Notorious Pleasures (Maiden Lane #2)(7)
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

Thomas blinked, realizing that he’d missed most of what his companion had said. He turned his head to the duke, but out of the corner of his eye he could still see the woman playfully drawing her fingers across the slopes of her breasts. “Wanton baggage.”

“Who?”

Damn, he’d spoken aloud and now Wakefield waited for an answer.

Thomas grimaced. “Mrs. Tate.” He jerked his chin to indicate the woman across the room. “Every time I see her, she has a different beau, all younger than herself. The woman should be hauled up on indecency charges. Anyone can see that she’s five and thirty if she’s a day.”

“Eight and thirty,” Wakefield murmured.

Thomas turned to look incredulously at him. “You know her?”

Wakefield’s eyebrows rose. “I believe most of London society knows her.”

Thomas glanced back at Mrs. Tate. Was Wakefield speaking of biblical knowledge? Had the duke bedded the woman?

“She has a quick wit and an easy manner,” Wakefield was saying lightly. “Besides, she married a man three times her age. I don’t begrudge her a little merriment now that she’s widowed.”

“She flaunts herself,” Thomas gritted. He could feel Wakefield’s look.

“Perhaps, but only with unmarried gentlemen. She is careful not to dally with a man otherwise engaged.”

As if she’d heard the word engaged, Lavinia Tate suddenly looked up, her eyes meeting his across the distance that separated them. He knew, even though he could not see them now, that her eyes were a plain brown. That, he thought with satisfaction, was something she couldn’t change. Her eyes were and always would be ordinary brown, no matter how much paint she employed.

She held his eyes and lifted her chin in a challenge that would bring any red-blooded man to attention. It was a look as old as Eden, as old as Eve daring Adam with a bit of over-ripened fruit.

Thomas deliberately looked away from her proud gaze. He’d tasted that fruit once, and though it had been difficult, he’d weaned himself from its heady sweetness. The woman was a jade, plain and simple. And if there was one thing he’d had enough of in this lifetime, it was jades.

LADY HERO’S FACE was calm and grave and almost beautiful—and she looked not at all impressed by Griffin’s dramatic recitation of his sins.

“I had already decided you were a rake,” she said as he halted before her. She sank into a graceful curtsy. “But as you are to be my brother-in-law, Lord Reading, I think avoiding your company entirely may be somewhat difficult.”

The woman certainly knew how to prick a man’s illusions about himself. Once again he was hit with the awful irony that this woman out of all the women at the ball should be the one Thomas had chosen as his bride. A woman who made no bones about her displeasure with Griffin. A woman who had seen him at his very worst—and showed no signs of forgetting the sight. A woman who was proud of her snowy-white soul.

Lady Perfect—a perfect lady for his perfect brother.

He eyed her with disfavor, watching as she arched her damned left eyebrow in pointed query. She wasn’t quite a beauty, his brother’s fiancée. Instead she had that sort of elegance that was found sometimes among the upper crust of English society—creamy pale skin, a slightly overlong face, properly neat features, and hair that was red without going so far as to be gauchely ginger.

He’d seen her type a hundred times before, and yet… something about Lady Hero was decidedly different. For one thing, most of the ladies of her rank would’ve simply left him to his fate in the sitting room. Yet she had gone against her own rigid morals to save both him and Bella. Had she acted out of compassion for two strangers? Or merely a stolid code of ethics that superseded even her own distaste for what she’d found in the sitting room?

Griffin looked about. The music had halted, the dance was at an end, and he was supposed to escort her back to stodgy Thomas. Which he would do, of course—just not yet.

He bowed, proffering his elbow in feigned docility. “Sad, isn’t it?”

She looked at his arm with sudden suspicion, but was forced by her own rigid propriety to take it. Griffin tamped down a surge of triumph.

“What is?” she asked, her voice wary.

“Oh, that a woman as pious as you should have to put up with the company of a rake like me merely because of polite convention.”

“Humph.” She lifted her chin as he led her slowly through the crowd. “I hope I know my duty.”

He rolled his eyes. “Buck up. Enduring my presence in your life will surely give you points toward sainthood.”

If he hadn’t turned to look at her at that very moment, he would’ve missed the twitch of her soft, pink lips. Egad. Lady Perfect had a sense of humor! He’d seen her smile, but the expression had been fixed and immobile. What would a genuine smile look like on her face? What would happen if she actually laughed?

Intrigued, he bowed his head toward hers, inhaling the scent of flowers. “If you aren’t marrying my brother for his title, then why?”

Wide gray eyes looked up, startled, into his. She was so near he only had to lean an inch or so closer and his lips would touch hers. He could find out what she tasted like, if she would break under his tongue and run soft and sweet like honey.

Good God! Griffin jerked his head back.

Fortunately, she seemed to have missed his confusion. “What do you mean?”

He inhaled and glanced away. They were nearly across the room now and moving in the opposite direction from Thomas, though she didn’t seem to notice. He was playing with fire, but he’d always found danger terribly tempting.

“Why marry Thomas?”

“My brother and he are friends. Maximus urged me to make the match.”

“That’s all?”

“No, of course not. My brother would not have considered Mandeville for me if the marquess weren’t well regarded, kind, and a man of substance.” She rattled off his brother’s attributes as if listing the points of a breeding ram.

“You don’t love him?” he asked with honest curiosity.

She knit her brows as if he’d burst into Swedish. “I have no doubt that I will someday have affection for him, naturally.”

“Naturally,” he murmured, feeling again that idiotic triumph. “Rather like a favorite spaniel, perhaps?”

She stopped dead, and if she hadn’t been restrained by her propriety, he had the feeling she would’ve set her hands on her hips like an irate fishwife. “Mandeville isn’t a spaniel!”