Read Online Lady Varney's Risqué Business by Cerise Deland - Free Book Online

him.” He kissed her then, his tongue darting inside to tantalize her with the promise of a different life.
    “I want you. I do,” she told him. “But I cannot take the chance.”
    “That I’d berate you? Badger you? Insult you? That’s what he did, isn’t it?”
    Daily. Hourly.
    Justin kissed her again, sweetly, desperately, lovingly. “Am I like him?”
    “No. Never.” She put her palm to his flies, and beneath the superfine wool, she felt one piece of hard evidence that he resembled Henry Varney in no way.
    He crushed her hand to his cock. “I mean to have you.”
    She fought to undo his buttons. “Do it then.”
    He glanced around the dim wood lined walls. “Here.”
    Following his line of sight, she saw the map table. “You wouldn’t.”
    “I will,” he told her and tugged her to the center of the room where a large table held maps. He lifted her and put her on it, her knees bent over the edge. “Let me raise your skirt, madam. I need to kiss your pretty pussy.”
    Someone gasped.
    Kitty halted. Her gaze met Justin’s.
    Something plunked to the floor. A book? A shoe?
    She gulped.
    He seized her hand. As he pulled open the door, he whispered, “ Wait. Have you left anything?”
    * * * *
    One ostrich feather.
    Kitty let her eyes drift shut at the ribald memory of what she and Justin had done and said in that library. And what she had left there.
    Oh, blast it all! The damned feather from her hat had become the subject that tickled everyone in the broad sheets for more than a week. “How many ladies wore ostrich feathers to the wedding breakfast of Lord and Lady C last Saturday?” asked one tabloid until they had a tally of three. Three women.
    “One of which is me,” Kitty fretted as she sat with her sister at Lady Anna Grey’s garden party eight days later. “Now they attempt to find the owner of the fan in the Martindales’ pantry and match them!”
    Adjusting her broad brimmed straw against the sun, Maggie fought hard to suppress a smile. “They’re just selling papers, Puss.”
    Kitty scowled. “They should focus on discovering who the other person was in the Darlingtons’ library!”
    “An assignation !” Maggie put a hand to her heart in feigned horror. “ Imagine !”
    “Oh, you are no help!” Kitty couldn’t stop herself from laughing.
    “Just don’t go off with him here.”
    Kitty froze. “He’s here?”
    Maggie giggled. “Just so. Don’t look now, but he’s talking with Susanna Curtis.”
    Susanna? Kitty could not resist turning to see how the two of them got on. My God. Susanna had not yet decided if she would accept Justin’s invitation to his cottage in Kent. His invitation to seduction. Though why go to Kent, when he seemed to be doing a marvelous job of it right here? Kitty wiggled in her chair while Susanna batted her long pale lashes at him, amused. Enthralled. And Justin grinned like a man enchanted.
    “ Oh ,” she seethed, jealousy coursing through her veins like lava. “How could he?”
    “Mmm. She is lovely.”
    “Whose side are you on, Maggie?”
    Her sister stared at her in utter exasperation. “My dearest sis, make up your mind. Do you want the man or not? Is he the man of your dreams? Rich, titled, kind, generous. Or is he simply a man whose gender alone you condemn because you’ve not the courage to see he is so different from Henry?”
    Kitty considered her younger sister’s words for a long minute. “When did you grow so mature?”
    “When you helped me learn to be a woman who used my head.”
    “ Touché. ”
    Kitty turned to admire dashing Lord Belmont. So changed from the privateer who captured her and saved her more than a decade ago. So very much the same man. Was she being feather brained not to admit she loved him? Wished she could marry him?
    “There is the matter of money,” she said to Maggie. “His uncle demands it.”
    “I don’t know, Puss, but I would say there must be a way to get round that. You said you have nearly