Lauren Willig Read Online Free PDF Page A

Alsworthy. Some men had an eye for horses; Vaughn had one for women. No matter how fine a collection of points Mary Alsworthy might have, there was a glint to her eye that foretold an uncomfortable ride. It didn’t take an expert to tell that she was highly strung and all too aware of her own good looks. That sort tended to be damnably expensive—not to mention possessed of an unfortunate tendency to buck the rider. He had encountered her kind before.
     
     
“Well?” inquired Jane. “What do think?”
     
     
“I think,” he said deliberately, “that if you have dragged me out to this inhospitable corner of the earth on nothing more than a bout of romantic whimsy, I shall be entirely unamused.”
     
     
“My dear lord Vaughn, I never matchmake.” Jane smiled to herself as though at a private memory. “Well, very rarely.”
     
     
Vaughn arranged his eyebrows in their most forbidding position, the one that had sent a generation of valets scurrying for cover. “Don’t think to number me among your exceptions.”
     
     
“I wouldn’t dare.”
     
     
From the woman who had invaded Bonaparte’s bedchamber to leave him a posy of pink carnations, that pledge was singularly unconvincing. “I believe there are very few things you wouldn’t dare.”
     
     
Jane was too busy scrutinizing Miss Alsworthy to bother to reply. “Have you noticed anything particular about her?”
     
     
“Only,” said Lord Vaughn dryly, “what any man would be expected to notice.”
     
     
Jane tilted her head to one side. “She doesn’t remind you of anyone? Her skin…her hair?”
     
     
He had been doing his best not to notice the resemblance, but it was impossible to ignore. That sweep of ebony hair, the willowy form, the graceful white dress were all too familiar. She had worn white, too. White, to draw attention to her long black hair, straight as silk and just as fine.
     
     
It had been more than a decade ago, in a room all lined with glass, from the long doors leading out to the garden to the tall mirrors of Venetian glass that had lined the walls, cold and bright. That was how he had first seen her , sparkling by the light of the candles, flirting, laughing, Galatea remade in ebony and ivory. Every man present had been panting to play Pygmalion. He had been no different. He had been young, bored, running rapidly out of dissipations with which to divert himself. And then she had turned to him, holding out one white hand in greeting—and challenge.
     
     
There had been a ruby, that first night, strung on black velvet so that it nestled tightly against the hollow of her throat. Sullen red welling against white, white skin…
     
     
Vaughn let his quizzing glass drop to his chest. “The resemblance is purely a superficial one. A matter of coloring, nothing more.”
     
     
“That might be enough.”
     
     
“No,” said Vaughn flatly.
     
     
“If,” said Jane, ignoring him as only Jane dared, “someone were to speak to her; if someone were to suggest…”
     
     
“Ah.” Vaughn’s lips compressed, as the whole fiasco suddenly fell into place. “That’s what you want of me. To play Hermes for you.”
     
     
“We can’t all be Zeus,” Jane said apologetically.
     
     
Prolonged exposure to Jane was enough to make anyone take to Bacchus. “I’m afraid I’ve left my winged shoes at home. Forgive me for suggesting the obvious, but why not approach the girl yourself? Why drag me into this fiasco?”
     
     
“Because,” said Jane very simply, “I don’t want her to know who I am.”
     
     
Vaughn regarded her with reluctant appreciation. Lulled by the peaceful symmetry of her fine-boned face, it was easy to forget that that pink and white complexion masked a mind for strategy that put Bonaparte to shame. It seemed unlikely in the extreme that Miss Mary Alsworthy was a French agent. Her interests, thus far, had tended more to millinery than politics. But hats—and all those other furbelows that tricked