Free Ruthless Charmer by Julia London

hair was a mousy color, her brown eyes small and set wide apart. Not that it mattered to him—he saw her beauty in so many other ways—but it mattered to the ton and Sophie had had very little success on the marriage market. That lack of success had, unfortunately, begun to erode her self-confidence. And for that reason above all else, Julian despised the ton.
    "Have you?" he asked, and gestured for her to accompany him as he moved up the stairs.
    "Lady Farnhall invited Aunt Violet and me to a tea last Tuesday while Lord Farnhall was in Edinburgh or some such place, and I didn't really want to go because I had quite a headache, but Aunt Violet persuaded me, and I am quite happy that I went!"
    "Were you? And whom did you see?" he asked absently, reaching the first floor and moving down the corridor to the master suite of rooms. Sophie quickly rattled off all of the attendees, then reviewed what each was wearing as they crossed the threshold of his suite. Nodding to Bartholomew, his valet, Julian removed the grimy neckcloth and tossed it to his outstretched hand. The fastidious man instantly made a face and held the offensive garment between thumb and forefinger, away from his body, while Sophie continued her chatter about a silk or something that Miss Candace Millbrook had worn to the tea party. With an appropriate ah now and then, Julian disappeared into his dressing room to remove his boots and was fanning the rank odor from his nose when he heard the name Sir William Stanwood. He sat up. "Pardon?" he called through the open door.
    That was followed by a moment of silence, then a faint, "Sir William called."
    Julian was at once on his feet and in the main room, oblivious to his stockinged feet and dangling shirttails. "I beg your pardon?" he demanded.
    The color instantly bled from Sophie's face. "He . . . he called Wednesday."
    He made a supreme effort to maintain his composure, but blast her, it was difficult! Several years her senior, Sir William Stanwood was an odious man with no more interest in Sophie than her obscenely large dowry and the generous annuity her father had left her. He had a sordid reputation, was known to have one foot in and the other just out of debtors' prison, and was rumored to have something of a mean streak when it came to the baseborn women with whom he consorted. His connection to the fringes of the ton was tenuous at best, owing chiefly to a nebulous but apparently real blood relationship to Viscount Millbrook.
    "Sophie," Julian began, but stopped as she sank into a leather chair at the hearth, her expression both hopeful and fearful. Marvelous—he was about to crush the one true hope the girl thought she had. Oh, he had no doubt Sophie would marry one day, and when she did, it would be to a man who was not only of suitable rank, but one who could be counted on to treat her well. It most definitely would not be to William Stanwood.
    He thrust his hand through his hair and turned to his valet. "Nothing more," he said, and waited for Bartholomew to quit the room before speaking again. "I thought we agreed during the Season that Sir William's attentions were not to be acknowledged or returned, did we not? We had an agreement, you and I."
    Her gaze fell guiltily to her lap. She shrugged, studied her hands. "I merely said he called. I didn't say that I had received him."
    Oh, no. He hadn't raised four girls without learning one or two of their tricks. "No, you didn't say . . . did you receive him?"
    Another, smaller shrug. "Perhaps for a moment," she muttered, and glanced up, cringing at whatever she saw in his face. "It would have been terribly rude to turn him away! Aunt Violet chaperoned! He called as he was nearby and thought to wish us well! Where is the harm?"
    The harm? The harm was that Stanwood would slither into her life like a snake, then squeeze the very breath from it! How did he tell a young woman that the one man in all of England she thought esteemed her above all others was a