Free My Fair Temptress by Christina Dodd Page A

want to tell me, you could just say so. It’s not as if I’m nosy.”
    Jude stood, hands on hips, and grinned at Turgoose.
    “All right, maybe I am.” Turgoose grinned back. “But I came by my nosiness legitimately. My grandmum spends so much time looking out her curtains, she caught her rings in the trim and was tangled there for an hour. Grandmum said she would have called for the footman to help her get free, but she caught her neighbor sneaking out in a lavender silk ball gown trimmed with handmade lace.”
    Jude bowed to a group of four ladies. “So?”
    “He was too tall for the style.”
    Jude laughed again, and realized Turgoose’s friendship was worth cultivating for more than just diversion. He also knew London society and its secrets. “Let’s walk,” Jude said, “and you can tell me what I missed in my absence.”
    As they started down the walk, Turgoose said, “It didn’t take you long to find Miss Ritter, and she herself is no small scandal.”
    Grabbing Turgoose’s arm, Jude yanked him into a fenced garden off the beaten path. “Scandal? What scandal?”
    “She’s a woman with a past,” Turgoose said significantly.
    “She’s experienced?” Jude didn’t believe his father would hire a woman of easy morals. More important, Jude didn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t want her to be one of the demimonde, a woman of easy virtue. It didn’t make sense, but he wanted her to be exactly as she appeared to be—a lady of perhaps desperate means, a lady who would trap a man with her beauty, but a lady nonetheless. “I don’t believe it.”
    “I know. That angelic face, the perfect figure, the grace, the charm…a fellow doesn’t want to consider it. But she got tangled up with that scoundrel Freshie and poof!”—Turgoose snapped his fingers—“went her reputation.”
    “Freshfield,” Jude said slowly. “We were up at Eton with him. Brilliant fellow. Cunning and totally without ethics.”
    “But from a good family,” Turgoose said.
    Jude stared at him questioningly.
    “That’s what my mother says when I point out that other stuff. Nothing else matters to her. She says Miss Ritter is totally beyond the pale. Not acceptable. I only wish—”
    Sharp and still, Jude asked, “What do you wish?”
    “I liked the girl. I liked her a lot. I just wish I had the bottom to take up the cudgels on her behalf. But my mother would break me like a crust of toast.”
    “She certainly would.” Turgoose’s mother, Lady Reederman, was a stickler for propriety, a guiding light of society, and she inspired fear in every one of her seven children as well as in her husband, all her servants, and every debutante who had made her bow for the last twenty-five years. Funny that Jude even cared whether Turgoose, of all people, was eliminated from the competition for Miss Ritter. With an intensity that he felt down to his toes—no, to his groin—Jude said, “Tell me the details.”
    “Debut year, Miss Ritter was as glorious a creature as any I’ve seen, and she was constantly in trouble. Men were always trying to kidnap her, or declaring their undying love on their knees in the middle of a quadrille, or threatening to commit suicide for her.”
    Jude should have been acting languorous, but the thought of her and all those men, all those suitors, kissing her hand, whispering about her charms, trying to sneak a kiss made him furious. They made him jealous, and of a girl he had met once, in the bushes, in the mud. A woman who’d ruined the plans he’d so carefully set in motion and made him lust when he should be focused on vengeance. Yet he managed to sound amused, to look casual, when he asked, “Bodies strewn in her path, eh?”
    Seriously, Turgoose said, “Not really. They always stopped short of shooting themselves. But you get the idea.”
    “The Season was a circus that revolved around Miss Ritter.”
    “Precisely!” Turgoose clapped Jude on the shoulder. “You may look