Free The Temptation of the Night Jasmine by Lauren Willig Page A

and the lechers. Usually in the same package.’
    Miles’s ears perked up. ‘Do you need any help keeping the lechers at bay?’ he asked Charlotte. ‘I’m told I loom rather well.’
    He looked immensely cheered at the prospect of enlivening his stay at Girdings with a spot of intimidation.
    ‘As much as I appreciate the offer, I don’t think it will be the least bit necessary.’ Charlotte looked down at her modest gown of silver net over green satin. It had seemed so pretty at the modiste’s – and that was just what it was. Not alluring, not seductive, just pretty. She sighed. ‘I need a little less go hence and a little more come hither.’
    ‘That depends on whom you’re hithering,’ declared Henrietta.
    Miles crinkled his nose. ‘ Hithering ?’
    Henrietta waved that aside. ‘Is there anyone the least bit hitherable in this assemblage of gargoyles?’
    Charlotte betrayed herself with a quick glance across the room to the spot where Robert stood, exchanging pleasantries with Sir Francis Medmenham. She hadn’t needed to look around the room to ascertain where he was; she just knew, the same way an astronomer knew the position of stars in the firmament. Over the past eight days she had become something of an adept on the subject of Robert. If he had been a university topic, she would qualify for an advanced degree.
    Henrietta’s hazel eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘So that’s the way the land lies.’
    ‘There isn’t any land there,’ said Charlotte regretfully. ‘Not even a very small island.’
    ‘Island?’ Miles echoed.
    Henrietta understood instantly. ‘You don’t know that.’
    ‘He calls me cousin .’
    ‘Well, you are his cousin,’ interjected Miles. ‘What is he supposed to call you? Spot?’
    Finding himself the recipient of two outraged female glares, Miles backed up, both physically and metaphorically. ‘Not that you have any. Spots, that is. It’s just a figure of speech.’
    ‘I understand,’ said Charlotte generously. She hadn’t forgotten all the times Miles had saved her from her usual post by the wall by sacrificing himself for a dance. It had all been at Henrietta’s behest, of course, but Charlotte loved both of them all the more for it, Henrietta for ordering and Miles for obeying, and both of them for caring enough for her to try to pretend it was otherwise.
    ‘We need to minimize your cousinly qualities,’ mused Henrietta.
    ‘How can you minimize her cousinliness when she is his cousin?’ demanded Miles. ‘You have many talents, Hen, but I don’t think you can go about lopping the limbs off family trees just like that.’
    ‘It’s a matter of metaphysical cousindom,’ said Henrietta loftily.
    Charlotte intervened before Miles could point out that cousindom wasn’t a proper word. ‘Even if we weren’t cousins, it still wouldn’t matter. One can’t engender warmer feelings where they don’t otherwise exist.’
    ‘Rubbish,’ said Henrietta, sounding eerily like her mother. ‘It’s not a matter of engendering warmer feelings, but of directing his attention to them. It’s as simple as that.’ She tilted her head up at her husband. ‘Isn’t it, darling?’
    Miles winced at the memory. ‘Simple isn’t quite the word I would have used.’
    ‘Simple-minded, more likely,’ muttered Penelope, just a little too loudly.
    ‘They don’t call me Clever Pete for nothing,’ said Miles cheerfully.
    Penelope regarded him balefully. ‘They don’t call you Clever Pete.’
    ‘I know,’ said Miles imperturbably. ‘I just like the sound of it.’
    Charlotte considered the merits of this. ‘Wouldn’t you have to be Clever Miles?’
    Miles shook his head. ‘It just doesn’t have quite the right ring to it.’
    ‘There’s a reason for that.’ Penelope tossed back half of her glass of wine in one long swig.
    Charlotte had managed to ‘misplace’ Penelope’s last glass while Penelope was dancing, but Penelope was rapidly making up for lost time. Penelope