Last Night's Scandal (The Dressmakers 5)

Yes, because it’s safe there.

“My attention has not wandered, I assure you, Miss Carsington,” Lisle said. “At present it could not be more firmly fixed.”

He’d like to fix his hands on the throat of the fiend who’d given her this face and body—as though she needed any more weapons. It must have been the devil. A trade of some kind, sometime in the five years since Lisle had last seen her. Naturally Satan, like anyone else, would have had the worst of any bargain with her.

In a corner of his mind, the voice that warned him of snakes, scorpions, and cutthroats lurking in the darkness said, Watch out.

But he already knew that, because he knew Olivia.

She was dangerous. Beautiful or striking, with or without breasts, she exerted a fatal fascination. She easily captivated otherwise intelligent men, most of whom had already seen her destroy the peace of other equally intelligent men.

He knew that. Her letters had been filled with her numerous “romantic disappointments,” among other things. He’d heard other stories since entering this ballroom. He knew what she was like.

He was merely temporarily unhinged because he was a man. It was a purely physical reaction, completely natural when one encountered a beautiful woman. He had such reactions all the time. This was disturbing only because he was reacting to Olivia.

Who was his friend and ally, practically his sister.

He’d always thought of her that way.

And that was the way he’d continue to think of her, he told himself.

He’d had a bit of a shock, that was all. He was a man who encountered shocks nearly every day of his life, and thrived on them.

“Having fixed my attention for the moment,” he said, “perhaps the lady would be so kind as to grant the next dance.”

“That’s mine,” said one of the men hovering at her shoulder. “Miss Carsington promised.”

Olivia snapped her fan shut. “You may have another, Lord Belder,” she said. “I haven’t seen Lord Lisle this age, and he’ll soon be gone again. He’s the most elusive man in the world. If I don’t take this dance, who knows when I should have another? He could be drowned in a shipwreck. He could be eaten by crocodiles or bitten by a viper or a scorpion. He could succumb to plague. He’s never happy, you know, except when risking his life to advance our knowledge of an ancient civilization. I can dance with you anytime.”

Belder looked murder at Lisle, but he smiled at Olivia and yielded his claim.

As Lisle led her away, he finally understood why so many men kept shooting each other on her account.

They all wanted her and they couldn’t help it; she knew it and she didn’t care.

Chapter 2

The gloved hand Olivia had taken was warm, and stronger and firmer than she remembered. When it clasped hers, she grew warm everywhere, which startled her—and that was by no means her first shock this evening.

Had she ever taken Lisle’s hand before? She couldn’t remember. But it had been instinctive to do so, to go with him, though he wasn’t the young man she used to know.

For one thing, he was much larger, and not simply physically, though that change was impressive enough.

When he first drew near, moments ago, he blocked her view of the rest of the room. He’d always been taller than she. But he wasn’t a lanky youth anymore. He was a man, exuding virility to a dizzying degree.

She wasn’t the only one he made dizzy. Among the hordes of men about her were a few women friends. She’d seen the way they looked at Lisle when he entered her circle. Now, as he and she passed into the crowd proper, on their way to the dancing area, she saw heads turn—and for once it wasn’t only men, and they weren’t all staring at her.

She’d stared, too, when she’d first spotted him, though she knew him so well. He captured one’s attention because he wasn’t like anybody else.

She studied him surreptitiously, sizing him up as she sized up everybody, as any Dreadful DeLucey would do.

The Egyptian sun had darkened his skin to bronze and lightened his hair to pale gold, but that wasn’t the only way he was different.

The black coat hugged his broad shoulders and lean torso, and the trousers outlined his long, muscled legs. His linen was immaculately white, his evening slippers glossy black. Though he wore the same impeccable evening attire as other men, he seemed not fully clothed somehow, perhaps because no other gentleman made one so forcefully aware of the powerful body underneath the elegant attire.

She saw other women taking him in, pausing in their conversations to study him or try to catch his eye.

They saw only the outside. That, she admitted, was exciting enough.

She knew he was different in other, less obvious ways. His wasn’t the usual gentleman’s education. Daphne Carsington had taught him all and more than he would have learned at public school and university. Rupert Carsington had taught him survival skills few gentlemen had need for: how to handle a knife, for instance, and how to throw a man out of a window.

All this she knew. What she hadn’t been prepared for was the change in his voice: the tantalizing hint of a non-English lilt in the aristocratic accents, and the way the sound conjured images of tents and turbans and half-naked women languishing on Turkey carpets.

He didn’t carry himself in the way he used to do, either. For nearly ten years he’d lived in a complicated and dangerous world, where he’d learned to move as quietly and smoothly as a cat or a cobra.

The deep gold skin and golden hair made one think of tigers, but that didn’t quite capture his otherness. He moved like . . . water. As he threaded his way through the crowd, he sent ripples through it. Watching him pass, women fainted mentally and men contemplated killing him.

As one who’d learned to be acutely aware of his surroundings, he’d sense this, she was sure, though his face gave nothing away.

But she, who’d known him for so long, was aware that he wasn’t as coolly contained and detached as he seemed. The logical, pedantic surface hid a fierce, obstinate nature. That, she suspected, hadn’t changed. Too, he had a temper—which, the set of his mouth told her, had been sorely tried recently.

She tugged his hand. He looked down at her, his grey eyes glinting silver in the candlelight.

“This way,” she said.

She led him past a cluster of servants bearing trays, dropped his hand to take two glasses of champagne from one of the trays, then passed out of the ballroom into the corridor and thence into an antechamber. After the briefest hesitation, he followed her in.

“Close the door,” she said.

“Olivia,” he said.

“Oh, please,” she said. “As though I’ve any reputation to lose.”

He closed the door. “As a matter of fact, you do, though I’m sure you ought to have been ruined ages ago.”

“There isn’t much that money and rank can’t buy, including reputation,” she said. “Here, take one of these, and let me welcome you home properly.” He took one of the glasses she offered, his gloved fingertips brushing hers.

She felt the spark of contact under her glove, under her skin. Her heart sparked, too, and its beating grew hurried.

She stepped back half a pace, and clinked her glass against his.

“Welcome home, my dear friend,” she said. “I was never so glad to see anybody as I was to see you.”

She’d wanted to launch herself at him and throw her arms about his neck. She would have done it, too, whatever Propriety said, but the look in his silvery eyes when he first caught sight of her stopped her in her tracks.

He was her friend, yes, and only Great-Grandmama knew her better than he did. But he was a man now, not the boy she used to know.

“I was bored senseless,” she went on, “but the look on your face when you discovered my bosoms was pr

iceless. It was all I could do to keep a straight face.”

He looked there now, and the heat started where he looked, and spread outward and deepened. In an instant she was in a sweat again, the way she’d been a little while ago, when he first looked at her. That was all the warning she needed: This was one fire she’d better not play with.

He studied her bosom critically, the way he might have examined a line of hieroglyphic writing. “You didn’t have them the last time I saw you,” he said. “I was completely flummoxed. Where did you get them?”

“Where did I get them?” Gad, that was so like him, puzzling over her breasts as though they were a bit of ancient pottery. “They simply grew. Everything grew. Very slowly. Isn’t that odd? I was precocious in every other way.” She drank. “But never mind my bosoms, Lisle.”