Nicola and the Viscount Read Free Page B

by the wife of the caretaker of her father’s estate, Beckwell Abbey. It was to this woman—and her husband, whom Nicola affectionately referred to as Puddy—that Nicola looked for grand-motherly advice and comfort. Dependent, as Nicola was, on the small income the local farmers supplied by renting the abbey’s many rolling fields for their sheep to graze upon, Nana and Puddy lived modestly, but well.
    But never so well as Nicola had been living for the past month. The Bartholomews, as it turned out, were every bit as wealthy as Phillip Sheridan had declared…perhaps even wealthier.
    But what Phillip had not mentioned, since he could not have known, was that the Bartholomews were also generous, almost to a fault. Nicola needed to express only the slightest desire, and her wish was immediately granted. She had learned to bite back exclamations over bonnets or trinkets at the many shops she and Honoria frequented, lest she find herself the owner of whatever it was she’d admired. She could not allow these kind people to keep buying gifts for her…especially as she had no way to return the favor.
    Besides which, Nicola did not really need new gowns or bonnets. Necessity, in the form of her limited income, had forced her to become a skilled and creative seamstress. She had taught herself how to alter an old gown with a new flounce or sleeves until it looked as if it had just come straight from a Parisian dress shop. And she was almost as fine a milliner as any in the city, having rendered many an out-of-fashion bonnet stylish in the extreme with an artful addition of a silk rose here, or an artificial cherry there.
    Eyeing her letter, Nicola wondered if she ought to add something about the God. It seemed as if it might be a good idea, since it was entirely possible that Sebastian Bartholomew was going to play an important role in all of their lives, if things kept up the way they had been. Having grown up almost completely sheltered from them, Nicola knew very little, it was true, about young men, but it did seem to her that Honoria’s brother had been most attentive since she’d come to stay. He escorted the girls nearly everywhere they went, except when he was not busy with his own friends, who were quite fond of gambling and horses, like most young men—except perhaps Nathaniel Sheridan, who was too concerned with managing his father’s many estates ever to stop for a game of whist or bagatelle.
    Even more exciting, the God was always the first to ask Nicola for a dance at whatever ball they happened to be attending. Sometimes he even secured two dances with her in a single evening. Three dances with a gentlemen to whom she was not engaged, of course, would be scandalous, so that was not even a possibility.
    On these occasions, of course, Nicola’s heart sang, and she could not believe there existed in London a happier soul than she. It seemed incredible, but it appeared she had actually accomplished what she’d set out to do, which was impress the young Viscount Farnsworth—for that was Lord Sebastian’s title, which he would hold until his father died, and he assumed the title of Earl of Farelly—with her wit and charm. How she had done it—and quite without the help of any face powder—she could not say, but she did not think she could be mistaken in the signs: the God admired her, at least a little. She supposed her hair, which she wore upswept all the time now, with Martine’s aid, had helped.
    All that Nicola needed to forever seal her happiness was for the God to propose marriage. If he did—no, when, when —she had already decided she would say yes.
    But there was, in the back of her mind, a niggling doubt that such a proposal might ever really materialize. She was, after all, not wealthy. She had nothing but her passably pretty face and keen fashion sense to recommend her. Handsome young men of wealth and importance rarely asked