How to Beguile a Beauty by Kasey Michaels Read Free Book Online Page B

think.”
    â€œThe baron was only being outrageous, which I admit he does rather well,” Lydia said, taking the card, but not opening it. “I think he’s apprehensive about the evening, and how he’ll be received.”
    â€œJustin? Apprehensive? I seriously doubt that.”
    They both looked in the direction the baron had taken, just in time to see him bow to an older gentleman who pretended not to see the gesture before pointedly turning his back on him.
    â€œOh, that’s not good,” Tanner said, shaking his head. “What one does, others may do, until the whole room turns its collective back on him. We managed to chaseByron out of England only a fortnight ago, and now it would seem we’re about to do the same to Brummell, as well. That can’t happen to Justin. I won’t allow it. Excuse me, Lydia, while I follow him, make my own feelings known on the subject of his return and my friendship for him. After all, being a bloody duke has to count for something.”
    Lydia nodded her agreement and watched Tanner hurry off to stand by his friend. It was as Jasmine had said, as everyone who knew him said: the Duke of Malvern was an honorable man.
    Jasmine was now speaking with a young woman dressed all in virginal white, her complexion as pale as her gown, and since Lydia didn’t wish to interrupt, she busied herself by at last opening her dance card, to see what the baron had written that had brought such a strange smile to Tanner’s face.
    The baron had scribbled his name on the second line, the fifth, and the eighth. The three dances he had mentioned. But it was the way he had signed the card that now brought a smile to her face.
    Wilde. Wilder. Wildest.
    What a wicked, wickedly interesting man.
    The captain had been gentle, almost respectful, their attraction to each other expressed only in longing looks, but never in word or action. He had been, she was realizing more and more, not only her first love, but also her beginning. Not her end.
    Tanner was an honorable man and a good friend (who had a spring in his step, according to Sarah), anda rather bemused but interested look in his eyes when she’d come into the drawing room this evening. She’d known, even at first feared, that Tanner could mean more to her than to simply be her friend. But she hadn’t considered that he might know that. Besides, Captain Fitzgerald stood between them, a bond and yet also a division.
    Baron Justin Wilde, however, was a man totally outside her limited realm of experience, a man who well could be teasing her, or he could be using his teasing to cover something that was perhaps more than a casual interest.
    Why, she was beginning to feel like the heroine in a Pennypress novel. All she needed now was a menacing stepfather, or a dark castle complete with a ghost.
    It was good that Rafe was a duke, and could frank her correspondence for her, as Lydia already felt certain her letter to Nicole was going to run to two sheets, if not more. Which, for a quiet person who was accustomed to little excitement in her life, was rather extraordinary, indeed.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T ANNER AND J USTIN stood on the dark balcony outside the ballroom, companionably sipping from their glasses as they leaned against the railing, looking out over the gardens and the inviting paths lit periodically by flam-beaux.
    It was good to have Justin Wilde back in his life, Tanner thought. They’d had grand times together in the past, young men fresh from school and the country, eager to explore the world and maybe make their own mark on it. They’d laughed together, traveled to the races and boxing mills together. Raced their curricles neck-or-nothing, drunk deep in disreputable taverns, even shared an opera dancer or two. They’d been young, so young, all of them, with their whole lives ahead of them.
    Now those memories seemed to be of another world, another time, one before Justin’s marriage, his