Read Online Incognita (Fairchild Book 2) by Jaima Fixsen - Free Book Online

testimony of their betters. What more can they need?”  
    “Nothing, I’m sure. Will you assist with recruitment at the dispensary?”  
    Mrs. Longswill turned even more solemn. “My dear, I really think I must.”  
    Much longer of this and she would crack. Mrs. Longswill was a good woman, a worthy soul, and all Anna could feel was a curdling self-pity. It blanketed her like a dark cloud, never mind the sun filling the windows.  
    “How is your boy?” Mrs. Longswill asked.  
    Anna nearly closed her eyes, but saved herself at the last moment. “Full of frisk. I took him to the park the other day and nearly toppled over from fatigue by the end of it.”  
    The happy light in Mrs. Longswill’s eyes would kill her if she didn’t look away. “I think we should encourage them to get started, don’t you?” Anna said and set her face to the front of the room, saying nothing until the vicar took his place.
    She’d always liked the vicar’s gravelly voice and the way his white wig and clerical collar stood stark against his dark robes, but try as she would, she couldn’t hold on to his words today. They slipped by her ears like pebbles through water, splashing and rippling, nothing more. Anna shifted on the hard bench, reflecting that at least the note writer had turned out to be him—the man from the park and the masquerade, who’d told her his name was Jasper Rushford. She liked Beaumaris better.  
    Her first thought on seeing that unfamiliar name, scrolling across his neat pasteboard card, had been much worse. She’d been reckless in choosing her lovers, very reckless, and it would be no more than she deserved if some man exposed her. Never mind that it was long ago. You couldn’t wash that off with a splash of soap and water. Captain Beaumaris was insulting and a nuisance—luckily the nursemaid was blaming Henry’s foul language on the footmen—but he wasn’t dangerous to her.  
    Had he told her his Christian name? No, but it was written on his card. She cast her mind back. Alistair Beaumaris. He’d signed his letters in that style, closing with ‘Yr obedient servant.’ Well, she got the joke there now. The man was none of the three: not hers, not obedient, and certainly no one’s servant. It hardly mattered. She wouldn’t see him again. There would be no more elliptical notes to terrify her.  
    Anna paused, her eyes tracing the edge of a leafy shadow moving across the whitewashed north wall. Lovers didn’t feel like the right word for those men. They might have used it for her, but she’d viewed them more as stud horses, chosen for convenience and a single purpose. She’d been all kinds of a fool, but she really should have taken better note of who they were—then she wouldn’t have panicked upon receiving Beaumaris’s card. Of course, at the time, she’d been so wild with rage at her husband, she hadn’t really cared who she bedded—she only wanted them for the child they could give her, a child she could flaunt in Anthony’s face.  
    That fit of temper should have cured her of all others, the same way a blistered chest drew phlegm from the lungs. There’d been a good pamphlet about that once.  
    She couldn’t call those men lovers—not when she could hardly remember their faces. She hadn’t needed that many. Four had been enough. They’d all been rather the same, save for the footman. Despite his lustiness, he had been sweet, smoothing her hair back from her face and looking at her with a steadiness that threatened to make her cry. Certainly he was the handsomest of the lot. Also the most tender, but in theory, as dangerous as the others. No lawyer in his right mind would represent her claim if the truth got out.  
    When she’d spied Captain Beaumaris’s dark silhouette in the street today, fear had turned her innards to water and stolen the air from her chest. Relief followed once she saw his face, but he could have been one of the four. The footman, James, was still