ceased to feel enraged by them.
Especially as he knew that gossip to be wholly untrue.
His mouth thinned now as he looked at Betsy Thompson beneath hooded lids. ‘The apology alone would have sufficed,’ he rasped. ‘Now, is there not some other service which you need to be busy performing for my aunt? Surely you have completed this one to the best of your ability.’
And been found wanting, Elizabeth acknowledged irritably, very aware that the laughingly flirtatious man who had tried to kiss her a few minutes ago had completely disappeared to be replaced by a gentleman who was now every inch the wealthy and powerful Earl of Osbourne, with vast estates in Kent and Suffolk, as well as a beautiful town house in London.
She gave a brief inclination of her head. ‘I believe it is time for Hector’s afternoon walk.’
‘Ah, yes.’ The earl gave a hard, mocking smile. ‘I have noticed, with my aunt’s cousin Letitia already in residence, you are more companion to my aunt’s dog than to my aunt herself.’
Yet another insult, no matter how smoothly it was delivered, Elizabeth recognised with a frown. Unfortunately, experience had shown her that with no references it was almost impossible to find employment in London. Indeed, Elizabeth had only succeeded in securing her present position in Mrs Wilson’s household because of her heroic rescue of that lady’s pampered and much-loved Scottish Terrier, after he had slipped his lead in a London park one afternoon and run amok.
As such, Elizabeth needed to maintain her employment with Mrs Wilson if she did not wish to return to Shoreley Park and that dubious offer of marriage from Lord Faulkner. A fate Elizabeth still considered— despite now knowing of that gentleman’s roguish good looks—to be more painful than death itself.
Lord Faulkner could not know it, but Elizabeth was actually doing him a great service by not accepting his proposal; she was the daughter most likened to her mother in looks, and as such had always been viewed with suspicion by neighbouring matrons of sons of marriageable age, in the fear, no doubt, that she might be like her mother in other ways …
Her chin rose proudly. ‘I really do sincerely apologise for any offence I may have given, my lord.’
Somehow Nathaniel doubted that very much. He had easily seen the battle taking place within Miss Betsy Thompson’s beautiful head as she wrestled with the knowledge that she considered herself to be in the right of it, whilst at the same time totally aware that she was speaking to the favourite nephew—in fact, the only nephew—of her employer.
Indeed, that inner battle had been so transparent he might have laughed aloud if he were not still feeling so disgruntled with her on Gabriel’s behalf.
After all, he had earlier attempted to steal a kiss from this young woman for his own enjoyment. And the fact that Nathaniel had received his injuries from paid thugs as he’d left a gambling club owned by yet another of his disreputable friends was not in the least flattering to his own reputation …
He viewed Betsy Thompson through narrowed lids. ‘You have not been a paid employee for very long, have you?’
A delicate blush coloured those ivory cheeks. ‘What makes you say that, my lord?’
The mere fact that she was daring to question him like this, an earl and the nephew of her employer, was reason enough! ‘You do not appear to know your place.’
Those blue eyes sparkled with what he knew without doubt to be a fierce temper. ‘My place, my lord?’
Had he ever had another conversation like this one? Nathaniel mused ruefully. Somehow he doubted it. ‘I believe it is the usual practice to show a little more … respect, when addressing one’s elders and betters,’ he drawled with deliberate provocation; after all, the blue of this young lady’s eyes did look particularly fine when she was in a temper!
Considering Nathaniel Thorne was a mere eight, or possibly nine years, her senior, Elizabeth did not consider him in the least ‘her elder’. And as Lady Elizabeth Copeland, the daughter of an earl, neither was he ‘her better’.
Except she was not Lady Elizabeth Copeland at this moment in time, was she? And she had no idea when she would become so again. Or, indeed, if she ever would …
Leaving her home had been a purely impulsive act on her part, a response to Caroline’s identical response to Lord Faulkner’s proposal two days earlier. Those two days had been spent in a fruitless search of the local area for the missing Caroline and had resulted in the other two sisters assuming that she had likely fled all the way to London.
London …
All three of the Copeland girls had always wished for, and repeatedly been denied by their father, so much as a single visit to England’s capital, let alone the Season that might have secured a marriage for any or all of them, on the basis, no doubt, that Marcus Copeland had considered the temptations to be found there to be responsible for his wife’s abandonment of her family.
Whatever his rationale for the decision, Caroline and Elizabeth especially had longed to experience some of those ‘temptations’ for themselves; Diana, the eldest sister at one and twenty, had always been the more reserved of the three, taking her responsibilities as mistress of Shoreley Park and surrogate mother to her two younger sisters very seriously indeed.
And so first Caroline, and then Elizabeth, had left the only home they had ever known for the excitement that London represented. Elizabeth could not speak for Caroline, of course, having had neither sight nor word of her sister’s whereabouts since reaching the city, but she had quickly realised that the excitements of town only applied to the wealthy and titled members of London society, and that the paid companion she had been forced by circumstances to become was merely a lowly employee at the mercy of the whims and fancies of her employer, with very few glimpses of the world she had so longed to inhabit.
Elizabeth had also had plenty of time in which to realise how much she missed her sisters, how alone she felt without the two of them to laugh and gossip with. To realise how, being the youngest sister, Caroline and Diana had been her companions for all of her nineteen years.
Indeed, Elizabeth had missed them so much that, on the day she had effected the recapture of Hector after he had made his escape from Mrs Wilson in the park, she had briefly, foolishly, thought she had seen Caroline seated as a passenger of the most fashionable coach travelling in the park that day.
It was nonsense, of course, a ridiculous notion only confirmed by Elizabeth’s glimpse of the gentleman easily controlling the pair of perfect but highly strung greys in front of that gleaming carriage. An aristocratic gentleman whose arrogant good looks were made to look dangerous by the scar that ran down the left side of his face. The rakish sort of gentleman none of the Copeland sisters had ever, or would ever, be acquainted with.
Nevertheless, that brief encounter had served to emphasise how deeply she wished to be with her sisters again. Unfortunately, Elizabeth—and no doubt Caroline, too—had realised since arriving in London that, when she’d left Hampshire so suddenly she had given no consideration as to how she was ever to learn when or if Lord Faulkner had quit Shoreley Park, thereby making it safe for her to return to her home.
Until a remedy to that situation occurred to her, it was very necessary that she retain her current position in Mrs Wilson’s household—something she would not be able to do if she ran foul of that lady’s much-loved nephew. ‘I apologise again, my lord, for any—any misunderstandings,’ she said stiff ly, ‘but I am sure that your aunt
