Never Fall for Your Fiancee
- Автор: Heath Virginia
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: St. Martin's Publishing Group
- Жанр: Исторические любовные романы
Электронная книга - «Never Fall for Your Fiancee». Краткое содержание книги:
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Virginia Heath's fun characters and situations will have you laughing out loud! Don't miss this wonderful read! - Sabrina Jeffries, *New York Times* bestselling author**
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The first in a new historical rom-com series, a handsome earl hires a fake fiancée to keep his matchmaking mother at bay, but hilarity ensues when love threatens to complicate everything.**
Vee frowned. “I just wish you had allowed us to meet him first, Minerva. Then we could have made our own judgments about his character. Perhaps you should have invited him home for tea…”
She felt herself cringe at the thought of him seeing her in her true environment, with its shabby thirdhand furniture, peeling paint, and the lingering aroma of the slums outside. “I could hardly bring him home, could I?” Inviting his butler in had been bad enough. The man’s eyes had been everywhere before finally coming to rest on hers with pity. “Lord Fareham lives in Mayfair!”
Vee immediately forgot to be seventeen again and glared through her spectacles, appalled. “There is no shame in poverty, Minerva.”
It was a saying their erstwhile father often uttered while they were growing up and one that she might have believed had he not cheerfully abandoned them when things got too much for him. Which just happened to coincide with Minerva reaching an age where she could step into his worthless shoes. The scoundrel had trained her for it!
“There is no joy in it either, Vee. Only misery—as we well know.” With each passing season, it got harder and harder, and like her sisters, Minerva was old beyond her years.
Old, tired, and slowly being worn into the ground by the relentless drudgery of life.
A sad indictment of her four and twenty years on the earth. “We all work as hard as we can, day in and day out, and yet still barely manage to scrape enough to make ends meet.”
If their stars didn’t dramatically change, even Vee would have to work all the hours God sent to earn her keep. Minerva had shielded her as much as she could from the depravity of their situation, allowing her to continue studying in the hope she might have a better future, but that would come to an abrupt stop once she entered the transient and despondent ranks of the workforce. Vee would have to grow up very fast, or her gentle, bookish, sensitive little sister would be grossly taken advantage of.
“I appreciate all your misgivings about Lord Fareham’s proposition, really I do, for it is peculiar and exceedingly out of the ordinary. I am well aware that what I am doing is morally debatable, but I shall tell you now up front—I will happily pose as his fiancée until Easter if need be. I fail to believe it is possible for life on an earl’s country estate in Hampshire, pretending to be someone else while being paid handsomely for it, to feasibly be as hard as our lives now. High morals won’t put food on the table nor will they keep a roof over our heads!”
“I suppose.” Vee was still understandably concerned, and really, who could blame her?
The past few days had been a bit of a whirlwind. On Wednesday her oldest sister had left home to reason with Mr. Pinkerton to keep a roof over their heads. On Thursday, that same sister had practically forced her into a strange man’s coach headed for the south coast on the basis of little more than a promise, to live under another roof. An ever-so-slightly scandalous, thoroughly charming bachelor’s roof. Had Vee or Diana come home and announced to her they were all to pose as a potential scoundrel’s fake betrothed’s family, she’d have hit the roof. That they were both here, albeit begrudgingly, was a direct result of Minerva’s unfortunate position as head of the family, one they respected and pitied her for in equal measure.
“I just wish we knew more about his character.”
“Perhaps he’s a murderer?” Diana was always the most fanciful of the three of them. “And perhaps this is all a convoluted ruse to feed his unquenchable thirst for killing?”
“You spend far too much time at that newspaper.” Her sister was forever attempting to submit articles in the hope one would someday be published, but the proprietor of the rag paid her a pittance to correct the spelling and the grammar of his less talented male reporters each week before his tawdry publication went to press. “You are convinced everyone is up to no good.” At just twenty-two, Diana was more cynical about the world than even Minerva was.
“I simply prefer to look at life through a clear, unobstructed lens rather than through the presently naive rose-tinted one you are clearly using. What has happened to you, Minerva? Do you honestly think the grass is greener as a rich man’s paid companion? I still cannot fathom what you were thinking to agree to such a preposterous falsehood.” Diana had taken it upon herself to do some hasty investigating at the newspaper before they left, and her account of Lord Fareham’s reputation was, Minerva couldn’t deny, a great source of worry. He had made several appearances in the scandal sheets both for his leisurely lifestyle and his alleged philandering. So much so she doubted he was overly burdened with the responsibilities of being an earl, as he had so convincingly claimed. As a result, he needed to be relegated to a flawed knight in her mind—and perhaps not even a knight at all. More a knave or perhaps even a scoundrel. That would be more prudent than contemplating his dratted soulful eyes! She was better equipped to deal with a scoundrel. An expert, in fact.
“Your earl is nothing short of a rake. A rake who consorts with other rakes and does rakish deeds.” Diana pointed a quaking finger. “He’s lured you to Hampshire to seduce you, mark my words. You’ll be thoroughly ruined.”
“That seems a lot of unnecessary trouble for something he could do just as easily in London.” At her sisters’ widened eyes, she hastily clarified. “Not me, of course! I have no desire to be seduced by him and nor would I stand for it.”
Aside from her healthy distrust of all males—aristocratic or otherwise—she was no fool. An earl would never consider a woman like her for anything beyond a quick tumble. Minerva might not be much of a catch, but she had too much respect for herself to ever allow that to happen. Not that she was tempted. He was far too shallow, and despite her wayward artist’s eye, she had high standards. Of course she did. Or she was simply jaded. Either way, men in general held little real appeal anymore. “The only relationship I want with Lord Fareham—and he with me—is a business relationship.
“As for ruination—I hardly think anyone gives two figs about my reputation regardless of what I do. Or either of yours, for that matter. We might consider ourselves a gentleman’s daughters and therefore a cut above our unfortunate neighbors, but we’ve only ever had Papa’s word he was a gentleman and we all know nobody could spin a yarn better than dear Papa.”
She smiled at her sisters to soften the necessary blow she was about to deliver. “As far as the entire world is concerned, we are nobodies. Nothings. Three more struggling, faceless, downtrodden souls in a city filled to the brim with them. No one cares what we do, nor will they remember our misdeeds any more than they recall our good ones.”
Vee pouted. “That’s a very cynical summation and one I don’t happen to agree with. Something will turn up. Something always does.”
“Do you seriously believe a proper gentleman will one day happen to be in Clerkenwell, and see past the frayed and patched clothes on your back to the genteel lady beneath? If you do, then I am happy to be the one to shatter your silly romantic notions, because you will be disappointed, Vee. Real life is not a fairy tale.”
Minerva used to dare to dream such nonsense until she realized dreams never came true—they got crushed instead. It was funny how becoming a parent overnight had made her view the world pragmatically. Some people were destined to live difficult lives, and theirs was so difficult even their own father couldn’t stomach it. Nor could the young man she had foolishly thought herself in love with. Faced with three Merriwell girls for the price of one, he had hastily severed all ties, too. She wasn’t bitter about that any longer—it still hurt from time to time when she felt miserably all alone—but she had learned her lesson well.