Read The Scandalous Spinster Online Free by Alyxandra Harvey

The marquis was with one of his footmen who did not act like footmen, but more like boxers waiting for something to fight. Their gazes collided, the marquis with his square jaw and patrician features, his customary blue-velvet coat, and Clara, ever unnoticed.

Usually.

She found she vastly preferred being unnoticed. There was something not quite right in his eyes. She could not explain it, but it made the back of her neck prickle unpleasantly.

“Lord Eastbourne,” she said politely, and kept walking.

Every hair on her arms lifted in warning. She did not falter, did not look back, though she had never felt more exposed. She turned the corner and finally released her breath, safely out of view.

And then she was yanked backward into the shadows, a whiskey voice in her ear. “Don’t make a sound.”

Chapter Seven

Bram.

Her body responded before her brain fully recognized him. He glowered down at her before tucking her into his side. He enveloped her completely in his heat, his scent of rain and sweet limes. She was so close she could see the stitching of his coat, a glimpse of skin behind his loosely knotted cravat, not at all fashionably starched and complicated. She found she vastly preferred it.

“Don’t move,” he ordered.

She leaned into him without conscious volition, so moving did not seem to be an option anyway. At least not moving away.

“On second thought,” he muttered to himself before tugging her into the nearest room, a small parlor reserved mostly for the lady of the house, had there been one. His gaze roamed from ornate chairs to a crystal swan roughly the size of a real swan, to an armoire painted with lilies. He dragged Clara toward it, yanked it open, and lifted her inside. He closed the doors in her face before she could make a sound.

She saw him through the crack of light between the wooden doors. He dropped into one of those spindly chairs that she was surprised did not break under him. His pause made her think he was mildly surprised as well.

And then a footman burst in—the same one who had been receiving an order from the marquis, the one who did not carry himself like a footman. He had doubled back. Looking for her? For something else? Someone else?

He looked disdainfully at Bram, who could not have stood out more, large and sun-worn, in the elegant room that suddenly looked like a dollhouse, fragile and inconsequential around him.

“What are you doing in here?” the footman demanded in a way that would have been utterly foreign to a proper footman addressing the guest of a marquis.

Bram regarded him calmly, stoically. Maybe not so stoically. Clara fancied she could read him a bit better now—the lift of his scarred eyebrow, the clench of his jaw. Even through the gap between the doors of an armoire she shared with a morning gown and a fox-fur stole who stared back at her accusingly. There might be a spider in that upper corner as well, but as it seemed larger than she liked, she ignored it. Her pulse hammered in her ears.

“Snuck away for a smoke, mate.” Bram pulled a pipe from his coat pocket. His expression was hard, daring the footman to continue his rude questioning.

The footman did not meet his gaze, but he did look around the parlor. Clara held her breath. Don’t see me, don’t see me.

Bram’s concern had rubbed off on her. And however would she explain her position? Not that a regular footman would have the audacity to demand answers from an earl’s daughter. She had paid off her father’s footmen when she was a girl so they would turn a blind eye when bringing in her many packages from the bookstore. Her favorite footman had never needed a bribe. The rest mostly ignored her if she did not require their immediate assistance.