A Sinful Deception
Page 36
“What do you say, Rivers?” Everett asked. “Will you take this little scrap on as your pupil?”
“Of course he will not, my lord,” Magdalena said indignantly, sliding quickly from Rivers’s knee to pull the girl’s arm free of the baronet’s grasp. “Lucia is a cousin and an orphan, entrusted to our care and keeping, and I won’t have you ruining her usefulness for the sake of some foolish gentlemen’s wager. Back to my room with those flowers, Lucia, pronto, pronto!”
She gave Lucia a light smack between the shoulder blades with the flat of her palm to urge her on, and the girl curtseyed and hurried away, the flowers held high in her arms for safekeeping. But as she curtseyed, Rivers glimpsed regret in those large dark eyes, a genuine wish that things had gone otherwise. Could she truly have wanted to be part of this, of what Magdalena had accurately described as a foolish gentlemen’s wager? Would she really have wanted to cast away her lot on the whim of a man she didn’t know, gambling that he could do what he’d grandly claimed?
As Rivers watched her slender figure weave among the others, he speculated as to whether he could have made so great a transformation. He wondered, trying to imagine her commanding both a stage and an audience as she played a queen.
Could he have done it? Could she?
Yet as soon as she disappeared from the room, she faded from his thoughts as well, and within minutes he’d forgotten both the tiring-girl and the wager entirely.
FIND YOUR HEART’S DESIRE …
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: www.headlineeternal.com
FIND US ON FACEBOOK: facebook.com/eternalromance
FOLLOW US ON TWITTER: @eternal_books
EMAIL US: eternalromance@headline.co.uk