Last Night's Scandal Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
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    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 priceless. 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 Page 18
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