Read Lady Eve's Indiscretion for Free Online

on.”
    â€œNot all.” Louisa frowned at her only remaining cake. “Papa has the Lords to run. Mama has Polite Society. Then, too, they’ve grandchildren to consider.”
    â€œBut they still have us too.” Eve made a little production of pouring tea all around: plain for Jenny, sugar for herself, cream and sugar in quantity for Louisa, which was an injustice of the first order. Louisa never gained weight and never seemed to stop eating.
    Eve sat sipping tea, but the sense of impending marital doom gathered like a pressure in her chest. An inkling of a solution had come to her only last night, when she’d been coming home from the ball with her mother and sisters.
    A white marriage.
    They were not as fashionable as they’d been in old King George’s day, but Eve suspected they weren’t entirely unheard of anymore either. Lord and Lady Esteridge had such an arrangement, and his lordship’s brother was tending to the succession.
    â€œShall we help you look for prospects?” Jenny asked. “Kesmore wasn’t a likely prospect, but Louisa is thoroughly besotted with him.”
    Louisa shot Jenny an excuse-my-poor-daft-sister look. “Kesmore is a grouch, his children are complete hellions, he can hardly dance because of his perishing limp, and the man raises pigs.”
    â€œAnd you adore him,” Jenny reiterated sweetly. “What about that nice Mr. Perrington?” Gentle persistence was Jenny’s forte, one learned at the knee of Her Grace, whose gentle persistence had been known to overcome the objections of Wellington himself.
    â€œMr. Perrington has lost half his teeth, and the other half are not long for his mouth,” Louisa observed as she moved on to the sandwiches. “Thank God he hides behind his hand when he laughs, but it gives him a slightly girlish air. I rather fancy Deene for Evie.”
    â€œDeene?” Eve and Jenny gaped in unison.
    â€œYou fancy Lucas Denning as my husband?” Eve clarified.
    Louisa sat back, a sandwich poised in her hand. “He’d behave because our brothers would take it amiss were he a disappointing husband. Then too, he’d never do anything to make Their Graces think ill of him, and yet he wouldn’t bring any troublesome in-laws into the bargain. He needs somebody with a fat dowry, and he’s quite competent on the dance floor. He’d leave you alone for the most part. I think you could manage him very well.”
    Jenny’s lips pursed. “You want a husband you can manage?”
    Eve answered, feeling a rare sympathy for Louisa, “One hardly wants a husband one can’t manage, does one?”
    â€œSuppose not.” Jenny blinked at the tea tray. “You left us one cake each, Lou. Not well done of you.”
    Louisa turned guileless green eyes on her sister. “You left me only four sandwiches, Jen.”
    They all started laughing at the same time, then ordered more sandwiches and more cakes, while Eve wondered if she had the courage—and determination—to find herself a man who’d be a husband in name only.
    ***
    â€œIt’s like this.” Anthony lounged back in the chair behind the estate desk and steepled his fingers. “You aren’t poor, exactly, but you haven’t a great deal of cash.”
    Deene paced the room, wondering if his own father had felt a similar gnawing frustration. “Give me figures, Anthony. The marquessate holds at least sixty thousand acres, and I have another ten thousand in my own name. There’s a soap factory in Manchester, a distillery on some Scottish island. How can I be poor?”
    â€œNot poor, but that sixty thousand acres includes some thirty thousand bound with the entail. You can’t sell it, but you have to maintain it. You must tend to the land, the cottages, the woods, even the ditches.”
    Deene peered at his cousin and stopped perusing a library stacked twelve feet high with