Midnight Pleasures Read Online Free PDF Page B

of a lady.
    Peter pulled over one of the heavy leather chairs, and his mother drifted over to speak to the Honorable Sylvester Bredbeck, who had retreated to the library to rest his gout-ridden left ankle.
    Quill regarded Sophie through heavy-lidded eyes, his face impassively registering no embarrassment, if indeed he felt any.
    “Are you enjoying the ball, Lady Sophie?” he drawled.
    Sophie flushed slightly. She sensed mockery, and she wasn’t feeling nimble-witted that evening. In fact, the practiced repartee that characterized most interactions between men and women in the ton seemed to have leaked from her tired brain.
    “Not particularly,” she answered truthfully.
    “Hmm,” Quill murmured, his eyes noting the drooping edges of her mouth. “Perhaps you would like to take a break from ceaseless gaiety? We could play a game of backgammon, if you wish.”
    Sophie thought quickly. Ladies did not retreat into libraries to play board games during balls. On the other hand, she was chaperoned by none other than her hostess, and it would be very pleasant to let her jangled nerves settle. Neither Braddon nor Patrick was likely to walk into the library, so she would have a period of calm before returning to the ballroom.
    She raised her eyes to Quill’s green ones. “I would be very pleased to join you.”
    At a nod from his brother, Peter jumped up and fetched a small table whose top was an inlaid backgammon board. Sophie and Quill silently placed the pieces on the board, firelight leaping off the walnut paneled walls and flicking lightly on the white and black pieces, on Sophie’s slender fingers, on the wine-colored glints in Quill’s hair.
    The game proceeded quietly until Sophie threw her second pair of doubles.
    Quill raised his eyes and cast a gleaming look at his brother. “Just whom did you bring in here to enliven my solitude, Peter? An ivory turner?” His eyes laughed at Sophie. “Isn’t it a good thing that I was too gentlemanly to suggest a wager?”
    Sophie smiled back demurely. Throwing doubles encompassed her only skill at board games, and it used to drive her grandfather to distraction when she was a child. She sipped at the wine at her elbow, feeling much more cheerful. The library was like a shimmery refuge, a calm, firelight-flecked oasis from the rioting hunger that seemed to have taken over her body.
    When she threw the next set of doubles, she smiled gleefully in response to Quill’s muttered complaints, and she looked up with a grin of utter delight when she managed to throw a final set—double sixes!—at the very end of the game.
    Which was the very moment at which both men whom she had looked for that evening, Braddon Chatwin, the Earl of Slaslow, and his good friend Patrick Foakes, walked into the library. Braddon forged straight ahead, heading toward the woman of whom he was so proud, about whom he had just been boasting to his old school friend.
    But Patrick stopped just inside the library. Sophie’s hair was shining in the light of the fire behind her with a color like ripened peaches, or like apricot wine laid up in glass bottles. She had bound her hair up on top of her head but the curls meant to fall down her back had tumbled forward. The curls were spun in fifty colors, melting from red to gold to the purest sunlit yellow…. And ringlets had fallen into smaller ringlets, tiny sprays of curls, giving her head the slightly fuzzy softness of a peach, a swimming, sunny color that promised that her hair would be as soft to the touch as the ripest summer fruit was to one’s lip.
    He almost turned on his heel to leave. Sophie was laughing, her eyes brilliant. Until she caught sight of him. Her smile entirely disappeared for an instant, and then just as quickly the corners of her mouth turned up again, although this smile didn’t touch her eyes. Probably afraid he would let on to Braddon just how proficient she was at the art of kissing, Patrick thought sourly.
    Braddon had lurched