Read Cecilia Grant - [Blackshear Family 03] for Free Online Page A

candle flame jump. Light skittered out to the edge of the dressing table’s top, momentarily illuminating the tray where the maid always left her mail.
    A letter sat there. The tray had been empty when she’d dressed for dinner; the letter must have come in the late post. It was, if she did not mistake—light had fallen on it so briefly and her heart was suddenly beating so hard she couldn’t be sure of much—franked.
    Franking privileges belonged to members of Parliament. An earl might frank a letter for his wife. Her hand reached carefully out, took up the letter by its corner, and brought it into the halo of candlelight.
    For a moment she could do no more than look. And touch. The paper, a pristine ivory stock heavier than anything she’d ever been privileged to write upon, pleased her fingertips the same way starched linen did. The sealing wax gleamed a painfully elegant shade of gold. Her name, in an unfamiliar hand, had never looked so illustrious. And indeed the letter was franked, the date and signature scrawled with lordly disregard for legibility.
    Her heart climbed up and up her throat as she slid her letter opener under the seal. The contents might poison all the pleasure she took in the letter’s outside—this might be the rebuff she’d cheated Lady Harringdon of delivering in person—but better she should find out at once than delay and wonder.
    The paper unfolded along its neat creases to reveal a very few lines of largely unremarkable text.
Thank you for your good wishes, &c, &c
, but the signature was all looping distinction and the postscript might as well have been written in letters of fire:
I am at home on Tuesdays and Fridays
.
    Kate set the paper down, slowly raising her eyes to her reflection. She’d done it. She’d been wrong to doubt herself. Five years of patience and determination had finally, somehow, reaped their reward.
    It’s because she wants to bring you out
. The audacious corner of her brain, silent since the trip to Miss Lowell’s,lost no time in speaking up. Well, let it say its piece. Why
shouldn’t
the countess wish to sponsor a girl whose beauty could take any ballroom by storm? The obstacle of her birth might even make the prospect more attractive to a lady who’d successfully married off half a dozen daughters and probably longed for a challenge of some sort.
    She folded up the letter and put it away in the same drawer where she’d stowed the
Pride and Prejudice
volumes. The book recovered a bit of its luster, in such grand company. Behind the fanciful love story, after all, lurked an account of how a woman’s prudent marriage might overcome all the mischief of her parents’ incautious union.
    The day after tomorrow was a Friday. Would so soon a call demonstrate an unbecoming eagerness, or fitting respect? Well, she had tonight and tomorrow to deliberate. She closed the drawer, gave one last appraising glance to the mirror, and rose from her chair to go down to the parlor.
    L ORD B ARCLAY ’ S letter didn’t tell a great deal more than what Westbrook had already related, but one thing it did tell—from the substandard hand and irregular spelling—was that he’d penned it himself. He didn’t, then, have someone to manage that task for him.
    Nick felt for his glass of port, still studying the letter. “He doesn’t say he’s in need of a secretary, I note. Just someone to train him in speech and argument.”
    “Indeed there’s no explicit mention.” They’d moved to one end of the table when the rest of the family had gone, and Westbrook now sat directly across from him. “I think we may assume, though, that if he did have a secretary, that man would be undertaking the speech training.”
    “Probably.” He mustn’t let his hopes run away with him. “Though I can see how a gentleman of discernment, even if he already had a secretary, would recognize that for those particular skills he could apply to no higher authority than a barrister.”
    “Without