A Certain Magic Read Online Free PDF Page A

the gentlemen will be smitten from the backs of their horses, and all the ladies’ eyes will turn collectively green.”
    She laughed.
    “They will, you know,” he said. “You have no business still looking as lovely as you do at your age, Allie. Are you thirty? If you are not, you must be perilously close.”
    “Piers!” she said, shocked.
    “Very ungentlemanly of me to have noticed that you were past your eighteenth year, is it not?” he said. “But I am right, I will wager. Let me see. You were fifteen when Web confided to me his undying passion for you. He was three-and-twenty at the time, which would have made me two-and-twenty. Now let me see...” He tapped one gloved finger against his chin and looked up at the sky. “Yes, my dear Allie. That makes you very close to thirty if not right on it. But quite as lovely as you were at fifteen.” He grinned and made her an elegant bow in the middle of the pavement on Oxford Street.
    “Piers!” she said again, laughing.
    He extended one arm to her. “Let me take you for tea and cakes,” he said.
    “Cakes?” She looked up into his face and took his arm. “I had luncheon little more than an hour ago.”
    He looked down at her very trim waistline and pursed his lips. “Definitely cakes,” he said. “The kind that ooze cream from both sides no matter how genteelly one bites into them. The kind one always has in one’s hand when some dowager duchess comes along to be condescending. You really do look very fine, Allie. You are turning heads.”
    “Oh, nonsense!” she said. “I am not even wearing my new bonnet.”
    He settled her at a table in a confectioner’s and ordered tea and cakes. He sat and smiled at her.
    “You have escaped from your sister-in-law?” he said. “I take it the invalids are no longer at death’s door.”
    “They never were,” she said. “They had measles, not the pox, Piers. Phoebe has a free afternoon, Amanda being one of a party that is quite well chaperoned.”
    “Poor Phoebe, “ he said. “Her nose is out of joint over that, I would wager. It must be quite lowering to have nothing better to do with one’s time than tend to ailing children.”
    “You are being unkind,” she said.
    “Yes, I am,” he agreed amiably, smiling at her and showing not one visible sign of contrition. “I have just had the most amusing morning, Allie. I am excessively glad I ran into you, or I would have been forced to laugh aloud on Oxford Street and all to myself. Not at all a tonnish thing to do, at a guess.”
    “I imagine you are right,” she said, frowning over the plate of cakes that had been set down before them and selecting the one that looked least sinful. Then she looked indignantly at her companion, who was lounging back in his chair, his long legs stretched beneath the table. “You are not going to have one, are you?”
    “No,” he said. “I have to watch my waistline. Unlike you, Allie, there can be no doubt whatsoever of the fact that I have passed my thirtieth birthday.”
    “Wretch!” she said, biting into pink icing.
    “I had a letter yesterday,” he said, “a timid and apologetic and self-effacing letter from a lady I had not seen in fifteen years.”
    “Indeed?” she said. “I hope this is not going to turn into an improper story, Piers.”
    “Oh, Lord, no,” he said. “She was—and is—very respectable. Widow of a close acquaintance of mine at Cambridge—Margam. Lord Margam, I would have you know. The poor man hated being a baron. He would have liked nothing more than to spend his entire life lost in a dusty university library. Never had a penny to his name, even though there was a Lady Margam and an infant. I didn’t know he was dead, poor chap. I haven’t seen him for years.”
    “His widow wrote to you?” she prompted.
    ”Yes.” He chuckled. “It is all vastly amusing, Allie. The infant is now a hopeful young lady about to be loosed on society. Except that the