Vixen in Velvet by Loretta Chase Read Free Book Online

be an infinite number of stanzas.”
    Her heart sank. One must give Lord Swanton credit for using his influence to raise funds for a worthwhile organization. All the same, if she had to listen to “Poor Robins” for another two hours or even more, she might throw herself into the Thames.
    “Lord Swanton seems to take life’s little sorrows very much to heart,” she said.
    “He can’t help himself,” Lord Lisburne said. “He tries, he says, to be more like Byron when he wrote Don Juan , but it always comes out more like an exceedingly weepy version of Childe Harold. At best. But happily for you, there’s no more room.”
    No room . Relief wafted through her like a cooling breeze. She wouldn’t have to sit through hours of dismal poetry—
    But she hadn’t come for her own entertainment, she reminded herself. This was business . Where Lord Swanton appeared, Maison Noirot’s prime potential clientele would be. Equally important, Lady Gladys would be here.
    “All the better if it’s a crush,” Leonie said. “And a late entrance will draw attention.”
    “Even if you deflated the sleeves and skirt, you couldn’t squeeze in,” he said. “I gave up my place and two women took it. The lecture hall is packed to the walls. That, by the way, is where most of the men have retreated to. Since they’re bored and you’re young and pretty, you might expect to encounter a lot of sweaty hands trying to go where they’ve no business to be.”
    Leonie’s skin crawled. She’d been pawed before. Being able to defend herself did not make the experience any less disgusting. “I told Lady Gladys I’d be here,” she said.
    “Why on earth did you do that?”
    “It’s business,” she said.
    “None of mine, in other words,” he said.
    She had no intention of explaining about Paris and the night she’d been hurrying home, to warn her sisters of the danger, and found herself in a mob of men, being groped and narrowly escaping rape.
    This wasn’t Paris, she told herself. This was London, and the place did not contain a mob. It was merely crowded, like so many other social gatherings. She walked to the lecture hall door.
    He followed her. “A hot, stuffy room, crammed with excitable young women and irritated men, and Swanton and his poetic friends sobbing over fallen leaves and dead birds and wilted flowers,” he said. “Yes, I can understand why you can’t bear to be left out.”
    “It’s business ,” she said.
    She cracked open the door and peered inside.
    She had a limited view, through a narrow space the doorkeepers had managed to maintain in front of the door. Primarily women occupied the seats on the ground floor, and they were so tightly squeezed together, they were half in one another’s laps. They and a few men—fathers and brothers, most likely—thronged the mezzanine and upper gallery as well. The latter seemed to sag under the weight. Men filled every square inch of the standing room. The space was stifling hot, and the aroma of tightly packed bodies assaulted her nostrils.
    Meanwhile somebody who wasn’t Lord Swanton was reading, in throbbing tones, an ode to a dying rose.
    She retreated a step. Her back came up against a warm, solid mass. Silk whispered against silk.
    Lord Lisburne leaned in to look over her shoulder, and the mingled scents of freshly pressed linen and shaving soap and male wiped out the smell of the crowd and swamped her senses.
    “Aren’t you glad you were late?” he said. “You might be sitting in there.” His breath tickled her ear. “And you wouldn’t be able to get out until it was over.”
    She’d be trapped, listening to poetic dirges, for hours. She closed her eyes and told herself it was business , then took a steadying breath and opened them again. She would go through this door. She—
    His large, gloved hand settled on the door inches from her shoulder. He closed the door.
    “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s go to the circus.”

 
    Chapter Three
    Never