Read In the Arms of the Heiress (A LADIES UNLACED NOVEL) for Free Online

limited in their choices of profession,” she said. “And in so many things. You men control the world, and a bloody mess you’ve made of it.”
    Louisa Stratton didn’t know the half of it. “I cannot disagree. So, my income is enormous, because I’ve invested wisely and am a genius with numbers.”
    “Are you?”
    “I was always good at maths. I could be, if I had any money to play around with. But I don’t. You saw where I lived, Miss Stratton.”
    Louisa gave a delicate shudder. “Maximillian was raised in wealth in the French countryside.”
    “Some château or other, I believe you said.”
    “Château Lachapelle. It was once a monastery, and the Dark Monk is reputed to haunt the corridors.”
    Charles laughed. What a fantastic imagination the idiot heiress had. “You have been reading too much fiction. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
    “Very well. You don’t have to mention the monk if you don’t want to. I just thought it added a soupçon of interest to your childhood. Your parents were English expatriates who ran away from arranged marriages. Very romantic.”
    A load of rubbish in Charles’s opinion. “There’s the tiniest glitch, Miss Stratton.”
    “You must remember to call me Louisa! We’ve been married happily for months now.”
    “I don’t speak French well,
Louisa
. I took it at school and pretty much left it there as well.”
    She waved a gloved hand. “Oh, that won’t matter. We’ll just say your parents were eccentric and preferred to converse in their native tongue. You were tutored at the château. No one in my family will quiz you—they loathe the French as all good English people do. A few days in Paris to shop is one thing, but my aunt Grace never permitted me to go abroad even for that.”
    “Poor little rich girl.”
    Louisa’s cheeks turned pink. “You may think you know all about me, Mr. Cooper—”
    “Max,” he reminded her. “We’re so happily married.”
    “—but you don’t,
Maximillian
. I’m not saying I’ve had a horrible life—I know I’ve had advantages some can only dream about. But it was not a bed of roses at Rosemont.”
    Charles laughed again. “Quite the turn of phrase, dear wife.”
    Her blush deepened, but she soldiered on. “You collect art, and the château is filled with wonderful things.”
    “Like the Dark Monk and my eccentric parents?”
    “I’m quite sure I said they were dead, too—didn’t I, Kathleen?”
    The maid did not look up from her book. “As doornails. So your aunt wouldn’t write to them.”
    “Just so. While you are an esthete, you are also an athlete.”
    “You rowed her on the Seine on a moonlit night, Mr. Norwich,” Kathleen said, turning a page.
    More rubbish. Where did girls get such ideas? From unrealistic romances like Kathleen was reading, no doubt. Charles had never rowed anything or anyone in his life—now if she had him bowling a cricket match or playing rugby, he was her man.
    “And what is the story behind my deformity? An oar in the eye?” He had suffered damage to his left eye when a shell exploded rather too near him. Once he’d come to, the doctors told him his vision might improve with time, but Charles saw no evidence of it so far.
    “I don’t suppose you fence.”
    “I do not.” He could hack his way through underbrush well enough, but the army had given up its swords for the deadly precision of automatic weaponry. Maxim machine guns were all the rage on the veldt.
    Louisa was thinking, her pink tongue curled into the corner of her lips again. Charles had noted the habit and was hoping that tongue might be persuaded to do something else. “Do you box?”
    He’d scrapped with his brothers growing up, and had held his own at school. “Yes, although I’m not one for the Queensberry rules.”
    “Well then. You received an unlucky blow in the ring. That’s when you broke your nose, too.”
    Charles kept his hand from touching the bridge of his nose, flattened courtesy of his brother