Hayley Ann Solomon Read Online Free Page A

thoughts were less discreet than her modish gown, which revealed nothing at all of her form.
    “Well?” Sir Peter’s tone was sharp as he took a sip of flame-colored liquid. “No good dithering, miss! Which is it to be? Lord Warwick, I trust you do not need a chaperon for this stroll of yours?”
    “Oh, no, for I see the balcony is alight with candles, and I assure you I shall take Miss Reynolds no farther than that window seat over there.” Warwick lifted his gloved fingers toward the balcony door. It was made of glass, so Miss Reynolds, peering out sharply, could see what he saw.
    An empty bench and a tall, wrought-iron candelabra flaming with tapers of various lengths. In all, there must have been fifty lit. Fern was astonished at the amount, for her parents, though fashionable, were generally frugal. Then she realized that they must have been expecting such a request, and she felt the strangest combination of confusion, yearning, and outright fury at being manipulated so.
    “I believe I shall play, after all.” She blurted out the words before she had time to reconsider. Sir Peter and Warwick looked astonished—Sir Peter because he was longing for his port and had thought he could retire to the library, Lord Warwick because he had formed the distinct impression that the lady did not wish to play. Only Lady Reynolds looked satisfied, clapping her hands genteelly and murmuring that although she was not a doting mama, Lord Warwick would see that she had done her duty by her daughter.
    The daughter, stricken and appalled by what she had just suggested, rose stiffly from the table, hoping that the white blur in front of her was, in fact, the hallway, and not the antechamber that led off from the dining room. Luck, for once, was with her, so that no one noticed anything amiss, save perhaps the footman, who thought she was behaving uncommonly odd for someone who had been sliding down the banisters for years.
    For Fern, sad to say, was walking as stiff as a ramrod, concentrating on keeping her tiara aloft, her headpiece in place—she could feel the pins loosen as she walked—and her eyes strictly ahead of her, from where she could marginally see the large, blurry objects that threatened to obstruct her path.
    Finally, though, she was seated by the instrument and it was no more than a second before Lord Warwick was at her elbow, muttering in low, velvety words that only she could hear.

Three
    “Miss Reynolds, are you perfectly well?”
    “Perfectly, I thank you.” The answer came out cooler than she intended, for in truth Lord Warwick’s presence flustered her quite unaccountably and she would not for the world have him know it. She fixed a quizzing glass to her eye, which increased the effect of cold hauteur. A quizzing glass!
    The Marquis of Warwick, heir to the dukedom of Hargreaves, had never had a quizzing glass fixed on his person in all of his life. If anyone quizzed, it was he. He did so with a practiced air guaranteed to depress the pretensions of any young jackanapes fool enough to be impertinent. But to be quizzed by his betrothed! From the tips of his soft slippers to the . . . Well, she had not yet reached his fine countenance yet; she seemed arrested at his breeches.
    Lord Warwick, eyeing the brilliant gold peeking out from the darker coils of the headpiece, wondered if it was he, not she, who was going mad. The girl was as cold as ice toward him, yet he felt fire in his veins and the most overwhelming urge to throw her up on his horse and carry her off into the night.
    Instead, he gently removed the glass from her hands, commenting firmly that it was not his pleasure to be quizzed. At which the lady, who had been frantically trying to catch at least a glimpse of him, colored up wildly, for she had focused altogether on the wrong part, due entirely to her own folly. She wondered if he knew, and suspected he did, which made her scowl fearsomely.
    Warwick compounded his sin by ignoring her displeasure