Read Online One Naughty Night2 by Laurel McKee - Free Book Online Page A

brandy at his club. The conversation of his friends. But what he had missed most was the theater. Amateur theatricals in someone’s drawing room or a touring company from New York, which was the fare available in the tropics, just wasn’t the same as a real London theater.
    He hadn’t been in the Majestic since that night he first met Lily, and it hadn’t changed. He focused his opera glasses on the stage and studied the elaborate gold and crimson velvet curtains, the frescoes above the proscenium that depicted the Muses. Gold boxes rose to either side, as elaborate as wedding cakes with their fashionable inhabitants in black evening suits and bright satin gowns. The excited sound of laughter and conversation hung in the perfume-scented air, along with the flutter of programs and the faint hiss of the gaslights.
    There was nothing quite like a night at the theater, Aidan thought as he watched the audience file into the stalls below his box. The anticipation of escaping into another world, of living another life just for a few hours.Those moments just before the curtain rose and a new world was revealed. It was this way every time he went to the theater; it was one of the things that kept drawing him back.
    But tonight felt somehow different. Tonight he kept thinking about Lily and wondering if he would see her. Was she behind that curtain? He could picture her there backstage, the very image of cool efficiency as she had been at the Devil’s Fancy, overseeing everything with her brown eyes. Her somber gown and sleek coiffure belying what was hidden inside of her, a fire that had nearly burned him when he dared to touch her. To kiss her.
    To want her.
    Aidan lowered his glass and frowned as he studied the laughing party in the box across the way. He
did
want Lily, with a raw passion that had caught him by surprise. It threatened to make him forget everything else but when he could see her again. But he had told Freddy he would find his blasted letters, and for that he needed a cool head.
    He turned back to the stage and suddenly noticed a man standing in the shadows of the wings, watching him. Aidan couldn’t make out his features, just the gleam of light-colored hair in the darkness and the intensity of his stare.
    Such a glare seemed to speak of anger and brawls, but Aidan couldn’t think of anyone he could have offended so deeply in the short time since he returned from the West Indies. Especially no one in the theater. It was unsettling, and he could feel his muscles tense as if he was prepared to fight.
    But then the gaslights flickered, and the audience grew quiet in anticipation of the play beginning. Aidan glancedover to see the curtain sway, and when he turned back, the man in the wings was gone.
    Aidan laughed ruefully. He was becoming infected with Freddy’s paranoia, seeing danger where there was none. He needed to focus on his task, not on fighting imagined foes. And definitely
not
on alluring dark-haired women in gambling clubs…
    “What is
he
doing here, the blighter?”
    Lily could hear the barely leashed fury in Dominic’s voice, but she was too busy lacing up one of the actress’s gowns to turn around and look at him. “Who is here?” she murmured. She tied off the ribbons and sent the woman hurrying off to make her entrance. The first night of a play was always frantic; the last thing she needed was one of her brothers in a temper.
    But Dominic didn’t seem to be calming down. He paced to the end of the dressing room, the black cloak that was part of his costume swirling around him. “That Aidan Huntington, of course. First he’s at the club and now here at the theater? What’s his game?”
    Aidan was here? Against Lily’s will, her heart suddenly pounded, and her mouth went dry. Could he possibly be here to see her? Or was Dominic right and there was some darker purpose to him showing up everywhere so suddenly? Her old distrust of people always seemed to be there, simmering under the