Read After the Kiss for Free Online Page B

shabby. And Dunston and his legitimate brood were never shabby. Thieves, yes. But not shabby ones.
    With a breath he set aside his own tankard of bitters. “I’d best be off. I wasn’t making up excuses to try to avoid dinner with you, earlier. With Samuel gone, I do want another pair of eyes watching my stock.” He glanced across the table. “And you have to be at Almack’s before long, don’t you?”
    “I told you, I’m not going.”
    “Mm-hm. It’s not your fault that you’re blue-blooded, Lord Bramwell Lowry Johns. I’ve already forgiven you for that.”
    Bram sent him a dark smile. “Yes, but there are other offenses on my head.”
    Before Sullivan could ask what he meant by that, Bram paid their bill and rose from the table. In the midst of the noise and drinking and wagering and cigar smoke of Jezebel’s, private conversation was both easy and almost impossibleall at the same time, but business was one thing. For Bram, personal matters were another. And there was nothing new about that.
    Sullivan hired a hack to drive him back to his three acres of stables, cottage, and grazing land. It wasn’t much by noble standards, he supposed, but at least he’d worked for it and earned it himself. And no one could take it away from him.
    Sullivan scowled. No one, that was, except for Lady Isabel Chalsey. Putting him in prison would make his land forfeit. How much of a threat was she, then? Pretty and spoiled, no match for him physically, but she had a mouth on her. Good for kissing, but quite capable of ruining his life. He needed to do something about her. And before his next sojourn through someone’s window.
     
    “Mama, I just wanted a horse,” Isabel stated for the fiftieth time since Zephyr had arrived. She wasn’t any closer to believing it, but she hoped her family was. “Eloise is always going riding, and she says it’s wonderful exercise. So I decided to stop being a ninny about it and learn to ride.”
    Lady Darshear looked at her from across the breakfast table. “Eloise Rampling is a lovely young lady, but you’ve never felt the need to imitate her daily routine. If anything, the other girls follow your lead.”
    “It’s not about aping anyone. I’m nineteen, Mama. Nearly twenty. I’m past being silly, and I would like to be able to do this.”
    “She certainly couldn’t have chosen a better teacher,” her father put in as he entered the breakfast room, pausing to kiss his wife and then Isabel on the cheek before he sat at the head of the table. “And as we’re something of a family of horse lovers, I’m glad you’ve decided to give this a go.”
    Isabel half thought his amenability was because she’d secured the great Sullivan Waring to come to the house for the next fortnight or so, but she didn’t say that aloud. She might tend to look for high drama or create her own where none existed, but with her parents—or her mother, at least—expressing concern over her latest project, she’d abruptly begun to realize that she wasn’t just keeping a secret. She was lying.
    For heaven’s sake, if she’d had more time to consider how to proceed, or a bit of advance notice that she’d been about to stumble in broad daylight across the man who’d stolen paintings from the house and a kiss from her, she doubted she would have settled on this solution. It wasn’t even a solution, really; it was a stalling tactic to keep Mr. Waring close by until she could…what? Decide how to best him for taking liberties with her? Have him arrested? He was a thief, after all. He deserved to be—
    “My lord,” the butler said, sending a glare at the footman with whom he’d just spoken, “a Mr. Waring is in the stable yard, awaiting Lady Isabel.”
    “He’s here!” Douglas crowed, bouncing into the room. “He rode that big black again. By Jove, he’s bang up to the echo.”
    “Douglas,” the marchioness chastised. “A little decorum, if you please. It’s not as though the Prince