Read Online Sweet Bargain by Kate Moore - Free Book Online

Hilcombe for the morning.
    "If you wish to relate your business to me, Lord Haverly, I will tell my father of it as soon as he returns," she offered, seating herself on a pale blue sofa opposite the window where the earl stood. He stared at her for a minute but made no move to sit in any of the chairs near her.
    Relate his business to her? In a room full of the unbearable softness of roses while she herself looked as delicate as petals against the sky. " Will you tell your father the reason for my call? I wonder, Miss Shaw. You may not wish to give my complaint to your father when you hear what it is."
    "Lord Haverly, I am not in the habit of withholding messages from my father." The man meant to insult her again, and she was forced to remind herself that the earl had a claim to her father's justice and she must act calmly and justly in her father's place. She folded her hands in her lap and looked up at him with as civil an expression as she could manage. She would not offer Lord Haverly any refreshment.
    "Very well," said the earl. He stood opposite her, his back to the windows now. "Tell your father I have been troubled since Sunday last with attacks upon my stretch of the Ashe, with persons who have polluted the stream, and dammed it twice." His gaze challenged her.
    "I will."
    'Tell him I suspect your brothers."
    "No!" She jumped up and strode toward him, stopping just inches from where he stood. "My brothers have not been near your stretch of the Ashe since the day we met," she said, giving to each word a distinctness and emphasis that could hardly be mistaken.
    He did not move or look away, but met her anger with an unflinching gaze of his own. "How can you be sure of that?" he asked.
    Now she saw what folly she'd been guilty of in giving in to Auggie and her cousins that day. She had brought them all under suspicion. "My brothers are neither criminals nor sneaks. When we fished the Lower Ashe in the past, we did so openly, with the permission granted to the trustee. Your purchasing Courtland put an end to our fishing there."
    "Yet you were fishing there the day I arrived. And that was poaching, was it not? Would not your brothers, resentful of my claim to the Ashe and encouraged by your own example, take vengeance on me if they saw the chance?"
    "My example encourage criminal acts?" They had come to her next folly. In his eyes she saw his awareness of her petty revenge against him. Suddenly she felt small and childish next to him. The comfortable muslin she had chosen for a Saturday at home seemed absurdly girlish, her dignity impossible to maintain. Her hands shook, but she concealed their shaking in the folds of her gown. She was Augustus Shaw's daughter. Her brothers were not furtive, desperate characters with no respect for the law, and this earl could not insult them so. Did he in his pride imagine that the Shaws had none? He was unbearable. He deserved no justice from her. "I will tell my father you have a complaint to make, Lord Haverly."
    She meant to dismiss him, he saw. It was time to nod and bow and withdraw, but though his mind understood her intent, his body would not obey. She was too near, and a taut weakness held him rooted to the spot. The morning sun streaming through the tall windows burnished her hair and the tips of her lashes, and her eyes burned blue. "It is not only attacks on the river, but wanton destruction as well. Last night someone severed the main pulley on my waterwheel and set fire to the timbers which were to restore my stable."
    She gasped. He accused her brothers of no less a crime than the one of the poor villagers her father meant to defend. "You imagine my brothers were in any way responsible for such acts?"
    He had provoked her defiance now. It was there in the deceptive sweetness of her voice. "I have evidence," he said.
    "Evidence against boys who lay asleep in their beds while someone else set fire to your lumber and damaged your waterwheel? Acts which boys could hardly have