Read One Whisper Away for Free Online

the same flaw.
    The road to ruin.
    And the cost . . . dear heavens, the cost . . .
    Primly, she said, “My lord, can we discuss this alone?”
     
    “My study?” Jonathan couldn’t decide if he should be amused or annoyed as he made the suggestion. Obviously, Lily didn’t want their younger sisters to hear what she wanted to say, but he was not certain he wanted to hear it either.
    “I suppose Father’s study would be acceptable.” Lily rose immediately. There was a steely glint in her eye that gave him pause, and she walked past him in a whisper of light blue muslin.
    James had been a bit evasive on the subject of Lady Lillian, other than saying she was on the independent side, and Jonathan was wondering if that might not just be the understatement of the year. She was too young to be so grave, and maybe expecting her to help oversee their sisters’ debut was asking too much, but this was not familiar territory for him either. If he’d already blundered, God alone knew it just might happen again. Because he didn’t care for himself, it was difficult to understand how desperately important social status might be to his family. In his world, it was insignificant, but in theirs . . . well, someone had to teach him the rules. Adela had to be considered also. She was too young now to feel the ramifications of ostracism, but one day she might.
    Both Carole and Betsy, mirror images of each other with their shining curls and blue eyes, watched them leave, neither one of them making a comment.
    Of course Lillian knew the way to the study, he mused as he politely followed her decisive footsteps down the marble hallway. She had been raised between the London town house and the country estate.
    He had not . Father’s study . Maybe in truth it belonged more to her than it did to him.
    It put him in his place as the usurper—never mind that he had never wanted the title in the first place. She didn’t accept him as earl, and quite frankly, he wasn’t sure he could blame her.
    That was only one of the many differences between them.
    Lily immediately took a chair by the fireplace, unlit at this time of year. The window was open to the late-afternoon breeze, and the light wind blew a loose, shining curl across her cheek. She said succinctly, “We need to speak plainly.”
    “My preference, always.” Jonathan folded his arms across his chest and sat casually on the edge of the desk. “Please do so, for I am in the dark as to the need for this conversation.”
    “I didn’t wish to discuss this in front of Betsy and Carole.”
    “That was made clear enough.”
    She visibly squared her shoulders. “What has Cousin James told you?”
    “About what?” Quizzically, he regarded his sister.
    She swallowed. He saw the convulsive ripple of the muscles in her slim throat. Her voice had an audible tremor. “Are you being deliberately obtuse? Or are you trying to spare my feelings by pretending you don’t know?”
    That was a tricky question if he’d ever heard one.
    “Lily,” he said, feeling his way through it because if there was one thing he wasn’t talented at, it was reassuring uncertain young women. Well, he could do fairly well with five-year-olds, but this wasn’t the same thing at all. “Perhaps you should just tell me what it is you are afraid James might have revealed.”
    “It is mortifying.” She glanced away.
    Mortifying. Yes, it was. He saw it in her posture, in the rigidity of her slender body in the blue gown that even he recognized was not in the latest fashion, in the tense set of her features.
    For the first time since setting foot on English soil and realizing he was responsible for his siblings, he actually understood it.
    This trouble does not just belong to her. It also belongs to me .
    His aunt—who had raised him upon the death of his mother—would have called it a “serene sign,” that phrase encompassing all the situations in which a person was guided—gently—in a direction they