Read The Lady Risks All for Free Online Page B

secretaries.
    Roderick followed with the latest information on the project he was assessing—a small bailiff-run school in Battersea. It was a straightforward proposal, one the other members felt would help Roderick cut his teeth. “I’m not yet entirely satisfied with some of the suppliers the school wishes to continue to use. I believe we should hold firm to our principle of not allowing firms owned by relatives of those running the establishment to be engaged—not unless they are the only supplier available.”
    “Hear, hear,” Max Gillard said. “We instituted that rule early on, and it’s saved us—or rather our blunt—countless times.”
    Roderick nodded. “I’ll tell Hendricks, the head bailiff.”
    “If I were you,” Roscoe said, “I’d also have a quiet word in Father . . . is it O’Leary’s? . . . ear. He’s on the school board, and while he might not feel the prohibition is necessary”—with a cynical smile, Roscoe looked around the table—“telling him that our considerable experience will not allow the Guild to invest in any project that doesn’t adhere to such rules will almost certainly be sufficient to ensure he sways all the other board members. No need for you to waste time trying to argue them around when he can do it for you.”
    “I second that,” Hugh Bentley put in. He met Roderick’s eyes. “It’s not simply a matter of getting them to do things our way—the trick is to leave them feeling that it was their wisdom behind it.”
    Roderick grinned, nodded, and jotted a note in his journal.
    The reporting continued around the table, with Roscoe briefly detailing the progress of his own current project—an endeavor to teach young boys from the dockside slums enough to allow them to become apprentices in the nearby shipyards; the Guild already worked with the shipyard owners to oversee the training and subsequent placement of the apprentices into paying jobs.
    As Hugh—Lord Hugh Bentley, the Duke of Raythorne’s second and rather more brilliant son—took center stage, Roscoe sat back and wondered what his uninvited and disapproving guest in the gallery was making of the meeting.
    Of the eight men about the table, seven—Ro, Sebastian, Marvin Grayle, Edward Bremworth, Hugh, Max, and Roscoe himself—were scions of noble houses. The only exception was Roderick. While nobility of birth wasn’t a criterion for membership in the Guild, the simple fact was that, other than in exceptional cases such as Roderick’s, most of the money available for charitable works lay in the hands of the aristocracy.
    Considering their secret observer, Roscoe wondered if she was squirming yet. He hadn’t known Roderick hadn’t told his family about joining the Guild, but given his sister’s overbearing protectiveness—given Roderick was twenty-three and in sole charge of his considerable fortune—it was understandable that Roderick had wanted to do something entirely on his own. A declaration of independence, as it were.
    Despite the fifteen years and the lifetime of experience that separated Roderick and him, Roscoe could nevertheless appreciate that.
    His mind returning to the hoity Miss Clifford, he wondered if she would.
    M iranda sat through the meeting in absolute silence.
    The men’s voices reached her clearly, their every word sinking her deeper into a quagmire of embarrassment heavily tinged with mortification.
    But how could she have known?
    Even before Roscoe had appeared in the library to take his chair at the head of the table, she’d picked up allusions to the social status of the other men. They knew each other well enough to refer to each other by name rather than title, but while trading jocular remarks several had called one of the others “lord” and in one case “viscount.”
    Alerted, she’d looked more closely at their features, all of which confirmed the likelihood of their belonging to the aristocracy, including, once she saw him in better light, Roscoe