Springtime Pleasures by Sandra Schwab Read Free Book Online

laughing. It was a muttonbrained notion, of course, for there had been nothing in Boo’s address to make her laugh. Yet surely it was not merely his imagination that her eyes sparkled even more than before.
    As she turned those wonderful green eyes on him, his brain stuttered to a standstill. It was ridiculous, really—she a girl hardly out of the schoolroom and he a man of experience, at least ten years her senior if not more so. But still, his heart thundered in his breast and his flesh felt alternately hot and cold. He managed a “How do you do?” and then blurted out inanely, “We have brought you a glass of lemonade, Izzie. Here .” Then he thrust out the glass like a muttonbrained idiot.
    ~*~
    They were tall, both of them, was what struck Charlie first. A blessing indeed in a town that to all appearances was generally not blessed with tall gentlemen.
    Both were blond, with a distinct family resemblance in the slant of the cheekbones and the form of mouth and jaw. One was built like a bear, with a friendly, homely face, while the other was slightly shorter and slimmer, his face cast in rather stern lines. That one wore elegance and breeding like a cloak. Even Charlie, untrained in the art of London fashion, could see that his clothes were of the finest cloth and cut, fashioned without unnecessary frills, but in such a manner as to accentuate a set of nice shoulders.
    He did not strike Charlie as an approachable man, yet her new friend exuded unvarnished pleasure at seeing the two men and enthusiastically introduced them.
    The bear—Mr Cole—sketched Charlie a friendly bow and called her ma’am, which struck her as hilarious. The po-faced man—Lord Chanderley—, by contrast, only muttered something unintelligible before he thrust a glass of lemonade at his poor sister.
    Lemonade! When the ladies’ retiring room was upstairs!
    Lady Isabella’s eyes widened in evident alarm, and she cast an imploring look at Charlie.
    “ Lemonade !” Charlie promptly exclaimed, snatching the glass out of Lord Chanderley’s hand. “Please allow me—I’m positively famished !” Which she was, so it was not a lie. But she felt she ought to prove her point, and so she valiantly gulped the whole glass down in one go. “Ah,” she sighed when she was finally finished (too much sugar in the lemonade). “I needed that.”
    Lady Isabella beamed at her, whereas the two gentlemen stared at her with varying degrees of disbelief.
    Charlie felt her cheeks heat up. “I was very thirsty,” she said defensively.
    “Absolutely.” Lady Isabella nodded. “You looked positively withered. Very understandable since… since you’ve been dancing so energetically. Miss Stanton is a splendid dancer—I was watching her, you know.” She winked at Charlie right before she turned to her brother. “Now that you’ve saved her from a dire fate of perishing from thirst, why don’t you invite her to dance, George?”
    The look “George” bestowed on his sister was one of pure horror. He probably did not care for girls afflicted with unbecoming height either, Charlie thought on a sigh.
    “Now, look, Izzie—”
    “I think it’s a splendid idea,” Mr Cole cut in, his eyes suddenly twinkling in what was surely mischief. “Let me take your glass, Griff. You probably wouldn’t like the punch anyway.” Grinning, he took Chanderley’s glass and then, with another bow, Charlie’s. “You won’t need that any longer, will you, Miss Stanton? And you’re lucky: a new set is just beginning.”
    With a forced smile, Chanderley held out his arm to Charlie. “Shall we, Miss Stanton?”
    Charlie was of a mind to tell him to go to the devil, but at Lady Isabella’s beaming face she found she did not have the heart to disappoint her new friend. “With pleasure.” She slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow and then remembered to tag on, “My lord.”
    The muscles under her fingers were rather stiff and the lines around his mouth seemed to