The Rebel Bride by Catherine Coulter

She’d applied for it with alacrity a few days before, feeling hope surge through her. Outfitted in her most subdued gray high-necked gown, her hair drawn into a severe bun at the nape of her neck, she sounded the brass knocker at the solid brick residence in the heart of a very respectable bourgeois area of Paris. The front door swung open, and she confidently faced a rather pinch-faced butler who demanded without preamble what the Young Person wanted. The Young Person wanted a job, she wanted to shout at the man, but she didn’t. Upon being informed in rather halting French, punctuated with gestures to the governess post in the journal, the butler allowed a flicker of surprise to pass over his cadaverous face and cast Kate a look that made her feel as if she were some sort of oddity. He said quite unnecessarily, “Mademoiselle is English. It is of an oddness, that. I will see if Madame wishes to see you.”

She bore this with fortitude and was admitted not many minutes later into a large salle that struck her as being furnished in less than the first stare of elegance. Like the salle, the large, somberly dressed Madame Treboucher looked to be a bastion of respectability.

“You are an English Young Person,” Madame announced, her eyes on Kate’s hair. “Your hair has much too much redness.”

Finding both these statements to be unarguable, Kate replied simply and proceeded to inform Madame of her aspirations. Madame was silent for a moment, her thick lips pursed. She looked Kate up and down and finally announced with the utmost disdain that Mademoiselle was far too young for such a responsible position, and furthermore, she wanted no red-haired Englishwoman running free in her house to seduce her son and her husband. Kate stared at her openmouthed, and finding herself unable to vent her outrage in the French tongue, rose stiffly and stalked out without a word. Once outside, she raised her fist to the heavens and demanded that God strike down the wretched woman, and the young gentleman she’d danced with at Almack’s who’d assured her that the French considered the English their liberators.

She sat back on the bench, the journal lying open on her lap, and stared for a moment ahead of her. Her flight to Paris had been so utterly undramatic that she had quite decided that her luck had changed, that perhaps she’d not been born under the wrong stars after all. But now, after more than a week in Paris, her small hoard of coins practically gone, she felt near to panic. A growl of hunger in her stomach reminded her sharply that panic over her situation wouldn’t buy food, nor would it pay the rent for her room for another week. She scanned the remainder of the positions on the page with fierce intensity. A milliner’s assistant on the rue de la Bourgoine. What a paltry wage, barely enough to maintain the small room. But her alternatives were rapidly dwindling. She set her mouth, and with a determined effort repeated aloud the street number.

When she looked up, the street address on her lips, she saw a tall, elegantly dressed gentleman walking purposefully down the hedged walk toward her. Her eyes widened in disbelief. Julien! All her careful planning, for naught. No, surely it couldn’t be he, no, certainly. She was just tired and hungry; the sun was in her eyes.

Of course it was the earl. “Damn you,” she yelled toward him. She jumped to her feet, the journal gliding unnoticed to the ground, and took to her heels in the opposite direction. Her breath came in quick gasps and her violent exertion on a very hungry stomach made her dizzy. She pulled up short, weaving back and forth. The gardens blurred before her eyes. She took another uncertain step forward, only to find that two strong arms were around her and her head was against his shoulder.

Julien held her against him none too gently and said in a hard, uncompromising voice, “How very coincidental to see you here, Miss Brandon. Don’t you find it strange? First I meet you lying dead at my feet and now in Paris. Well, no matter what you think, truth be told, for your little game is quite over.”