Seducing an Angel Read Online Free

ahead of them were two other ladies, one of them decently clad in russet brown, a color more suited perhaps to autumn than summer, the other dressed in widow’s weeds of the deepest mourning period.She was black from head to toe. Even the black veil was so heavy that it was impossible to see her face, though she was no more than twenty feet away.
    “Poor lady,” Stephen said. “She must have recently lost a husband.”
    “At a pretty young age too, by the look of it,” Constantine said. “I wonder if her face lives up to the promise of her figure.”
    Stephen was most attracted to very young ladies, whose figures tended to be lithe and slender. When he did finally turn his thoughts to matrimony, he had always assumed he would look among the newest crop of young hopefuls to arrive on the marriage mart and try to find among such crass commercialism a beauty whom he could like as well as admire and whom he could grow to love. A lady who would be willing to look beyond his title and wealth to know him and love him for who he was.
    The lady in mourning was nothing like his ideal. She did not appear to be in the first blush of youth. Her figure was a little too mature for that. It was certainly an excellent figure, even though her widow’s weeds had not been designed to show it to full advantage.
    He felt an unexpected rush of pure lust and was thoroughly ashamed of himself. Even if she had not been in deepest mourning he would have felt ashamed. He was not in the habit of gazing lustfully upon strangers, as so many young blades of his acquaintance were.
    “I hope she does not boil in the heat,” he said. “Ah, here come Kate and Monty.”
    Katherine Finley, Baroness Montford, was Stephen’s youngest sister. She had perfected the skill of riding only since her marriage five years ago, and was on horseback now. She was smiling at both of them. So was Monty.
    “I came here to give my horse a good gallop,” Lord Montford said by way of greeting, “but it does not seem possible, does it?”
    “Oh, Jasper,” Katherine said, “you did not! You came to show off the new riding hat you bought me this morning. Is it not dashing,Stephen? Do I not outshine every other lady in the park, Constantine?”
    She was laughing.
    “I would say that plume would be a deadly weapon,” Con said, “if it did not curl around under your chin. It is very fetching instead. And you would outshine every other lady if you wore a bucket on your head.”
    “Dash it all, Con,” Monty said. “A bucket would have cost me a lot less than the hat. It is too late now, though.”
    “It is very splendid indeed, Kate,” Stephen said, grinning.
    “But I did not come here to show off the riding hat,” Monty protested. “I came to show off the lady beneath it.”
    “Well,” Katherine said, still laughing, “that was clever of me. I have squeezed a compliment out of all three of you. Are you going to Meg’s ball tomorrow, Constantine? If you are, I insist that you dance with me.”
    Stephen forgot all about the curvaceous widow in black.

2
    I T took very little effort on Cassandra’s part to learn of Lady Sheringford’s ball. She simply looked about the fashionable area of Hyde Park until she saw a largish group of ladies—there were five of them in all—strolling along the footpath together and talking quite animatedly among themselves as they went. Cassandra led Alice toward them and then strolled along ahead of them and listened.
    She learned a great deal she did not wish to know about what was most fashionable in bonnets this year and about who looked well in such hats and who looked so dreadful that it would really be a kindness to tell them if only one could summon up the courage. She learned about the endearing antics of their children—each one trying to outdo the others. The antics were endearing, Cassandra suspected, only because their victims were nurses or governesses rather than the mothers themselves. It sounded to her as if