Read Regency Romance: An Intriguing Invitation (Historical Billionaire Military Romance) (19th Century Victorian Romance) for Free Online Page B

Margaret noticed how his hazel eyes glistened and his smile was warm. He was handsome.
    “Hello,” Mark said as he got closer, removing his hat. “You are Margaret, are you not?”
    “I am. How did you guess?”
    Mark took one of her long blond braids in his hand and touched the soft hair with his large, short fingers. Her bright blue eyes stared up at him from behind surprisingly dark lashes. He wondered how she managed that.
    “Your description matches you nearly to perfection, Margaret. How uncanny.”
    Margaret blushed a little and confessed, “It was my father who wrote that letter.”
    Mark hesitated before throwing his head back to laugh loudly. “No wonder you sounded so full of yourself. That’s bound to happen when a father describes a daughter he loves.” He looked down at her. “You do have a close relationship with your father don’t you?”
    “I do.” Margaret smiled up at him, pleased that he could tell without her saying it.
    “It’s a good thing to have a relationship with your father like that. Respect is very important.”
    “I agree.”
    “Did your father approve of your decision to answer my ad?”
    “Yes, he did. He was encouraging from the beginning.”
    “I’m glad to hear it.” Mark was very happy to hear it. He knew that a woman who had respect for her father would have respect for her husband, too. When he’d placed the ad, he’d only done so because he had been through all the women in the city and he hadn’t found a decent one in the bunch. He decided to roll the dice on a stranger, at the behest of one of his buddies at the stables. It had been all somebody else’s idea and he’d lucked out. He’d won that bet. He smiled. “So if you don’t mind, I’m just gonna take you on to the courthouse and get the papers signed.”
    Margaret nodded. She didn’t know how it was supposed to go anyway. If he wanted it quick and immediate, she didn’t have an objection.
    “I am fine with that.”
    “Then after it’s done, you can come with me to the stables where I keep my horses. Some of them are for breeding. I also race.”
    She looked up at him with wide eyes. “You ride a horse in a race?”
    He laughed and shook his head. “I used to be a jockey, yeah, but it was a while ago. Now I just watch the races and train the jockeys and horses and breed. I’d like it if you would be there, meet everybody, maybe help out sometimes.”
    Margaret jostled in the seat when the tires bumped over rocks and debris. She grabbed Mark’s arm instinctively and he smiled at her.
    “You’ll have to get used to that. These roads can be pretty rough. You can’t really even call most of them roads. They’re just paths. The tires have made them in the ground where people keep going.”
    “How long have you been here?” Margaret asked, looking at the dismal scene as it passed her by. There was not much of anything there. The people didn’t look very happy and the dust was constantly being kicked up by one horse or another.
    “I was born and raised in the area but I’ve been here in this part of Nevada for four years. That’s when it got the postmaster, back in ’84. I arrived just days before they made it part of this state instead of Arizona.”
    “That’s very interesting.” Margaret nodded, politely. She had no knowledge of either Arizona or Nevada and hadn’t been interested in reading the news when she and her father had a business to run. She scanned the landscape again, looking at the heavily male occupied area that seemed like a blight in the middle of plush green all around them. There was almost a line differentiating between where man dominated and land dominated. “I must say it seems quite amazing that you would race horses here. I didn’t know such a thing existed in these small places out here in the West.”
    “Well, we have to do something to entertain ourselves, don’t we? Especially us men who don’t frequent the saloon until all hours of the morning. I