Silk Is For Seduction Read Online Free Page B

shopkeeper, nothing more. She’d said so, unselfconsciously and unashamedly, yet he couldn’t quite believe it. He watched the way she moved, and the way her French friend moved, so unlike that they did not even seem to belong to the same species.
    “Yes,” he said, “I know.”
    M eanwhile, in London, Lady Clara Fairfax was longing to throw a china vase at her brother’s thick head. But the noise would attract attention, and the last thing she wanted was her mother bursting into the library.
    She’d dragged him into the library because it was a room Mama rarely entered.
    “Harry, how could you?” she cried. “They’re all talking about it. I’m mortified. ”
    The Earl of Longmore folded himself gingerly onto the sofa and shut his eyes. “There’s no need to shriek. My head—”
    “I can guess how you came by the headache,” she said. “And I have no sympathy, none at all.”
    Shadows ringed Harry’s eyes and pallor dulled his skin. Creases and wrinkles indicated he hadn’t changed his clothes since last night, and the wild state of his black hair made it clear that no comb had touched it during the same interval. He’d spent the night in the bed of one of his amours, no doubt, and hadn’t bothered to change when his sister sent for him.
    “Your note said the matter was urgent,” he said. “I came because I thought you needed help. I did not come to hear you ring a peal over me.”
    “Racing to Paris to give Clevedon an ultimatum,” she said. “ ‘Marry my sister or else.’ Was that your idea of helping, too?”
    He opened his eyes and looked up at her. “Who told you that?”
    “All the world has been talking of it,” she said. “For weeks, it seems. I was bound to hear eventually.”
    “All the world is insane,” he said. “Ultimatum, indeed. There was nothing like it. I only asked him whether he wanted you or not.”
    “Oh, no.” She sank into a nearby chair and put her hand over her mouth. Her face was on fire. How could he ? But what a question. Of course he could. Harry had never been known for his tact and sensitivity.
    “Better me than Father,” he said.
    She closed her eyes. He was right. Papa would write a letter. It would be much more discreet and far more devastating to Clevedon than anything Harry could say. Father would have the duke tied up in knots of guilt and obligation—and that, she suspected, was probably what had driven his grace to the Continent in the first place.
    She took her hand from her mouth and opened her eyes and met her brother’s gaze. “You truly think it’s come to that?”
    “My dear girl, Mother is driving me mad, and I don’t have to live with her. I came to dread stopping at home because I knew she’d harp on it. It was only a matter of time before Father gave up trying to ignore her. You know he never wanted us to go away in the first place. Well, not Clevedon, at any rate. Me, he was only too happy to see the back of.”
    It was true that Mama had grown increasingly strident in the last few months. Her friends’ daughters, who’d come out at the same time Clara had, were wed, most of them. Meanwhile Mama was terrified that Clara would forget Clevedon and become infatuated with someone unsuitable—meaning someone who wasn’t a duke.
    Why do you encourage Lord Adderley, when you know he’s practically bankrupt? And there is that dreadful Mr. Bates, who hasn’t a prayer of inheriting, with two men standing between him and the title. You know that Lord Geddings’s country place is falling to pieces. And Sir Henry Jaspers— my daughter—encouraging the attentions of a baronet ? Are you trying to kill me by inches, Clara? What is wrong with you, that you cannot attach a man who has loved you practically since birth and could buy and sell all the others a dozen times over?
    How many times had Clara heard that rant, or one like it, since they’d returned to London for the Season? “I know you meant well,” she said. “But I wish you