The Viscount and the Virgin Read Free Page A

quite in appropriate for you to make your home with me now.’
    Nick, who was training for the law, had already given her the devastating news that the Brambles—the house where she had grown up, the place she had thought of as her home—would have to be sold to pay off the debts Hugh had racked up in the latter years of his life.
    â€˜What is left over is to be divided equally between myself, Alaric and Germanicus.’
    She had felt as though Nick had struck her. ‘What about me?’ she had asked in a scratchy voice. How could he have left everything equally between the three sons who had left her to nurse their father through his last, protracted illness? Not that she blamed any one of them. Nick was too busy with his law books. Alaric was away with his regiment, fighting in the Peninsula. And Germanicus was a naval lieu tenant serving with his squadron in the Caribbean.
    No, it was Hugh’s attitude she found hard to swallow.
    She had listened with mounting hope as Nick proceeded to witter on about widow’s jointures and marriage settlements, slowly grasping the fact that her mother, at least, had not intended her to be left completely penniless. She had, in fact, bequeathed her only surviving child quite a tidy sum.
    Though Nick had not been able to quite meet her eye as he explained that it was to have been hers when she reached her twenty-fifth birthday.
    â€˜Unfortunately, my father somehow got access to it and made some rather unwise investments.’
    From the look on Nick’s face, Imogen had gathered he had squandered the lot.
    â€˜What must I do then, Nick?’ she had asked with a sinking feeling. ‘Seek employment?’ She would probably be able to get work in a school. One thing about growing up in the house hold of a man who devoted his life to studying antiquities was that there had never been any shortage of books. She could teach any number of subjects, she was quite sure, to boys as well as girls.
    â€˜No, not as bad as that,’ Nick had assured her. ‘Your mother’s family have agreed to take you in and, once your period of mourning is over, to give you a Season. If you can make a match your uncle approves of, he will make up what you would have received from your mother upon your majority into a respectable dowry.’
    And so, though the prospect of having to endure even a single Season had her shivering with dread, she had been packed off to live with Lord Callandar, her mother’s brother, and Lady Callandar, his wife.
    At least it had not been like going to live with total strangers. Though she had never met them, Lord Callandar had written to his sister Amanda punctiliously on her birthday and Imogen’s, every year.
    It had never crossed anyone’s mind to approach her real father’s family, not considering their obdurate attitude towards her mother. They had laid the blame for what her aunt termed the Dreadful Tragedy firmly ather door. Imogen had never had any contact with them at all.
    â€˜Are you attending me, Imogen?’ her aunt snapped, rapping her wrist with her fan so smartly that it jerked her out of her reverie. ‘And sit up straight. Hands in your lap, not folded in that insolent manner!’
    Imogen flinched to hear her aunt sounding so annoyed, and dutifully corrected her posture. She was truly sorry that she had turned out to be such a disappointment to her aunt and uncle, who had each shown her a great deal of kindness, in their own way. Her uncle had spent an extortionate amount of money trying to make up for what he saw as the deficiencies in her education. He had paid for deportment lessons and dancing lessons, and encouraged her aunt to buy her more clothes than she had believed it was possible for one girl to wear in a lifetime. And that had just been to cover her mourning. They had shopped all over again when she went into half mourning, and again when it was time for her to begin moving about in