Ravishing the Heiress Read Free Page A

discussion of cricket. Millie and Mrs. Graves gave their attention to Colonel Clements’s army stories. Had someone looked in from the window, the company in the drawing room would have appeared perfectly normal, jovial even.
    And yet there was enough misery present to wilt flowers and curl wallpaper. Nobody noticed the earl’s distress. And nobody—except Mrs. Graves, who stole anxious looks at Millie—noticed Millie’s. Was unhappiness really so invisible? Or did people simply prefer to turn away, as if from lepers?
    After the guests took their leave, Mr. Graves pronounced the dinner a
succès énorme
. And he, who’d remained skeptical on the previous earl throughout, gave his ringing endorsement to the young successor. “I shall be pleased to have Lord Fitzhugh for a son-in-law.”
    “He hasn’t proposed yet,” Millie reminded him, “and he might not.”
    Or so she hoped. Let them find someone else for her. Anyone else.
    “Oh, he will most assuredly propose,” said Mr. Graves. “He has no choice.”
    D o you really have no other choices, then?” asked Isabelle.
    Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Futility burned inside Fitz. He could do nothing to halt this future thathurtled toward him like a derailed train, and even less to alleviate the pain of the girl he loved.
    “If I do, it is only in the sense that I am free to go to London and see if a different heiress will have me.”
    She turned her face away and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “What is she like, this Miss Graves?”
    What did it matter? He could not recall her face. Nor did he want to. “Unobjectionable.”
    “Is she pretty?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t know—and I don’t care.”
    She was not Isabelle—she could never be pretty enough.
    It was unbearable to think of Miss Graves as a permanent fixture in his life. He felt violated. He raised the shotgun in his hands and pulled the trigger. Fifty feet away, a clay pigeon exploded. The ground was littered with shards: It had been an excruciating conversation.
    “So, this time next year, you could have a child,” said Isabelle, her voice breaking. “The Graveses would want their money’s worth—and soon.”
    God, they would expect that of him, wouldn’t they? Another clay pigeon burst apart; he scarcely felt the recoil in his shoulder.
    It hadn’t seemed quite so terrible at first, becoming an earl out of the blue. He realized almost immediately he’d have to give up his plan of a career in the military: An earl, even a poor one, was too valuable for the front line. The blow, although harsh, was far from fatal. He’d chosen the military for the demands it would place on him. Returning an estate from the brink of ruin was just as demanding and honorable an occupation. And he did not think Isabelle would at all mind becoming a ladyship: She would cut a dashing figure in Society.
    But as he stepped into Henley Park, his new seat, his blood began to congeal. At nineteen, he had not become a poor earl, but a desperately destitute one.
    The manor’s decline was frightful. The oriental carpets were moth-eaten, the velvet curtains similarly so. Many of the flues drew not at all; walls and paintings were grimy with soot. And in every last upper-story room, the ceiling was green and grey with growth of mold, spreading like the contours of a distorted map.
    Such a large house demanded fifty indoor servants and could limp by with thirty. But at Henley Park, the indoor staff had been reduced to fifteen, roughly divided between the too young—several of the maids were barely twelve—and the too old, retainers who had been with the family for their entire lives and had nowhere else to go.
    Everything in his room creaked: the floor, the bed, the doors of the wardrobe. The plumbing was medieval—the long decline of the family’s fortune had precluded any meaningful modernization of the interior. And for the three nights of his stay, he’d gone to sleep shivering with