Lady Eve's Indiscretion Read Online Free PDF Page A

terraces. A few of the doors were propped open, making the place both quieter and cooler.
    â€œDown there.” Deene gestured with the hand holding the plate. His other arm had been offered to Eve for escort, as if by her very presence she could ward off encroaching mamas.
    Which, if it came to that, she could.
    They found a small table beneath an arch, a blessed oasis of privacy in an otherwise dauntingly public evening.
    â€œI believe I owe you an apology,” Eve said when they were seated.
    He lounged back in his chair, a delicate little wrought iron piece that barely looked capable of holding his weight. “For?”
    â€œPerhaps not an apology.” Eve picked up a forced strawberry and considered it. “I love strawberries, but I have this notion they taste better when they’re allowed to develop according to their own natures.” She popped it in her mouth and watched while Deene did likewise with a smaller berry.
    He had a lovely mouth. She hadn’t forgotten that for a moment, blast the man.
    â€œWhat would you be apologizing for?” He picked up another strawberry, drawing Eve’s attention to his hands. Without his gloves, their strength was obvious. Those hands had been on her person, they’d offered her relief from misery, and at Christmas…
    She frowned at a section of orange. “You haven’t tattled, so to speak. You have my thanks for that.”
    â€œTattled.” He sat forward, a predator catching a scent. The strawberry had disappeared, Eve knew not where. “Tattled, regarding your headache? What kind of gentleman would I be if I bruited a lady’s distress all around the clubs? How would that—?”
    Eve shook her head. Men were obtuse. Her brothers claimed that women were too indirect and subtle, but it was a bona fide fact men were thickheaded about certain important matters.
    â€œAt Christmas,” she said very quietly. The walls had ears, after all. “You didn’t”—she stared at another section of orange—“kiss and tell. I appreciate that.”
    She felt compelled to state her thanks for his discretion. The words put something right between them that Eve had been allowing to drift in the wrong direction. The spatting and skirmishing was all well and good, but this needed to be said too.
    â€œNow this is interesting.” He addressed a luscious strawberry, red-ripe all over, the exact shape and size a strawberry ought to be, but when had his chair shifted so close? “I am trying to do the pretty without being caught in parson’s mousetrap, I suffer a small lapse of propriety while under the influence with a lady whom all esteem, and you think it’s your name I’m protecting?”
    He popped the strawberry into his mouth and considered her in a lazy-lidded way that had Eve’s insides pitching in odd directions.
    â€œWhy are you bristling, Deene? I’m offering my thanks.”
    He finished chewing the strawberry, though his blue eyes had bored into hers as he’d consumed it. “Did you enjoy our kiss, Evie?”
    Evie. Only her family called her that—and him. He said it with a particular intimate inflection her family never used though.
    She sat up very straight. “Your question has no proper answer. If I say no, then I am dishonest—I flew at you, after all, and you had to peel me off of you—and if I say yes, then I am wicked.”
    â€œBecause if you did enjoy that kiss,” he went on as if she hadn’t spoken, “for I certainly enjoyed it, then perhaps you might be thanking me for the kiss and not for keeping the silence any man with sense or manners would have kept.”
    With him staring at her like that, it was hard to grasp the sense of his words, but Eve made the effort.
    He was offended that she’d thanked him.
    Any man admitted under her parents’ roof would have been discreet about such a moment.
    He had enjoyed that