The Wickedest Lord Alive Read Online Free PDF

been obliged to ask Lizzie to dance, for she’d been there when he asked Clare to save him a set.
    “The cotillion, then,” Lydgate said promptly. He really did have an enchanting smile. It was a pity his relation hadn’t an ounce of Lydgate’s warmth.
    “Thank you. I’d be delighted,” she murmured.
    Without looking at Steyne, she turned to go.
    “Miss Allbright.” His cut glass accents sliced the air.
    Again, she halted and looked back, and for the first time she met his eyes squarely.
    There is a plummeting sensation one feels as one wakes abruptly from a deep sleep. Lizzie experienced that now, as if she plunged headlong into something dark and dangerous.
    With difficulty, she found her voice. “Yes, my lord?”
    “Save me the supper waltz.”
    The command was so peremptory, it set her teeth on edge. Anger settled over her like a cloak. Did he actually think he could abandon her immediately after wedding her, after making love to her so … so … like that  … and then go about demanding waltzes as if he had the right?
    Striving for her most affable tone, she said, “I fear I am now engaged for every dance, my lord.”
    “Ha!” said Lady Chard, clapping her hands. “There’s one in the eye for you, sir. You ought to have been quicker off the mark.”
    Steyne tilted his head, as if to view her from a new angle. He had not expected her to react with spirit to his command.
    She couldn’t resist adding sweetly, “But do not fear that you will be without a partner, Lord Steyne. I am sure I can find someone for you to dance with.”
    A twitch of those sensual lips showed her he was, perhaps, not entirely without a sense of humor. “Until tonight, Miss Allbright.”
    The words were invested with so much meaning, it was all she could do not to pick up her skirts and sprint from the room.
    *   *   *
    “I think she likes me,” said Lord Lydgate as they left Lady Chard’s and mounted their horses.
    “Who, Lady Chard?” said Xavier, deliberately misunderstanding him.
    “No, the divine Miss Allbright, of course,” said Lydgate. “You never told me how pretty she is.”
    Xavier threw him a scornful glance. Truth to tell, he’d spent the entire visit quelling the urge to lean in to Miss Allbright and wipe the smudge from her elegant little nose with the pad of his thumb. Even when she’d rubbed at her face, she missed the spot. His suggestion that she refresh herself had sprung from a desire to remove temptation from reach rather than any wish to improve upon her appearance.
    Of course, being female, she’d taken his suggestion as a criticism, and that was just as well.
    “You think her pretty?” said Xavier, investing his tone with indifference he only wished he could feel. “I would not have said so.”
    In fact, he did not consider the lady who called herself Miss Allbright to be pretty, nor even beautiful. Those banal epithets did not begin to do her justice. She was everything he remembered from their one, fleeting encounter, and more.
    “You are trying to provoke me,” said Lydgate.
    “No, I am refusing to allow you to provoke me, ” Xavier calmly replied. “You will not flirt with my wife, Lydgate.”
    “Until you claim her as such, I say she’s fair game for flirting,” said his irrepressible cousin with a grin. “I still don’t know why you left her to kick her heels in this backwater for eight years.”
    Xavier made no immediate answer. After his first, fruitless search, he’d had little trouble locating his new bride. She’d been clever in her attempts to cover her tracks, surprisingly imaginative for a girl of her age. But he’d had resources at his disposal of which she could never dream.
    Yes, he’d found her, but he’d left her quite alone.
    Now, he said, “There appeared to be no urgency. She was very young.”
    “You mean you wanted to go on raising hell without a wife to plague you,” said Lydgate.
    “Now, there, Lydgate, you are lamentably wide of the