Love and Honor: The Coltrane Saga, Book 7 by Patricia Hagan Read Free Book Online

gown but she fumed, “I look like a birthday cake! I’m nearly fourteen! Why do I have to dress like a little girl?”
    “You look like what you are,” Colt tried to comfort his niece. “A fairy princess.”
    “I don’t want to look like a fairy princess,” she protested petulantly. “I want to be able to dress up like Kit.”
    Only Kit caught her meaning, and she gave Marilee a scathing look, silently warning her not to say anything else. Marilee looked apologetic, and was grateful that Kitty called down the stairs at that precise moment. “You’re going to have to go on without me. I’m all thumbs tonight. Kit, would you come up here and help me with my hair?”
    Jade groaned, “Oh, for heaven’s sake! I believe in being fashionably late, but this is a bit too much.” She told Kit to go up, motioning the others toward the door and the waiting car outside.
    Kit was halfway up the stairs, a rush of excitement washing over her. Then she heard Marilee wailing again and froze where she stood, bristling with anger she dared not express.
    “Why can’t I wait and go with Kit? Why do I have to look even more like a little girl by walking in with all of you?”
    Jade had reached the point where she did not care what anybody did as long as she and Colt got to the ball before the hour grew any later. “Do what you want, Marilee,” she said irritably, gathering her mink cape and walking out.
    The front door closed after them, and Kitty appeared on the landing to wave Kit up the stairs. “Hurry! We don’t have long. What are you going to do with your hair? That style just doesn’t go with your dress, and…”
    Kit wasn’t listening. Dizzy with excitement, she hurried to her room to take off the dress she was wearing. Then she took the box containing the black velvet sheath from its hiding place beneath the bed.
    A sudden thought made her stiffen. She looked from the dress to the white lawn knickers she was wearing, open between the legs front and back and joined only at waist and knees. She could not wear anything so bulky beneath the clinging sheath! In her excitement, she had neglected to buy a dancing corset!
    Kitty knocked on the door. “You really must hurry, dear. Can I help?”
    “No. I’m almost ready. I’ll be right down.”
    What difference did it make? she asked herself recklessly as she yanked off the knickers, tossing them aside. Who would know, anyway? She stepped gingerly into the sheath and began to pull it up over her naked body, relishing the way the soft velvet felt against her bare flesh. It clung like a second skin across her hips, flowing smoothly to the floor from beneath her firm, round breasts.
    Whirling in front of the mirror, Kit admitted to herself, with a delicious wave of wickedness, that she liked what she saw…expect for her hair. With a few yanks, the pins were out of the sophisticated pouf. With a wild toss, her thick, golden-red hair fell to her bare shoulders.
    Stepping into black beaded slippers, Kit was ready to make her debut…in her own unforgettable way.
    Kitty and Marilee were waiting in the foyer. When they saw her, Kitty actually swayed, so impressed was she with her granddaughter’s stunning beauty. Marilee just stood there, her eyes wide with shocked admiration.
    “Do I dare?” Kit grinned.
    “You dare!” Kitty confirmed, then she challenged, “Are you sure you don’t enjoy looking like a femme fatale ?”
    “Of course I do,” Kit admitted, “but most of all I enjoy being me …which means presenting whatever side of me I wish to present…when I wish it…not my mother!”
    Marilee was unimpressed by her cousin’s personal declaration of independence. “Aunt Jade is going to send you to that convent in Nice where my mother once lived,” she predicted. “And not to be a nun, either. Just you wait and see.”
    Kitty quickly rejected that notion. “That’s when I’d turn into the busybody she already thinks I am. No granddaughter of mine will ever