Free Slightly Dangerous by Mary Balogh Page A

the challenge of acting out an idea without words and of guessing the meaning of someone else’s efforts. She threw herself into the game with unbridled enthusiasm, and was soon flushed and laughing and everyone’s favorite—among her own team members, anyway.
    Her team won handily. Rowena Siddings and Audrey, infected by her enthusiasm, soon elevated the quality of their own performances, though Harriet King, who was quite hopeless at the game, pretended to be bored and to consider the whole thing quite beneath her dignity. Mr. George Buchan and Sir Wendell Snapes were soon looking upon Christine with admiration as well as approval. So were the Earl of Kitredge and Sir Clive Chisholm, who were watching from the sidelines and calling out encouragement.
    The Duke of Bewcastle was also watching, a look of supercilious weariness on his face. But Christine took no notice of him—beyond noticing that expression anyway. He might have a reputation for lowering the temperature of any room that he occupied, but he was not going to chill her spirits.
    By the time she went to bed, she was feeling quite reconciled to the idea of simply enjoying herself for the next two weeks and forgetting about all the duties with which she normally filled her days.

5
    M RS. D ERRICK, W ULFRIC CONCLUDED OVER THE NEXT few days, did not know how to behave.
    When the company played charades on the first evening, she became flushed and animated and laughed right out instead of tittering delicately as the other ladies did and shouted out guesses without any fear that she might outguess the men. She did not mind making a spectacle of herself when it was her turn to act.
    Wulfric, who had not intended subjecting himself to the tedium of watching the game, found that he could not take his eyes off her. She was the sort of woman who was pretty even in repose, but she was quite extraordinarily lovely when animated. And animation seemed to come naturally to her.
    “One cannot help admiring her, can one?” Justin Magnus said with a chuckle, having come up beside Wulfric unannounced. “Of course she does not possess the refinement many members of the
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expect of well-bred ladies. She often embarrassed my cousin Oscar, and Elrick and Hermione too. But if you want my opinion, Oscar was fortunate to have her for a wife. I always defended her staunchly and always will. She is a regular out-and-outer—unless one happens to be excessively high in the instep, of course.”
    Wulfric turned his quizzing glass upon the young man, unsure whether he was being subtly reprimanded for being high in the instep or whether he was being treated as some sort of comrade who was expected to agree that out-and-outers made more desirable companions than ladies with refined manners. Either way he did not appreciate the familiarity with which he was being treated. Despite the fact that Magnus was Mowbury’s brother, Wulfric had only the slightest acquaintance with him.
    “One would assume,” he said in the voice he invariably used to depress pretension, “that you are talking about Mrs. Derrick.
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was observing the game.”
    But no true lady had any business being so bright-eyed and vivacious and . . . rumpled when in genteel company. Her short, dark curls bounced about her head when she moved and quickly lost all semblance of refined elegance. The fact that she looked twice as pretty at the end of the game as she had before it began said nothing to the issue at all.
    She ought not to have behaved so. If this was the way she had behaved during her marriage, Derrick and the Elricks had had every right to be offended.
    She reminded Wulfric a little of his sisters, he was forced to admit, but she lacked the air of breeding that had always saved them from vulgarity. Not that Mrs. Derrick was vulgar exactly. She was just not good
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. But then, she was not, by birth, a member of the beau monde at all.
    She did conduct herself with more decorum during the next few days, it was true.