The Passion of an Angel. Kasey Michaels

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СКАЧАТЬ our grandfather? How can I do that and die in peace? And so I have come up with a solution.”

      Daventry eyed the unfolded paper with a wary eye. “I’m beginning not to like this, Colonel,” he said quietly, knowing he was honor-bound to listen to the man. That would teach him to drink with near strangers!

      “I’ve been watching you these past weeks, Daventry,” MacAfee continued in a rush. “You’re a responsible sort, if a bit stiff—at least until tonight. Make a tolerably pleasant drunk you do, too, not that I haven’t had to help you along a bit, tipping the servants to be sure your glass stayed full as I dangled Miss Broughton under your lovelorn nose. You’ll be a perfect guardian for my Angel. Take the sweet little love under your wing, so to speak. See that she’s financially freed of Shadwell, given a season years from now, when the time is right—all that drivel that’s so important to a female. And she won’t give you a moment’s trouble, I swear it.”

      If Daventry hadn’t been sobered by the prospect of the coming battle, MacAfee’s words served to push away the last of the wine-induced fog that blurred his senses. “Allow me a moment to reflect, if you will, MacAfee? You have investigated me these past weeks? You have deliberately sought me out in the last few days, ingratiated yourself to me—and all so that I might take your young sister as my ward if something were to happen to you? And that paper you’re holding? That would be some sort of legal transference of guardianship?”

      “Already signed by the Iron Duke himself,” the colonel said, his grin now appearing much more calculating than friendly. “Old Arthur seemed very affected by my concern for my dear little Angel. He also said that you’re the best of men, and plump enough in the pocket since that rich-as-Croesus aunt of yours stuck her spoon in the wall, so that you could take on a half-dozen wards without putting even a small dent in your fortune.”

      “I could kill you for this, MacAfee,” Daventry drawled as he took the paper and read it, “except that any such personally satisfying action would definitely saddle me with your unfortunate sibling. And if I don’t agree to sign, I’d be sending a distraught man into battle, wouldn’t I—or at least that’s what Wellington will believe. You’re a singularly vile, clever bastard, Colonel, and I believe I detest you almost as much as I do myself for having fallen prey to your scheme. What’s your sister’s name again? Patience?”

      “Prudence,” MacAfee corrected him as he nearly succeeded in pushing Daventry into hysterical laughter by extracting both a pen and a small ink pot from his pocket. “My little Angel. You’ll adore the little mite, truly. And as I said, she won’t give you a moment’s worry. Sweet, biddable, amenable—trust me in this, a true Angel. Just make sure she has an allowance to keep her fed until she’s grown, that’s all I ask. You don’t even have to see her until she’s ready for her season. Just leave her in Sussex for now. Honestly! Then,” he added, pushing the quill at the marquess, “I can die in peace, having served king and country with the last drop of my soldier blood.”

      “Oh, cut line, you shameless bastard. And don’t worry your head about dying, MacAfee,” the marquess said, using the colonel’s back as a makeshift desk as he scribbled his name and title at the bottom of the paper. “I don’t intend to let you out of my sight until the battle is over—at which point I shall personally blacken both your eyes and rid you of several of those lying, conniving teeth!”

      BOOK ONE

      COMMITMENT

      Tis true, your budding Miss is very charming,

      But shy and awkward at first coming out,

      So much alarm’d, that she is quite alarming,

      All Giggle, Blush; half Pertness and half Pout;

      And glancing at Mamma, for fear there’s harm in

      What you, she, it, or they, may be about,

      The nursery still leaps out in all they utter—

      Besides, they always smell of bread and butter.

      George Noel Gordon,

      Lord Byron

      CHAPTER ONE

      Might shake the saintship of an anchorite.

      George Noel Gordon,

      Lord Byron

      “PRUDENCE MACAFEE, Prudence MacAfee,” the Marquess of Daventry grumbled beneath his breath as he reined his mount to a halt on the crest of a small hill that overlooked the MacAfee farm. “Was there ever a more prudish, miss-ish name, or a more reluctant guardian?”

      He lifted his curly brimmed beaver to swipe at the sweat caused by the noon heat of this early April day, exposing his silvered black hair to the sun, then turned in the saddle to squint back down the roadway. His traveling coach, containing both his valet, Rexford, and his sister’s borrowed companion, the redoubtable Miss Honoria Prentice, was still not in sight, and he debated whether he should await their arrival or proceed on his own.

      Not that either person would be of much use to him. Rexford was an old woman at thirty, too concerned with the condition of his lily-white rump as it was bounced over the spring-rain rutted roads to be a supporting prop to his reluctant-guardian employer. And Miss Prentice, whose pinched-lips countenance could send a delicate child like Prudence MacAfee into a spasm, was probably best not seen until arrangements to transport the young female to London had been settled.

      Damn Henry MacAfee for being right! And damn him for so blatantly maneuvering his only-cursory friend into this ridiculous guardianship! He’d heard of the colonel’s bravery in battle, up until nearly the end, when his second horse had been shot out from under him and he had disappeared. If Daventry could have found Henry MacAfee’s body among the heaps of nameless, faceless dead, he would have slapped the man back to life if that were possible. Anything to be shed of this unwanted responsibility.

      What was he, Banning Talbot, four and thirty years of age and struggling with this bachelorhood, going to do with an innocent young female? He had asked precisely that question of his sister, Frederica, who had nearly choked on her sherry before imploring her brother to never, ever repeat any such volatile, provocative question in public.

      It wasn’t as if he hadn’t already lived up to his commitment. Having been wounded himself at Waterloo, which delayed his return to London only in time to discover that Frederica, his only relative, was gravely ill, the marquess had still met with his solicitor to arrange for a generous allowance to be paid quarterly to one Miss Prudence MacAfee of MacAfee Farm. Contrary to what Henry MacAfee had said, he knew he should at least visit the child, but he buried that thought as he concentrated on taking care of his sister.

      He had directed his solicitor to explain the impossibility of Daventry’s presence at the Sussex holding for some time, and had then dragged out that time, beyond his own recovery, beyond any hint of danger remaining in his sister’s condition. Past the Christmas holidays, and beyond.

      He would still be in London, enjoying his first full season in two years, if it weren’t that Frederica, who had always been able to draw her older brother firmly round her thumb, had put forth the notion that she would “above all things” adore having a young female in the house whom she could “educate in the ways of society and pamper and dress in pretty clothes.”

      Why, Frederica would even pop the girl off, when the time came to put up the child’s hair and push СКАЧАТЬ