Read Online Lord Langley Is Back in Town by Elizabeth Boyle - Free Book Online Page B

lowered his voice. “They weren’t exactly falling for the notion that we are wildly in love.”
    Minerva’s brows arched upward and she leaned forward to match him tone for tone. “That is because we are not!”
    He waved her off. “A moot point, that.”
    “A moot point?” she sputtered. “To whom? You? For it is certainly not moot to me.” She paced again, stomping back and forth, utterly furious with him.
    Her houseguests had been sent toddling off to their beds, not without a few protests, and even more whispered offers that left Langley politely demurring and Lady Standon blushing with annoyance.
    So now they were finally alone and Langley was doing his best to find his way through this mess. Like most of his escapades, he was making this up as he went along, but usually when there was a woman involved, she was far more willing than this one.
    This stubborn, unyielding Boudicca in flannel.
    “Lady Standon, please,” he said, looking around her bedchamber and settling for pointing toward the only chair in the room, the one at her dressing table. “Have a seat and calm yourself. Perhaps you would like something to drink to ease your nerves.”
    “No, I shall not sit down. Nor will I be mollified or plied with drink. I would point out that my nerves wouldn’t be in this state if you hadn’t come tumbling into my bedchamber like a thief.”
    “An oversight on my part.” One that might work to his advantage. What had Thomas-William warned?
    You don’t want to be caught in the open.
    And while most of Langley’s kind preferred to work in the shadows, such tactics had never set well with him.
    And now he saw all too clearly how he could draw out his enemy.
    By standing in the middle of Society.
    And it wouldn’t hurt to be surrounded, as it were, by a bevy of deadly beauties.
    Present company excluded.
    “An oversight?” The lady threw up her hands. “Whatever were you doing on my drainpipe to begin with?”
    “I would think that the answer to that is rather obvious—but it hardly matters now. Though in my defense, I will point out that I wouldn’t have been forced to climb the drainpipe if you hadn’t invited my former . . . former . . .”
    “Doxies?”
    “Acquaintances,” he corrected. “You can hardly call a Russian princess a doxy. It’s bad form. Diplomatically speaking and all.”
    The lady’s hands went to her hips and those dark brows of hers arched.
    So she didn’t like being taken to task. Then again this was why most English diplomats left their wives at home.
    English women just didn’t understand Continental manners. Were all too judgmental about the mores. And looked askance at most of the customs that made each kingdom and principality unique.
    And the lady proved his point by saying, “When one such as your princess arrives—uninvited and unwanted—and takes over one’s house as if by divine right, all in pursuit of . . .”
    He grinned at her, for the possibilities for completing her sentence were endless.
    In pursuit of passion . . . ecstasy . . . pleasure.
    But before he could enlighten her, she finished her own tumbled sentence.
    “ . . . in pursuit of low company, I will call her exactly what she is—a common doxy.”
    Low? Common? The lady knew how to get to the crux of the matter.
    Langley put his hand over his heart. “Madame, you wound me.”
    The brows arched again, and this time she glanced at him and made a slight withering shake of her head. “I doubt it,” she said with every bit of cold rigidity that Thomas-William declared ran through her veins and Mrs. Hutchinson had seconded. But Lady Standon had not been without defenders in the ranks, for Tia believed that Minerva had once been greatly disappointed in love and that was why she was this way.
    Leave it to an overly imaginative chit barely out of the schoolroom to see right through the lady’s bluff. Because Langley knew something the others didn’t about the mistress of the