Free Wicked Becomes You by Meredith Duran Page B

debutantes! Then perhaps some marriage-minded girl would trap him.
    Remembering her own titillated shock, Gwen felt irked. Three years ago, now. How smug she’d been, with her wedding to Lord Trent scheduled and the invitations dispatched. How inevitable marriage had seemed to her, then. She’d decided that the women Alex entertained must be unnatural for not wanting to marry—and that, in turn, Alex was unnatural for admiring them.
    Now she wondered if these women didn’t have something to teach her. At any rate, none of them would have agreed to marry either of the swine she’d picked.
    Alex cleared his throat and refolded the note. “This is . . .” His lips folded together briefly, as if he were biting back a smile. “Not what I expected, shall we say.”
    “Oh? What did you expect?” It might be instructive to learn what he thought her capable of doing. He’d visited Heaton Dale last autumn to say farewell to his sisters before leaving for New York, and once or twice she’d caught him looking at her quite peculiarly—as though expecting her at any moment to do something awful, like burst into a cancan.
    Learn to cancan! That was an excellent addition to her list of things to do now that she no longer cared what anybody thought of her. Better yet, Paris was the place to try it.
    “Does it matter?” Alex gave a one-shouldered shrug as he slipped the letter into his jacket. “I suppose I assumed it was a plea for him to return to you. But bully for you, Gwen. You certainly gave him what-for.”
    The praise might have encouraged her had it not dripped with condescension. She frowned as he straightened off the window frame. The reddening sunlight spread down the length of his body, and she felt her temper sharpen. Drat it. Her criticism of Thomas had not been nearly as comprehensive as she’d hoped. He prided himself on his height, but Alex was taller. His shoulders had been adequate, but Alex’s shoulders were broader. Indeed, their breadth seemed all the more striking for the slimness of Alex’s waist and hips.
    She supposed his odd athletic habits must account for that. Everybody knew that he spent an hour each morning hopping about and kicking things like a maddened rabbit. In France they apparently considered this a proper sport of some sort, but then, Frenchmen were an odd lot. Alex was probably one of ten people on the entire island who gave the nation credit for anything besides its wine. At any rate, she did not recall encountering other similarly shaped gentlemen among English society.
    The rarity suddenly struck her as regrettable.
    He was speaking. “—stay right here and stand your ground. Although the decision is yours, of course.”
    She opened her mouth, but her reply fell away as she noticed something: he’d unbuttoned his jacket at some point between lobby and library, and it had fallen open. His belly beneath his dark waistcoat was perfectly flat. How had she never noticed that before? Katherine Percy, her horse-mad bridesmaid, would have likened him to a good racehorse, all height and lean muscle.
    He was certainly a serviceable specimen.
    “Gwen,” he said. “Are you all right?”
    She blinked. He lifted a brow in question. A hot feeling prickled over her, alarm and excitement at once. She’d been ogling him like a trollop. Alex Ramsey, London’s most dedicated bachelor. Astonishing to behold how one was blinded by his lack of eligibility. Bohemian ladies must be positively gleeful that no respectable lady got a crack at him!
    “I’m perfectly well,” she replied. She felt very well, as if an electrical charge had gripped her. What other new things would she see, now that she no longer cared to be virtuous? “May I have the letter back?”
    “I’m afraid not.” He put a hand on his hip, knocking his jacket back farther. “You can’t post this, you know.”
    The temptation was too much to resist. She took another quick glance downward. “Why not?” Good heavens, ogling