Royal's Bride by Kat Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

The smile she gave him was warm and hopeful and his body flushed with heat.
    Dammit to hell, an attraction to his soon-to-be fiancée’s cousin was not at all what he wanted.
    “Let me know if there is anything else you need,” he said a bit more harshly than he intended. Leaving her to complete what other tasks she had planned, he made his way down the hall to change out of his riding clothes.
    The afternoon was slipping away. Soon he would be joining his aunt for supper. Tonight for the first time since her accident, Lily would be joining them.
    Royal swore softly as he stepped into his suite and firmly closed the door.

Five
    S he didn’t want to go. Lily considered pleading a headache, as she had done for the past two nights, but she simply couldn’t ignore her host and hostess any longer. Still, the notion of sitting through a meal with the duke made her stomach quiver. Every time she was around him, she felt nervous and flushed and not quite certain what to say.
    It was ridiculous. He was only a man, after all, not the golden-haired angel she had imagined when she had been lying there in the snow.
    He was handsome, yes. But beauty was only skin deep. At the balls and soirees she’d attended with Jo, she had met dozens of handsome men. It had never bothered her before.
    Lily didn’t understand it. As a child, she had been shy, but in the years she had lived with her uncle, she had learned to overcome it. Living in Jocelyn’s shadow for so long seemed to have brought its return.
    Still, she usually did quite well in the presence of theopposite sex. Perhaps it was knowing this particular male belonged to her cousin.
    As the little maid, Penny, helped her fasten the buttons at the back of her aqua silk gown, she wondered when Jo would arrive and hoped it would be soon. The sooner the duke met his stunning future bride, the sooner this ridiculous attraction Lily grudgingly admitted to feeling would be over.
    One could hardly be attracted to a man who looked through her as if she were not there, and she knew from experience, once Jocelyn arrived, that is exactly what the handsome Duke of Bransford would do.
    “Gor, ye look lovely, miss.”
    Lily smiled at the dark-haired girl. “Thank you, Penny.” She turned in front of the cheval glass, pleased at the changes she had fashioned in Jo’s cast-off dinner gown. She had removed the extra ruffles around the hem and across the bodice, leaving only a single flounce of aqua satin across the bosom, which she adorned with a spray of tiny seed pearls.
    The gown looked brand new, which it practically was, since Jo rarely wore a dress more than once and was happy to hand them off to Lily to change in any way she pleased.
    She moved to the dresser, lifted the lid on the small rosewood box she had brought with her and removed a lovely peach-colored agate cameo hanging from a black velvet ribbon. It wasn’t an expensive piece of jewelry, but it was one of her favorites, a gift from the Caulfields on her eighteenth birthday.
    She held it out to Penny, then turned her back. “Could you tie it for me, please?”
    “Of course, miss.”
    Penny set the cameo at the base of her throat and tied the ribbon round her neck. With her pale hair pulled away from her face and pinned in a cluster of curls at her shoulder, she felt ready to face the duke and his aunt across the supper table.
    Taking a breath for courage, Lily swept out of the room and headed down the wide mahogany staircase. She found the duke and his aunt conversing in an antechamber that led into the elaborate formal dining room. She had hoped for a more casual evening, but with the dowager in residence, she should have known it wasn’t going to happen.
    “Ah, Miss Moran,” the duke said, striding toward her. “We were afraid you’d had another brush with the kitchen maids.”
    He was smiling, teasing her, but with his aunt in the room, she was embarrassed. “Nothing of the sort, I assure you.” Her cheeks burned.