Taming Beauty Read Free Page B

looked at him from huge cornflower-blue eyes.
    “Good afternoon, Uncle,” greeted the devil disguised as an angel.
    “Shouldn’t you be in the nursery?” Jasper asked in his most gravelly voice, hoping beyond hope the creature would take herself off forthwith.
    “I don’t like the nursery.” Meghan Rossiter smiled, showing off the empty space where her two front teeth had been knocked out during her last visit to Breckenridge. “There’s only babies and they’re always napping.”
    “Where are Charlie and Henry?” Her brothers didn’t meet the height requirement either, but Jasper would gladly allow them into his study long enough to round up their little sister.
    “Papa took them to walk the cliffs.”
    Meg was no longer allowed anywhere near the cliffs since she’d jumped into the ocean in a mad attempt to swim to China. That was two visits past.
    “Mama says you’re marrying a princess.”
    “Lady Priscilla is an earl’s daughter.”
    “What’s an earl?”
    “A man puffed up on his own importance.” Even as he spoke the words he knew the five-year-old would repeat them the first chance she got.
    “When I eat too many tarts my belly gets puffy.” Meg started forward, taking little mincing steps as if her uncle wouldn’t notice the sneak attack.
    “Stop right there,” Jasper ordered.
    “I just want to look at the globe.”
    “You just want to spin it until it twirls from its axis and goes careening around the room, knocking over everything in its path,” he contradicted, stepping to the side to put his considerable bulk between the demon and the world, metaphorically speaking.
    “That only happened the one time,” the little fiend replied with a pout that would, one day, lay waste to all manner of men’s good intentions.
    “Once was quite enough.”
    The door at the girl’s back opened and Susan’s dark head appeared, the same cornflower-blue eyes scanning the interior. “What are you doing in Uncle Jasper’s study, Meghan Elizabeth Rossiter?”
    “Nothing, Mama.”
    “Well, come along.” Susan motioned her daughter out of the room while mouthing the words, “Carriages coming up the drive.”
    “Damn.”
    “Uncle Jasper said a bad word,” Meg cried in glee as her mother towed her down the hall. “Did you hear him, Mama? Wait until I tell Charlie and Henry.”
    Jasper contemplated rushing upstairs to put on a coat and cravat before discarding the idea as a waste of time and effort. If his bride didn’t already know he was a rustic without an ounce of town polish, she would find out soon enough.
    He left his sanctuary and turned toward the front door, pushing aside the butler and hauling the portal open.
    “I would have gotten it, my lord,” Dervish protested on a wheezing breath.
    “You’d have been ten minutes wrestling with the damn thing.” Jasper tossed the words over his shoulder as he stepped outside.
    Spring had come early to this corner of Cornwall, a welcome relief to the fishermen and farmers after the unusually harsh winter. The ever-present wind was little more than a stiff breeze and the sky a vast cerulean expanse but for a few low-hanging clouds scuttling along the horizon.
    A compact, black carriage pulled by two shaggy horses of indeterminate lineage trundled up the drive, followed by a luxurious traveling coach led by a quartet of perfectly matched grays, a big black gelding tied behind. The carriages circled the fountain that for years had functioned as little more than a breeding ground for algae and a pool for little children to fall into while walking the stone bowl.
    Before either vehicle had come to a complete stop on the dusty drive, two servants dressed in the earl’s scarlet and gold livery hopped down from the second carriage while another manservant, the earl’s valet presumably, and two maids piled out of the first.
    “I suppose we’ll be expected to squeeze his lordship’s servants in with us?” Dervish asked and it was all Jasper could