Last Night's Scandal Read Online Free Page A

many other men, he was tall enough to look the birds in the eye. Other women wore equally fantastical hair arrangements, he was aware. While men’s fashions had grown increasingly sober in recent decades, women’s had grown increasingly deranged.
    “Some birds have landed on your head,” he said. “And died there.”
    “They must think they’ve gone to heaven,” said a male voice nearby.
    “Looks like rigor mortis,” Lisle said.
    Olivia sent him a fleeting smile. Something curious happened inside his chest.
    Something else happened lower down, not at all curious and all too familiar.
    He willed the feelings into oblivion.
    She couldn’t help it, he told himself. She was born that way, a Dreadful DeLucey through Page 14
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    and through. He mustn’t take it personally. She was his friend and ally, practically his sister.
    He made himself picture her as she’d been on the day when he first met her: a skinny twelve-year-old who’d tried to brain him with his sketchbook. A provoking, dangerously fascinating girl.
    “I dressed for you ,” she said. “In honor of your Noble Quest in Egypt. I ordered the silk for my gown to match the green of the Nile in your watercolors. We had to use birds of paradise because we couldn’t find ibises.”
    Voice dropping to a conspiratorial tone, she leaned toward him, offering a nearer and fuller view of alabaster flesh, curved precisely to fit a man’s hands. At these close quarters he was acutely aware of the faint sheen of moisture the ballroom’s heat had brought to her skin. He was aware, too, of the scent of a woman arising therefrom: a dangerous blend of humid flesh and a light, flowery fragrance.
    She should have warned him, drat her.
    Think about the skinny twelve-year-old , he counseled himself.
    “I wanted to dress like one of the ladies in the copies of the tomb paintings you sent,” she went on, “but that was forbidden. ”
    The scent and the stress on forbidden were softening his brain.
    Facts, he told himself. Stick to facts, like. . .
    Where were her freckles?
    Perhaps the room’s gentle candlelight made them less obvious. Or maybe she’d powdered her breasts. Or had she bleached them with lemon juice?
    Stop thinking about her breasts . That way madness lies. What’s she saying?
    Something about tomb paintings.
    He filled his mind with images of flat figures on stone walls.
    “The ladies in the tomb paintings are not, technically speaking, dressed,” he said. “When alive, they seem to be tightly wrapped in an extremely thin piece of linen.” The costume left nothing to the imagination, which was probably why even he—who preferred to stick to facts and leave the realm of imagination to his parents—had no trouble at all picturing Olivia’s curvaceous new body wrapped in a thin piece of linen.
    “Then, when they’re dead,” he went on, “they’re overdressed, tightly wrapped in layers of linen from head to foot. Neither form of attire seems practical for an English ball.”
    “You never change,” she said, drawing back. “Always so literal. ”
    “Leave it to Lisle to throw away a golden opportunity,” said another male voice. “Instead of complimenting the lady—as any man with eyes must do—and trying to win her favor, he must wander into a boring lecture about pagan customs.” Yes, because it’s safe there .
    “My attention has not wandered, I assure you, Miss Carsington,” Lisle said. “At present it could not be more firmly fixed.”
    He’d like to fix his hands on the throat of the fiend who’d given her this face and body—
    as though she needed any more weapons. It must have been the devil. A trade of some kind, sometime in the five years since Lisle had last seen her. Naturally Satan, like anyone else, would have had the worst of any bargain with her.
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