Guarding a Notorious Lady by Olivia Parker Read Free Book Online Page A

knows. He’s only just arrived.”
    “Then why are you all calling him ‘Lord Sin’?” Lucy looked flummoxed. “Well, you’ve taken a good look at him, haven’t you?”
    “No. No. I have not,” Rosalind said, noting that she sounded a little shrill. “I have been fighting to move an inch. Break it to me, I implore you.”
    Lucy bent her head close as they shuffled across the room. “Well, he just . . .” Her words trailed off as she turned an alarming shade of crimson. “. . . he’s tall and scandalously tanned by the sun. And his evening clothes!”
    “What could be so remarkable about his evening clothes?”
    Lucy sighed like a girl fresh out the schoolroom who was seeing her first well-dressed man. “He’s simply sinful to look at.”
    “Oh, how preposterous,” Rosalind exclaimed.
    “Really, Lucy, you cannot be serious.”
    “I’m dancing the minuet with him first,” Lucy blurted, counting off on her fingers. “Jane Locke is next for a country dance set. Clara Hopkins promised him the quadril e. Oh, and Mary Chambers was asked for the Scottish reel. And . . . is there to be a waltz this evening?”
    Apparently, Lord Winterbourne did not hesitate in the filling up of dance cards.

    “How did you all acquire dances with him so quickly?”
    “Well, he asked us, ’tis all.” Lucy eyed her speculatively. “I say, are you jealous?” Rosalind leveled a stare at Lucy. “How on earth can I be jealous of the fact that you all have dances with someone I have never met?”
    Lucy’s brow puckered in confusion. “But you said you knew him.”
    “I did?” Now it was Rosalind’s turn to look confused.
    “When did I say that I knew him?”
    “In the bookshop,” Lucy muttered, “this afternoon.” Rosalind’s heart dropped down to her stomach.
    “And you said he was a farmer.” Lucy snorted. “A farmer, indeed. Admit it. You just didn’t want me to set my cap for him because you wanted him all for yourself.”
    “It cannot be,” Rosalind murmured.
    But it was.
    Before her, the crowd thinned and parted, revealing her eldest brother and Madelyn. Next to them stood Kincaid himself, tall and arrogant, looking like the handsomest devil in all of England, bare knees and all.
    “It cannot be,” she repeated.
    Nicholas
    Kincaid
    was Lord Winterbourne ?
    Nicholas Kincaid was a marquess ? Which meant . . .
    she knew exactly why he was in London.
    He had come for a wife.
    N icholas wagered that most observers, upon entering the Devine ball room, would describe it as a gilded nest for the social elite. A prestigious affair, where the privileged could frolic, twitter to their hearts’ content, and proudly puff out their feathers to display to all.
    Nicholas saw it as a den of horrors.

    Aye, it was beautiful, with its gleaming parquet floors and glimmering chandeliers glowing with hundreds of beeswax candles, but it was also stifling, crowded, and if one more lady’s jaw dropped at the sight of his kilt—and his legs, for that matter—he would surely bend over and flash her something truly shocking.
    Dressed in formal Scottish evening wear, Nicholas, for the most part, looked like an English gentleman from the waist up, and a Scot from the waist down.
    Apparently, it wasn’t an everyday sight, which was fine, really. He was probably making them feel about as comfortable as he felt himself.
    But he was nothing if not responsible. He would do his duty. And then he was going back home to the country, where a man could walk across a room without
    getting
    four
    separate
    embroidered
    handkerchiefs discreetly stuffed in his palm—all of them accompanied with whispered invitations that would make a naval captain blush.
    Three out of the four handkerchiefs were from married women, the fourth from a widow who couldn’t have been a day over twenty. And if he wasn’t getting offers for carnal companionship, the marriage-minded mothers were brazenly thrusting their daughters at him as if they were