Free What I Did For a Duke by Julie Anne Long Page B

shiny dark hair and a warm complexion. She was very pretty, he supposed, in that she had even features and all of her teeth, all of which she was showing to him now. She was tall enough to nearly look him in the eye, and the plume, he decided, was a poor choice, as it would be visible through the crowd no matter where one stood. She might as well have planted a flag atop her head.
    She continued beaming fulsomely at him.
    “A pleasure to meet a fellow art lover. What do you think of James Ward, Miss Oversham? Is there a finer painter of horses in all the land?”
    He waited.
    Her smile radiated at him.
    Perhaps she was poor of hearing? He raised his voice and leaned forward. “What do you think of James Ward, Miss Oversham?”
    She fingered the silk of her fan nervously and her smile expanded.
    He grew acerbic. “My apologies, Miss Oversham, but has something I said amused you? Has Ward suddenly become passé? Are horses objects of mirth? Do allow me to share the joke.”
    She cleared her throat. She wasn’t mute. Excellent. “You needn’t shout, Lord Moncrieffe. It’s just . . .” He leaned forward as it seemed she was about to confide something. “It’s just I cannot seem to stop smiling.”
    It was his turn to go silent.
    “You do it very well,” he offered cautiously, finally.
    “Thank you.” She beamed queasily.
    Out of the corner of his eye he saw Genevieve Eversea slip back into the room, a sleek little blue shadow. She was now carrying a cup of punch. Pressing business, indeed! He watched her locate a spot the size of her bum on a nearby tufted settee and wedge herself in behind a large-rumped denizen of the Pennyroyal Green community, he suspected, as he hadn’t yet been introduced, and Eversea had seen to it that everyone of any rank had been introduced to him. It was an excellent location in which to moon over Harry, he thought, without being spotted by any of her other admirers.
    He wondered if she was within earshot of his conversation with Lady Oversham.
    To whom he returned his attention. He gave a start when he discovered her splendid teeth were still bared.
    “ I’ve a painting of a horse by Ward,” he volunteered. “Comet, my stallion’s name is. I’ve another horse, too. Named Nimbus.”
    Genevieve’s fan slipped from her grasp. Perhaps she’d been having a quiet laugh at his expense and it had jostled from her grip. When she bent over to retrieve it, her bodice gapped, affording him a startling view of almost all of two deliciously round, pale breasts.
    It was such a sensual shock the breath went out of him.
    It was all the more erotic because he knew he was the only one who could see it, and because she didn’t know that he could, and because they were both in the midst of a crowd.
    He was a man. He gulped down the view for the duration of its offering, which was cruelly brief. And then Genevieve was upright again, and regret washed him.
    Miss Oversham didn’t seem to notice his infinitesimal distraction.
    When he returned his attention to her, his composure ruffled, his mind’s eye filled with breasts, Miss Oversham was plucking at a bracelet on her wrist. And smiling.
    “I think I understand, Miss Oversham. Do I make you . . . well, do I make you nervous?” His tone was gently cajoling, the way a favorite uncle might speak to her.
    Genevieve Eversea assumed a position so alert he was certain she was listening. If she’d been an insect her antennae would have been waving about.
    “Yes!” Miss Oversham admitted with some relief. The smile snapped neatly back into place. “It’s nerves! I’m terribly sorry, sir, and not proud to admit it, but that’s the truth of it. It’s just . . . the things that are said about you. The . . . duels. The . . .” She stopped. Her fingers worried over the stones in her bracelet.
    The rest was clearly unspeakable.
    She’d acquired a mortified flush. She was now a beaming red and yellow and brown, like some exotic bird. A