a cheerful smile on her lips.
    “Aunt Sophie,” Sarah Armitage said brightly, “I could not sleep for a moment longer. What a relief to find that you are already up. Oh, do get down, Lass, you silly hound. Dog paws and muslin do not make a good combination. Mama is to take me for a final fitting for my new clothes later this morning, and we are to ride in the carriage in the park this afternoon. Papa is to take us. He says that everyone rides in the park at the fashionable hour.”
    “And you cannot wait to return home so that all the excitement may begin,” Sophia said, getting to her feet after putting the paper with its figurings inside one of the cubbyholes at the back of her desk.
    Sarah had been so restless with pent-up excitement the afternoon before that Sophia had suggested a walk back to Sloan Terrace and an evening and night spent there. Sarah had accepted the treat with alacrity. But now, of course, she was terrified that she would miss something. Soon—two evenings after tomorrow—all the activities she so eagerly anticipated would begin with the first major ball of the Season at Lady Shelby’s.
    “Shall we have some breakfast and then walk back through the park?” Sophia suggested. “It will be quiet and quite enchanting at this hour of the morning. And it looks to be as lovely a day as yesterday turned out to be. You need not dash about the room with such exuberant glee, Lass. There is to be breakfast first and you are not going to persuade me otherwise.” She led the way to the dining room, her collie prancing after them, since Sophia had been unwise enough to use the word walk in her hearing.
    How wonderful it would feel to be eighteen again, Sophia thought, looking wistfully at her niece, and to have all of life, all of the world, ahead of one. Not that she was ancient herself. She was only eight and twenty. Sometimes she felt closer to a hundred. The ten years since her marriage had not been easy ones, though she must not complain. But now, just when she had achieved some measure of independence and had made a circle of amiable friends and had expected to be able to make a life of quiet contentment for herself ...
    Well, the debts had arrived.
    It would have been so very pleasant, she thought with an unaccustomed wave of self-pity, to have been able to afford a new gown, to have been able to afford to have her hair trimmed and styled, to have been able to convince herself that though not beautiful or even pretty, she was at least passably