The Devil's Web Read Online Free PDF Page A

room together. Strangers, except that his pulses pounded with the knowledge of her. Except that he could not look at her or speak to her. Except that he felt an irrational urge to kill the handsome officer who sat beside her, and even Lord North, with whom she was making arrangements to drive later in the afternoon.
    Fool! He would have given anything in the world, he felt after half an hour, if he could only go back and make that entrance all over again.

    M ADELINE HAD BEEN holding court in her mother’s drawing room, if entertaining two gentlemen who were currently showing a marked interest in her could be called holding court. She had been laughing gaily and assuring Lord North that she would indeed have gone driving with him in the park if only the day were not so beastly cold and the rain not drizzling down intermittently.
    And while Lord North had looked somewhat crestfallen, she had turned toward Colonel Huxtable and said that yes, she was to attend the concert at Mrs. Denton’s that evening with her mama and would be pleased with his escort. After all, Sir Cedric would undoubtedly be accompanying her mother, as he had accompanied her almost everywhere since his return from Vienna, and she herself should have an escort of her own.
    When the butler had opened the doors of the drawing room, Madeline had looked up brightly to see who the latecomers might be. She was taken completely off her guard. She had known he was coming, of course. Alexandra had talked of little else for months. But she had not known he had come.
    She did not listen to the butler’s words. She saw her sister-in-law.
    â€œHere come Edmund and Alexandra,” she said gladly, rising to her feet and stepping past her two admirers to greet the new arrivals. And only then, when she was stranded in the middle of the room, did the butler’s words register on her hearing and did she see that the man with Alexandra was not her elder brother.
    He was different. Very much darker of complexion and more agile-looking. And his eyes were less brooding and less hostile. Very different. He had changed.
    And yet he was no different at all. She was paralyzed with the sameness of him. James as he had lived deep in her memories for four years, dark and intense, seemingly coiled like a spring, an almost frightening power in him. James, more handsome than any man she had ever known, though not in a drawing room kind of way. He belonged in the wilderness and not in the ballrooms and salons of society.
    And that truant lock of dark hair fallen across his forehead as it had always used to do, the one feature she had forgotten about, though it was so very familiar now that her arm ached to lift and put it back to join the rest of his thick hair.
    James, as he had always been. Throwing only one brief, contemptuous glance her way before turning away to greet her mother. Though how she knew about that glance when she had not once looked fully at him, she did not know. She behaved with all the gaucherie of a girl only one day out of the schoolroom. She neither looked at him nor greeted him, but smiled at Alexandra and continued on her way to the tea tray, where she poured her sister-in-law a cup of tea, but not their other guest.
    And then she rejoined her group and behaved with all the mindlessness of the most flighty of social butterflies.
    â€œBut where is Lady Beckworth?” she asked Alexandra, far too brightly and far too loudly.
    â€œShe would not come with us,” Alexandra said. “She thought the weather too inclement for an outing. And Edmund would not come.” She laughed. “He said that since he is of no more importance to me now that my brother has arrived, he might as well retire to the nursery and sulk. He is being very silly. He is teasing me, of course,” she added, for the information of Colonel Huxtable and Lord North, who might have taken her words seriously.
    â€œAre you going to Mrs. Denton’s tonight?”