Scandal Meets Its Match (The May Flowers #7) - Merry Farmer Page 0,69

see what Freddy and Reese thought of her in the cold light of day, she sat at the small table in her room, took out the stationary she’d purchased on Oxford Street, and started a letter to her mother.

“Dear Mama. I don’t know what you will have heard by the time this letter reaches you or how the information will reach you at all, but I must confess that I haven’t been entirely honest with you in the last year. This will either come as a shock to you, or it will be no shock at all, but the truth is that I am married and have been since Papa’s conference in Laramie in the spring a year ago.”

She stopped and sighed, rubbing her forehead and the vestiges of the headache she still had. A letter was hardly adequate to explain the things her family deserved to hear. She should tell them a tale like this face to face. But that would involve a return to Wyoming, and she had the creeping feeling that if she ever crossed the Atlantic again, she wouldn’t ever come back to England.

And she loved England. She loved London. She loved the life she’d built for herself in the last year. She had friends, a lover, and a sense that she belonged. Granted, the group she belonged with didn’t quite belong with society themselves, but it was their status as misfits that made them perfect for each other. Home would always play an important part in her life, but that life was in England now.

Then there was Phin. She heaved an even bigger sigh and threw down her pen, spattering ink across the corner of her stationary as she did. She’d never known feelings like the ones she had for Phin. He excited her and aroused her. He made her laugh, and he made her feel safe. She knew beyond a shadow of any doubt that he was the only man for her, but she’d gone and ruined things. She was convinced that she shouldn’t be writing a letter to her mother, she should be pounding on Phin’s door and falling at his feet and begging for his forgiveness. Perhaps there were other things she could do on her knees that would incline him to feel kindlier toward her.

She snorted at the ridiculous, sensual thought just as a knock sounded on her door. Her heart leapt into her throat, and she whipped toward the door, wondering if that could be Phin now. She truly would fellate him out of a sense of pure relief if he’d come to her room to say he’d forgiven her.

“Who is it?” she called, standing.

“Just me, miss,” Florence said, opening the door.

Lenore’s shoulders dropped in disappointment, and she was tempted to laugh at herself.

Right up until Florence said, “If you please, miss, Mr. Swan has arrived and is taking tea in the wisteria parlor with Lord Howsden and Lord Herrington.”

Lenore pressed a hand over the pooling dread in her stomach. “Thank you, Florence. You can tell them I’ll be right down,” she said in a hoarse voice.

Florence nodded, sending her a look of sympathy, and left. Lenore turned to her vanity, picking up a brush to run through her hair, then worked as fast as she could to pile it into something resembling a fashionable style on her head. Any hope of easily getting out of the mess she’d made was completely gone. She was in trouble, pure and simple. At least she had allies. Freddy and Reese would go to bat for her, she knew. She would have felt so much more confident if Phin were there as well, but she had lost the right to hope for that.

She headed downstairs with as much courage as she could muster. She thought she was doing well, until the sound of Bart’s gruff baritone reached around the corner from the parlor as she approached.

“…don’t cotton much to your prissy, British ways,” he was in the middle of saying. “Where I come from, men are men, not women dressed up in men’s clothes. It’s obscene, if you ask me, and not at all what God intended.”

Lenore stepped around the corner into the parlor in time to see Freddy and Reese’s barely-disguised looks of rage as Bart rattled on. Bart sat with his legs spread in one of Reese’s fine chairs, looking like a buffalo in a lily pond. He held a delicate, china cup as though he might crush it without realizing