I Kissed an Earl: Pennyroyal Green Series Read Online Free PDF Page B

So unmistakably a Redmond, long and lean, finally grown out of coltishness. He was indeed proximate to the punch bowl and the garden doors, but he was also strategically tucked behind a pillar, and one hand was outstretched and propped against the wall. He was obscuring someone or something. She knew what it was when she heard the giggle.
    She peered over his shoulder to get a look at the woman he was shielding: a delicate blonde in unimaginative white muslin: big-eyed, petite-nosed, a little overbite that gave her a not unappealing rabbity appearance peeled back in a smile. Lady Wareham? Wartsomething?
    Violet had been introduced earlier and had forgotten her name instantly. Where had her brother learned to do that? To strike that indolent pose, to pour…silent, burning attention…upon a woman and to say things to cause her to picturesquely blush? Violet wasn’t a blusher; growing up in a household of frank brothers rather inured one to that sort of thing. But her brother looked unnervingly like a…grown man. Which he of course he supposedly was.
    It was just that she so seldom saw him behave like one.
    “Jonathan,” she said. Sotto voce. About two feet away from his ear. He didn’t turn.
    “Jonathan!” she barked.
    Her brother jumped and spun to face her, glowering. And in that instant he looked so remarkably like Lyon that Violet was intensely aware of the passage of time and the urgency of her mission. She saw instantly what the earl must have seen when he saw Jonathan, and wondered how she hadn’t yet seen it.
    “Viiiolet,” her brother drawled warningly, by way of greeting. He cast a quick sidelong look at the blonde, and then a speaking one back at Violet. All of which was sibling for: Go away.
    “Oh, please do excuse me for interrupting,” Violet gushed insincerely. “But Jonathan—were you aware the gentleman accompanying the Earl of Ardmay is named Lavay?”
    Her brother’s frown shifted into irritated confusion. “Well…yes. I was introduced to him. Pleasant, if a tad oily, his manners so very, very exquisite you know. One gets the sense that he thinks he’s better than you, but it’s naught he does or says in particular, really. Not certain you can yet entirely trust anyone of French—”
    “Do shut up, Jon. His name is Lavay. Don’t you recall what happened when we visited the Gypsies?”
    “I say, hardly cause to raise your voice, sister dear.” The tone was condescending and came with an inclusive smile for Lady Wartle…Lady Wartham! That was it!
    The beast. Jonathan was showing off. He really, really ought to know better by now.
    “You do take telling a number of times, Jon. Don’t you remember? The Gypsy girl shouted
    ‘Lavay’” to me? The one who said you would have ten children?”
    He went instantly rigid, alarmed as if she’d hexed him.
    “That Gypsy girl is touched in the head, Violet,” he said on a fervent hush. “That’s pure lunacy, and you know it.”
    “You probably will have ten children.”
    “Bite. Your. Tongue.”
    “You might even have all ten of them with Lady Wartham here,” Violet pressed wickedly. Young Lady Wartham’s eyes widened to saucers and began to sparkle with dreams. Her brother was incensed. “Never! Never, I tell you! I’m nowhere near ready to be leg shackled and she’s just a dallia…” He squeezed his eyes closed as he realized he’d neatly tumbled into his sister’s trap. “Damn you, Violet,” he croaked. Violet shook her head to and fro, pityingly.
    Jonathan opened his eyes in time to see Lady Wartham’s dropped-open mouth clap tightly shut and her eyes narrow in an admirably poisonous way. She whipped around in an indignant blur of taffeta and clicked off without a word for either of the Redmonds. Jonathan rounded on his sister. “See what you’ve done, you wretch!”
    “Oh, stop. You just said yourself she was a dalliance. If you can tell me her first name now I shall profess abject chagrin and I will owe you a great