Whisper of Scandal Read Online Free PDF Page B

her…”
    Alex doubted that Lady Joanna would be very pleased with this particular surprise. She had not expected to see him again. She disliked him equally as much as he disliked her.
    Devlin was still waiting for his reply.
    “Very well,” he said slowly. “Yes, I will be there.”

Chapter 2
    “W HAT IS L ORD G RANT LIKE?” Mrs. Lottie Cummings, ton hostess extraordinaire, scandalous matron and one of Lady Joanna Ware’s dearest friends, ignored the guests piling into her reception rooms in favor of quizzing her friend on the shocking news of her affaire . “You know I have only ever heard tell of him, Jo darling, and have not even seen a portrait.”
    “Well,” Joanna said, “he is tall.”
    “So is my aunt Dorothea.” Lottie gave an impatient wiggle. “Dearest, you are going to have to do better than that.”
    He is not really my lover… Why on earth had she let this go on for as long as it had? Why not simply say: “We are not lovers. It is all a hum…”
    Joanna was not sure. Anger at Alex’s high-handed behavior, and what she acknowledged was a rather childish pettiness because he disapproved of her and disliked her, had made her want to punish him. It was a foolish game of tit for tat and unworthy of her. The trouble was that if she denied the liaison now it would cause almost as much of a sensation as the original announcement. Such were the rather superficial obsessions of society. And a deeper, more disturbing truth was that she actually liked the idea of Alex Grant as her lover, liked it all too well as she imagined what it might be like totake him to her bed, to feel his hands on her body, to give herself to him with all the abandoned desire she had never actually felt for a man before. She had loved David passionately when they had wed, but the intensity of her infatuation had never been matched by physical desire. When David had touched her she had felt vaguely anticipatory, as though something more exciting should be happening. Unfortunately it never did. And then the relationship had turned so hideously sour that she had never wanted David to touch her ever again.
    In recent years—in most years, actually—her marriage bed had resembled the snowy wastes of the Arctic, pristine, empty and untouched, and having lost her illusions about David Ware, that was exactly how she had wanted it. She had been horribly lonely through the years of her marriage, a wife and yet no true wife, but even when David had died she had not trusted any man sufficiently to allow him close. And Alex Grant could not be that man. He was not for her. David had poisoned him against her, she was sure, and most importantly he was cut from the same cloth as David, an adventurer, an explorer, a man who would forsake his home and his family, and walk out into the unknown, leaving everything that should have been most precious and valuable to him behind.
    “Well?” Lottie prompted impatiently.
    “He is dark,” Jo said.
    Lottie sighed. “Again, my aunt Dorothea can give him a run for his money on that.” She threw up her hands. “Darling…you know I lead such a boring life! A little more vicarious excitement, if you please.”
    “That’s the best I can do, Lottie,” Joanna said. “LordGrant and I are not really lovers. The gossip is not true.”
    Lottie was looking at her pityingly. “Jo, darling, you don’t have to explain or excuse yourself to me. Nobody blames you for taking a lover! Why, it is an age since David died. And I hear that lovely Lord Grant is very, very luscious. Is it true—” Lottie’s dark eyes sparkled suddenly “—that he has the most fearsome scars on his chest from wrestling a polar bear?”
    “I have no notion,” Joanna said. “Why would anyone want to wrestle a bear? It sounds highly dangerous.” She remembered the slight limp that characterized Alex’s gait. She had a vague memory that David had mentioned that Alex had been badly injured on some expedition some years before.