Simply Magic by Mary Balogh Read Free Book Online Page B

not thought of that incident for years and years. She was surprised she remembered it at all.
    Were that friendly, talkative, overprotected little boy and the viscount she had met this afternoon one and the same, then? But they must be. She had liked him then and wanted him for a friend. She had hoped he would visit again, but though she believed he had, she had never seen him again.
    Even then they had been worlds apart.
    â€œWe have been invited to spend the evening with Mr. Dannen and his mother tomorrow,” Frances said. “It will be something for you to look forward to. And you will have a chance to take a look at him and find out if you like what you see.”
    She chuckled at the look on Susanna’s face, and then they both laughed together.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    Peter had spoken quite truthfully about neighbors in the country frequently coming together, either for impromptu walks and rides and drives and daytime calls at one another’s homes or for more formal entertainments like dinners and carriage excursions and garden parties.
    The evening of the day after he first met Susanna Osbourne offered one such formal gathering.
    Dannen’s mother had recently come from Scotland, where she lived with a widowed brother, to spend a few weeks with her son. And so he had invited his neighbors to meet her at an evening of cards and music followed by supper.
    The Raycrofts were among the first to arrive, but by the time Peter looked up to observe the arrival in the drawing room of the Earl and Countess of Edgecombe with Miss Osbourne, Miss Krebbs was seated beside him on a sofa, the Misses Jane and Mary Calvert were sitting close by, one on a chair, the other on an ottoman, and Miss Raycroft was leaning on the back of the sofa, having declined his offer to allow her to sit.
    They were talking—almost inevitably—about the assembly. Miss Krebbs had asked him about the waltz and whether it was embarrassing to dance a whole set face-to-face with one partner and actually
touching
that partner all the time.
    There had been a flurry of self-conscious giggles from the other ladies at the question, and then they had all fallen silent in order to hear his answer.
    â€œEmbarrassing?” he had said, looking from one to the other of them in mock amazement. “To be able to look into a lovely face while my one hand is at the lady’s waist and the other in hers? I cannot think of any more congenial way to spend half an hour. Can you?”
    â€œOh,” Mary Calvert said with a deep sigh. “But Mama
will
insist that it is too fast a dance for any of us to perform—and I am not talking about tempo.”
    â€œThe beauty of the waltz, though,” Peter said, “is that it is danced in public with every mama able to keep an eye upon her daughter—and upon her daughter’s partner. No man with a grain of sense would attempt anything remotely indiscreet under such circumstances, would he—despite what he may
wish
to attempt.”
    They were all in the middle of a burst of merry and slightly risqué laughter when Peter looked up and his eyes met Susanna Osbourne’s across the room.
    Ah.
    Well.
    If someone had told him that a lightning bolt had penetrated the roof and the ceiling and the top of his head to emerge through the soles of his feet on its way through the floor, he would not have contradicted that person.
    Which was the strangest thing really when one came to think of it, considering the fact that in the brief moment before she looked away he saw neither stars in her eyes nor adoration in the rest of her face. Quite the contrary, indeed. Her look made him uncomfortably aware of how he must appear sitting here, surrounded by young beauties and laughing his head off with them.
    Vain, shallow popinjay.
    He did not catch her eye again for all of the next couple of hours or so while he conversed with almost everyone else, played a few hands of cards, and