Last Night's Scandal Read Online Free PDF

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    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.”
    “Easy for you to say. You’re not a man. And I haven’t got used to them yet.” And she hadn’t got used to what happened when he looked at her in that way. She laughed. “Well, look, then, if you must. Great-Grandmama told me the time will come all too soon when men won’t be interested in looking there, and I ought to enjoy it while I can.”
    “She hasn’t changed at all.”
    “She’s frailer, and tires more quickly than she used to do, though she still gets about. I don’t know what I’ll do when she’s gone.”
    Great-Grandmama was her confidante, the only one who knew all of Olivia’s secrets. She couldn’t possibly tell Mama or Step-Papa everything. They’d done their very best for her.
    The truth would only distress them. She had to protect them from it.
    “I don’t know what I should have done tonight without her,” Lisle said. “She took my parents prisoner and let me escape.” He dragged his hand through his hair, turning it into a wild tousle that would make women swoon. “I oughtn’t to let them trouble me, but I can’t seem to master the art of ignoring them.”
    “What can’t you ignore this time?” she said.
    He shrugged. “The usual madness. I needn’t bore you with the details.” His parents, she knew, were the cross he had to bear. All their world revolved around them. All others, including their children, were merely supporting players in the great drama of their life.
    Great-Grandmama was the only one who could cut them down to size effortlessly, because she said and did exactly as she pleased. Everyone else was either at a loss or too polite or kind or didn’t think it worth the trouble. Even Step-Papa could do no more than manage them, and that was so trying to his temper that he did so only in extreme circumstances.
    “You must tell me all,” she said. “I dote on Lord and Lady Atherton’s madnesses. They make me feel utterly sober and logical and rather sweetly dull by comparison.” He smiled a little, a crooked upturn of the right side of his mouth.
    Her heart gave a sharp lurch.
    She moved away and threw herself carelessly into a thickly cushioned chair by the fire.
    “Come, get warm,” she said. “The ballroom was as hot as Hades, but not to you, I know.
    Away from that crush of warm bodies, you must think you’re in an ice house.” She waved a hand at the chair opposite. “Tell me what your parents want from you now.” He came to the fire but he didn’t take the chair. He looked at the fire for a long time, then at her, but briefly, before reverting to the fascinating flames.
    “It’s to do with a crumbling wreck of a castle we own, about ten miles from Edinburgh,” he Page 19
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    said.
    “H ow very strange,” Olivia said after Lisle had summarized the scene with his parents. He knew she could fill in the histrionic details herself. In the last nine years, she’d spent more time with Father and Mother than he had.
    “I wish it were strange,” he said. “But it isn’t in the least odd for them.”
    “I meant the ghosts,” she said. “How strange that workers keep away on account of ghosts. Only think of how many haunt the Tower of London. There’s the executioner chasing the Countess of Salisbury round the chopping block.”
    “Anne Boleyn carrying her head.”
    “The young princes,” she said.