All Through the Night by Connie Brockway Read Free Book Online Page B

from her infatuation. Seward would eat her alive with his gentle manners and ruthless eyes.
    “Anne, m’dear, Colonel Seward,” her uncle introduced them. “Sir, my niece, Mrs. Anne Wilder.”
    She swallowed, willing herself to act. She turned her head up, half expecting Seward to seize her wrist and drag her bodily from the ballroom. “How very pleased I am to make your acquaintance, Colonel Seward.”
    At her utterance of those few syllables, Colonel Seward’s head snapped up from making a low, formal bow. His eyes narrowed on her.
    She was caught.
    Chapter Five
    Jack carried Anne Wilder’s gloved hand to his mouth and brushed his lips lightly over it.
    “How very pleased I am to make your acquaintance, Colonel Seward,” she said, and shivered. He could feel the alarm vibrating through her. Alerted, he looked up and found himself caught in her gaze.
    She held him with a regard nearly masculine in its directness. Seasoned. Knowing. A touch of valiance. A portion of pain and much resignation. Hardly the eyes of a procuress, as Strand had suggested. Jack had procured much himself; he knew the look.
    Rather, she gazed at him like a woman who sold her body might look at her buyer: with fatalism, submission, and a certain damning anticipation. It was an expression that said “Do it and be done.” And it aroused him.
    “Madam, I am honored,” Jack said, taking a steadying breath. She, too, he noted, took a careful breath.
    Small wonder Strand had sounded smitten. Individuality marked Anne’s face with absolutes: wide cheekbones, square jaw, dark and unfashionably straight brows. Her nose was both bold and elegant, her eyes—a striking, night-devouring indigo—deep-set, the lids delicately stained with mauve. Her mouth alone was a subtle creation, tender and soft.
    It disturbed him that a woman in widow’s weeds should draw such a sexual response from him. But she was just a touch disheveled—a dark tress escaped from her cap, a wrinkle marred her glove—and a picture of her rising blowsy and sated from his bed crystallized in his imagination. He glanced away and heard her exhale with undeniable relief. He damned himself for being so obvious. The thief had done this to him, heated him, readied him for lust.
    “Mrs. Wilder is acting as Sophia’s companion this season,” North said, recalling Jack from his preoccupation.
    “How kind of you, Mrs. Wilder,” he murmured.
    “And this is my daughter, Colonel. Miss Sophia North.”
    Sophia tilted her small face, regarding him with supreme feminine confidence.
    “Miss North, your servant.”
    “La!” the beauty said, snapping her fan open and dimpling. “I already retain servants aplenty, sir. Perhaps I can find another function you might serve?”
    His smile feigned admiration. As sallies went it wasn’t bad, but the determined brilliance with which she delivered the line suggested it had been used before.
    “You’re a friend of Prinny’s?” the girl asked.
    “I have a long-standing acquaintance with the prince regent.”
    “Oh.” Her lips formed a plump and perfect circle.
    She truly was an exquisite little creation, showy and kittenish, and she engendered in him not a whit of the confounding hunger awakened by his thief in her black silk mask and boy’s breeches or the stab of lust awakened by a tousled-looking widow still clinging to half mourning.
    He smiled ruefully. Had he grown so perverse that he needed a fetish to awaken his lust?
    “Prinny rather dotes on my Sophie here,” North said proudly.
    “And does he dote on you, too, Mrs. Wilder?” Jack asked.
    His query caught her off guard, though only someone observing closely would have seen the slight start of her hand, the tungsten brilliance flare in her dark eyes before she ironed her face smooth.
    “As a fond monarch dotes on any of his subjects.”
    “Well, his interest in Sophia is hardly of a magisterial bent.” North snorted.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Strand drawled. “Mrs. Fitzhubert