Read Online The Wicked Wedding of Miss Ellie Vyne by Jayne Fresina - Free Book Online

peripheral vision.
    Standing beside the potted palm, she’d just begun to get that chilling sensation again, of being followed and spied upon. It must be the effect of Hartley’s blue gaze on her shoulders, she decided, and shrugged it off quickly.
    He thrust his way through the crowd, bumped into her with one hard shoulder, expelled a tired breath, and grumbled in her general direction, “Are you dancing?”
    Spilled wine stained her borrowed evening gloves and seeped through to her skin. She looked up and immediately felt the familiar shiver of annoyance. It was quite disgusting that one man should have so much in his favor—all of it wasted.
    Ellie Vyne or Ellie Phant? She heard those mocking words again in her mind as if he’d just uttered them aloud. Even the laughter still echoed around her head as it did all those years ago.
    “Do I look as if I’m dancing?” she snapped.
    “Do you intend to?”
    “I made no plans one way or the other.”
    He smiled thinly. “Perhaps you can decide now.”
    “Why do you want to know my plans?” She fluttered her lashes in feigned ignorance. “What interest can they be to you?”
    A heavier sigh squeezed out between his lips. “You know very well, Vyne, that I am asking you to dance.”
    “With whom?”
    “With me.”
    “Well, you might have said. It’s quite simple, but you always have to complicate things. In your tiresome, arrogant English way I suppose you assumed I was waiting in absolute desperation for you to ask.” Although she was born in England, Ellie considered that purely an accident. She liked to think of herself as an American, like her mother.
    “I don’t intend to stand here arguing with you for another five minutes, Vyne.”
    Not waiting for her reply, James swiftly removed the empty glass from her hand, gave it to a passing footman, and gestured with a stiff bow of his towering form, for her to exit the room and join the line of couples currently gathered in the hall, where lack of furniture made it more suitable for dancing.
    “I can’t,” she said, feeling hot, anxiously watching the security of her empty glass moving away.
    “What’s the matter with you? What have you done now?”
    “It’s not me. It’s the dress.” Her sister’s maid had done her best with the gown but, just a few moments ago, an entire seam of hasty stitches had snapped apart under her sleeve and down the side of her bosom. This required Ellie to keep her arm rigidly clasped to her side or else expose her chemise and corset to the room at large. Added to that, she’d accidentally sat in a dish of trifle half an hour ago, and that left a stain in a very unfortunate place. She was doing her best to hide and not move very much. Her sisters had disappeared, abandoning her soon after they all arrived at the party, but she’d been hoping one of them would come to find her so she could explain her predicament and leave.
    Instead, James came along and suddenly, after all these years, wanted to dance with her.
    His quizzical gaze now assessed the front of her gown.
    With a low groan she lifted her arm to show the tear. His eyebrows arched high.
    “And…” She turned, showing him the trifle stain that marked her sister’s lovely, white muslin frock.
    James considered her decrepit state with all due solemnity.
    “So you see,” she said, “I can’t dance with you.” For some reason she was close to weeping. It was most unlike her, and she had no excuse for it.
    “I can assure you, Vyne, I’ve danced with women in far worse states. Is that the best you can do to get out of it? I always imagined you’d have far more intricate and nonsensical excuses at the ready to turn me down.”
    The idea that he might ever have considered asking her to dance before could not have occurred to Ellie. Not in a thousand years.
    He held out his arm. “I’m not going away, so you may as well dance with me. It’ll be over with before you know it.”
    “That’s what they say before