ROMANCE: Regency Romance: Fated to His Kiss (Historical Victorian Romance) (Historical Regency Romance Fantasy Short Stories) Read Free Page B

to collect her. Beautiful, impetuous Isadora, with her soft, almost-white blond hair and eyes that looked like the world opened up as soon as you looked in them. How could she not follow in the family's footsteps when Devon Haversham was so like Papa?
                  Anabelle clutched back a sob as she remembered that fateful day when she and Isadora had lost their last remaining parent. It had been a while since Lord Givens had been a responsible guardian of any kind, but he was better than nothing. He had allowed the house to fall into a state of such disrepair that their friends had stopped coming. Wasting all of his money on drink and the races, he had quickly become a stranger in the household. Still, he worshiped his daughters, particularly dreamy-eyed Isadora. Anabelle could not remember how young her little sister had been when their father had first begun taking her out to the stables and teaching her the names of all of the horses and giving her lectures on exactly the type of feed and sequence of grooming each one preferred. And Isadora had clearly felt the same back for their father, because she had followed him around, committing every last detail to memory.
                  The household had been left up to Anabelle after their mother had succumbed to the coughing sickness when she was just fourteen. A year of physicians, bills, and watching the love of his life succumb to an illness he could not cure as easily as he could care for his horses had left Lord Givens completely emotionally drained. After she passed, he became like a ghost, wandering around the halls of their home as if he had quite forgotten why he was there in the first place. The only thing that could bring him back to life was the mention of his favorite horse, Marjorie, a tactic that the girls had had to use fairly often.
                  The household had fallen almost naturally into Anabelle's capable hands. Still, despite the training she had received at her mother's hands, it had been an uphill battle to keep the household afloat. Balancing the books had proved to be particularly difficult since whatever money they had was dedicated to her father's love of the four-legged creatures of the Earth. Isadora, in her stead, had developed a fondness for fashionable clothing, and it was not long after Anabelle had become skillful at turning their old gowns into new with a few simple tricks that Isadora had decided, with all the impetuousness of a child, that this simply was not good enough. Knowing how starved her sister had been of the attention her mother had paid her, Anabelle had gone without so that her sister could have what she wanted. Still, it was too much for her young shoulders, and there were more nights than she could count where she found herself locked in her bedchamber, sobbing, her cries magnified tenfold in the emptiness of the house around her.
                  Things had taken an almost magical twist when she had her coming out four years later at eighteen. One of her father's kindlier aunts had sponsored her for a proper Season in London, and Anabelle had shone brightly, with her unusual hair and quick wit. After all, a house where all the human companions seemed far more interested in creatures that could only neigh in response lent itself to solitary pastimes such as reading, and when Anabelle had entered the social scene, she was adopted immediately by the literary set. She had written to Isadora about it, shining letters describing all of her new friends, but Isadora had only wanted to hear about the latest fashions. Still, it was a marvelous time, and Anabelle could scarcely believe her luck.
                  Everything seemed to come together most marvellously when Anabelle had met Lord DeVere. Tall, gentle, and scholarly, he had seemed like just the right match for her. So what if she had not felt any kind of attraction to the man? He had no interest in horses as far