The Seduction of Lord Stone Read Online Free PDF

ball, she sucked in a relieved breath. “Perhaps you can tell me about them.”
    With difficulty he kept his expression neutral. “Delighted to help,” he said, lying through his teeth.
    After a hesitation as if she sensed something amiss but couldn’t place it, she said, “Mr. Harslett has been very attentive and he has pretty manners.”
    “Old Johnny Harslett?” Silas asked, playing for time.
    “Yes, there he is. The tall gentleman with red hair.”
    “I know who he is.” Silas shot a poisonous glare at the oblivious clodpoll standing in the pit below them.
    “Then what do I need to know?”
    Hell. Silas had never heard a word against Harslett, something of a miracle in the vicious world they inhabited. Time for a bit of creativity. He lowered his voice to a confidential murmur. “Completely under his mother’s thumb. Doesn’t have a thought to call his own.”
    “I’m not expecting him to invite me to tea with his family.”
    Silas lowered his voice further. “Yes, but his mother insists on…choosing his mistresses. And interviewing them after every…encounter.”
    She gaped with shock before distaste crossed her features. “Ugh. Very well. I take your point. He’s not suitable.” She pointed to another section of the crowded ground floor. “What about him?”
    “Lord Pascal?”
    “He’s very handsome.”
    Devil take the fellow, he was. Amy, Silas’s youngest sister, had been moon-eyed over him when she was twelve. These days, at sixteen, she was more interested in efficient farming methods, thank heaven. Silas racked his brains for some reason to veto Pascal as Caro’s lover.
    “He chews with his mouth open.” When that didn’t elicit an immediate rejection, he pursued his fiction. “And he cracks his knuckles incessantly. He’d drive you completely dotty within five minutes.”
    “What about Harry Hall?” She pointed to the slender man talking to Pascal.
    “Doesn’t wash.”
    She turned to frown at Silas in puzzlement. “I’ve danced with him. He smelled perfectly fine.”
    “Well, when I say he doesn’t wash, he does have a scrub-down once a month. You must have timed your dance just right.”
    “Oh, dear,” she said with unconcealed disappointment. “Eligible lovers seem thinner on the ground than I’d anticipated. I’m so glad you’re helping me to discount the bad choices.”
    If he had his way, he’d have her discounting every rake, roué, mother’s boy and decent chap in London. Except for that fine example of British manhood Silas Nash.
    She brightened as her eyes settled on a tall, fair-haired man in the opposite box. “There’s Lord Garson. You can’t tell me he’s unsuitable. I know you’re great friends.”
    A friendship likely to end in bloodshed if Caro went to the swine’s bed. Silas struggled to come up with something to dissuade her from pursuing a fellow he both liked and respected. His honor dangled by a thread, but he couldn’t bring himself to accuse a good man of cheating at cards or swindling old ladies.
    Garson caught his eye and signaled a greeting. Then he raised his quizzing glass to inspect Caroline with unconcealed interest. A shamefully primeval itch to poke the delicate implement into Garson’s eye gripped Silas.
    “He…snores,” he said in a strangled voice.
    “Is that all? We won’t do much sleeping.”
    Buggeration, now he was imagining her
not sleeping
with Garson. The pictures swarming through his mind made him long to smash his fist into his friend’s wholly inoffensive face. “Caro, you shock me.”
    She looked unimpressed. “No, I don’t. Anyway, how do you know?”
    “Know what?”
    “That he snores.”
    Silas hadn’t lied so much since he was a lad caught raiding Sydenham Place’s larder at midnight. “A few years ago I had the misfortune of sharing a room with him at a dashed poky hunting box in the Cairngorms. Didn’t get a wink of sleep. Every breath sounded like a battery of artillery.”
    “I agree