Read Royally Ever After for Free Online Page B

a copper-colored rat’s nest.
    But never mind.
    Rothwick didn’t want her for her looks, such as they were. He’d noticed her appearance only enough, she supposed, to be relieved she wasn’t utterly hideous. Not that it would have stopped him had she resembled a toad.
    She managed to hold her head high, but the instant she saw the tall form across the room, she forgot decorum and poise and pride and flew into the parlor like the silly, eager girl she hadn’t been since she was Philip’s age.
    Rothwick had his back turned to the door, and his hands held out toward the parlor fire, and for an instant, that human act of warming himself at the fire made him seem vulnerable, for all his great size and great rank. She was taking in the tendrils of dark hair clinging to the back of his neck and the damp patches on the shoulders of his beautiful wool coat when he turned, hearing her footstep, and she saw the weary lines etched in his face.
    Guilt stabbed.
    â€œOh, Rothwick, you’re wet through,” she cried. “What possessed you to come out on such a day? All the way from London—on horseback, no less, Freets says—and in this wretched weather.”
    â€œWhy the devil do you think I came?” He withdrew from an inner pocket of his waistcoat a letter. “This,” he said. “I thought I might at least obtain the courtesy of an explanation.”
    The letter he held up was still folded the way she’d folded it, though it bore a great many creases now. He must have crumpled it and smoothed it out repeatedly.
    Why hadn’t he thrown it into the fire? Why did he have to come and wave it in her face?
    She lifted her chin. She would not let him intimidate her. She’d never done so before, and now was not the time to start. “Did I not explain sufficiently?” she said.
    â€œWe shall not suit?” he said. “That’s your explanation? That’s the sort of mealy-mouthed excuse one gives the world—not the man one has agreed to marry. Was I not entitled to more than three sentences?”
    â€œI beg your pardon, my lord,” she said. “I had understood that one didn’t lay blame or fault or make excuses in such letters—”
    â€œYou understood wrong,” he said. “This is a pathetic excuse for a rejection. Do you hate me?”
    How I wish I did.
    â€œThere are a great many men I don’t hate,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I want to marry them.”
    He dismissed all the other men—and there had been scores of them—with a wave of his hand. “You said yes to me.”
    â€œI changed my mind.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI realized we didn’t suit.”
    â€œBarbara.”
    Because my heart pounds when you enter a room, and my knees melt when you touch my hand or push a strand of hair from my face, and I think I’ll die of excitement and happiness when we dance . .  .
    . . . and it isn’t that way for you.
    â€œWe’ll never suit,” she said. “We come from altogether different worlds—”
    â€œYou knew that when I began courting you,” he said.
    â€œWe have nothing in common,” she said.
    â€œAnd it took you nine weeks to discover this?” he said.
    He had courted her for nine weeks and four days.
    â€œIs that why you’ve come?” she said. “Is that what troubles you? You’re annoyed because it took me so long to know my own mind?”
    â€œDamnation, Barbara, you know my situation is dire,” he said. “I’ve made no secret of it.”
    â€œI know all too well,” she said. He was by no means the first impecunious gentleman who’d come calling. She’d had no trouble rejecting any of the others. But he, the most desperate of them all—and the least conciliatory—had stolen her heart. Or run over it like the human locomotive he was. “I’m sorry. But you never