Free Grace Under Fire by Jackie Barbosa

Chapter One
    London, 1795
    It was a truth universally acknowledged that Lady Grace Hannington was the most inaptly named young lady in all of England, if not all Christendom. Within two months of her debut, she had ruined at least a dozen gowns—none her own—and half as many cravats by spilling tea, wine, or some sort of sauce upon them, trod heavily upon many a gentleman’s slippered toe, and broken the nose of one unfortunate chap with a misplaced elbow during a reel. That list of missteps did not encompass the full measure of the lady’s sheer gracelessness, however, for she was forever nursing some sort of self-inflicted injury, ranging from a sprained wrist and a stubbed toe to this evening’s glorious and ill-concealed black eye.
    Atticus Stilwell wondered from his vantage on the opposite side of the crowded ballroom how she had come by that shiner. Not that it mattered. With or without the swollen, bluish-purple tinge beneath her eye, she was by far the loveliest woman in the room. Oh, perhaps not in the classic sense of a delicate English rose, but then, she stood a head taller than any other lady in the room—and fully half the men—and her hair was an entirely too flamboyant shade of red for traditional beauty.
    In fact, everything about her was lush and flamboyant, from the blazing color of her unruly curls to the ripe red of her too-wide lips to the plump mounds of her generous tits. Though he could only guess at what lay beneath the loose folds of her high-waisted gown, he imagined a slender waist curving into broad but perfectly proportioned hips and from there into shapely legs that would go on forever. Though she was consigned by her ungainliness on the dance floor—and nearly everywhere else—to the role of a perpetual wallflower at Society events, Atticus saw the woman she could blossom into if only she were freed from the expectations of fashion and propriety.
    A woman who was more than enough for not one man, but two.
    She shifted in her chair, causing her breasts to come dangerously close to overtopping the lacy edge of her gown’s scooped neckline, and licked her lips. Her gaze darted in the direction of the table upon which the lemonade bowl rested, and beside which he and Lord Fitzgerald had been lurking for the past twenty minutes.
    Atticus glanced at Colin. “Are we in agreement that she is the one?”
    His friend—for although the word friend did not capture the depth of their affection and attachment, it was the closest one available in the English language—nodded. “She is perfect.”
    Atticus’s balls tightened with anticipation as Lady Grace rose from her chair, knocking it dangerously askew in the process. She whirled to catch it before it toppled over, and her dark green skirts billowed crazily about her legs, affording him a tantalizing glimpse of a trim pair of ankles before they settled back into place. He could scarcely wait to plant kisses upon those ankles, then upward along her calves and thighs before setting his mouth to the sweet, juicy flesh between…
    An elbow connected with his ribs. “Pay attention. She’s coming,” Colin hissed.
    She soon would be if Atticus had anything to say about it. Then he realized what Colin meant.
    Time to put their plan in motion.
     
    Grace negotiated the potted plants and clusters of people separating her from a desperately needed glass of lemonade without incident. Really, this was a considerable improvement over her performance at the ball she had attended last week, when she had caught her foot on the—ridiculously, she thought—long train of Lady Aberdeen’s skirt and gone careening into a large fern. It would not have been quite so humiliating had she not righted herself only to land flat on her backside when she walked directly into the glass door that led to the retiring rooms, resulting in the fading black eye she sported this evening.
    She huffed to herself in righteous indignation. If they didn’t want people to walk