The Glass Orchid Read Online Free PDF Page A

there would be few who would hesitate to obey her every command.
    “If you are the missing ingredient to a perfect party,” Jane said, drawing her gaze back to Farber, “then I suppose I should not deprive anyone of your presence for a second longer.” She stepped inside the doorway, and gestured for the men to come inside, taking coats and hats and canes as they passed.
    Camden followed his friends through the hallway in to the main parlor, his eyes nearly tearing up from the thick smoke. There were clusters of people throughout the house, talking, drinking and laughing. Nearly all the men — and not a few of the women — were smoking something, a pipe, a cigar, what appeared to be pieces of rolled up paper filled with tobacco. There were card tables throughout the room where animated foursomes played whist or vingt-et-un. A few couples danced a most scandalous waltz to the slightly discordant sounds of a rather inebriated-looking quartet folded into a dark corner of the parlor. Other couples were pressed into the shadows, pressed into each other. Camden caught glimpses of exposed flesh and roving hands. In all, Camden thought the party seemed pungent, loud, crowded, a bit shocking — and horribly fun. The kind of fun Camden hadn’t experienced in the month he had been in his father’s employ.
    “Amazing, isn’t it?” Farber asked, and Camden saw he was grinning stupidly and rubbing his hands together, as if the party were some great feast he was about to tuck into. “And to think, Wittingham, that you complained about coming. What you would have missed.” Farber turned his idiotic grin on his stoic friend, who only raised an eyebrow in return. “Ah, look, there’s Mare. Come, Hollsworth, and I’ll introduce you to Mare’s pretty little friend.”
    Camden watched as his two friends disappeared into the crowd in pursuit of more titillating attractions than either he or Wittingham could provide.
    “Worthless cads,” Wittingham pronounced for the second time that evening.
    Camden laughed. “You will have to come up with some new insults. You are starting to become repetitive. Wouldn’t want anyone to think your biting wit was going soft.”
    “It’s just that it’s so apt,” Wittingham said, and although the light was low, Camden could have sworn the man was smiling. “But enough of them. I am going to enquire as to what lengths a man must go to procure spirits of some kind. I certainly need the fortification. You coming?”
    “Excellent idea,” Camden said, but as he turned to follow his friend, something caught his eye that rooted him to the spot, and he barely noticed that Wittingham had moved on without him.
    Standing in the shadows across the room was the blonde beauty he had stumbled across the night of his birthday, and saw again a few weeks later. She looked tonight as tempting as she ever had — more so, perhaps. She was in a dress of red silk, a shock of color in the dim room. She seemed finer, more delicate, more beautiful — more
alive
— than anyone else in the room. Her hair was gathered and pinned up, exposing the long, delicate lines of her neck. A neck that Camden wanted to press his lips against before moving down to the hollow of her collarbone, and then down yet more to the soft mounds of flesh straining against a plunging neckline. Camden’s pulse pounded in his ears, and his cock stiffened painfully against his trousers.
    “Stunning, isn’t she?” asked a voice beside him.
    Camden jerked slightly, startled at the sudden intrusion into his thoughts, and saw that Jane had come to stand beside him. “I — she — er — who — ”
    “Del,” Jane said with a nod toward the blonde sylph. “The most mysterious woman in London.”
    Though he tried to avoid it, his attention turned back to the woman — Del — though he knew he must look the fool, gaping after her stupidly. “And who is she, exactly?” he asked Jane.
    “I’m not entirely sure,” Jane replied. She