Читать книгу My Lady's Honor - Julia Justiss - Страница 14

So this is Jeffrey’s new love, Gilen thought, despite his friend’s description of her, still a bit surprised as he inspected the woman curtseying before him. This tall, slender lady, her bowed head displaying a luxurious tangle of thick ebony curls, her long dark lashes in sharp silhouette against the porcelain of her face, was not the sort of gazetted beauty to whom his friend had previously lost his heart.

Nor—mercifully—upon Jeffrey’s announcing his name and rank, had she latched on to his arm with an effusion of ingratiating chatter, as had happened on several uncomfortable instances in the past when Jeffrey had presented him to his inamorata of the moment.

Lovely rather than stunning, and pretty-behaved besides, he concluded as he reached for her hand. Perhaps she might do for Jeff.

His favorable impression of genteel beauty did not prepare him for the jolt of awareness that hammered his nerves when his gloved hand touched hers. That lingered, pulsing through his veins, while he hastily brushed his lips to her fingertips and released them.

She’d felt it, too—his shocked mind noted her gasping intake of breath, the slight tremble of her hand. It, he concluded as he tried to reorder his scrambled thoughts, being an intense, immediate and entirely unwelcome attraction to the lady who’d won his best friend’s admiration. Damn and blast, he cursed under his breath.

“Lord St. Abrams,” she murmured, her face still demurely lowered.

“Isn’t she splendid?” an exuberant Jeffrey mouthed to him over her head. Reclaiming the lady’s hand with covetous zeal, he motioned Gilen to follow them. “Come along, St. Abrams. I’ll present you to Miss Southford’s aunt, Lady Alice, and some of her friends.”

After spending a moment staring in befuddlement at his hand, as if that appendage had betrayed him, Gilen started off a few steps behind the couple. Which, as they crossed the floor, gave him a good view—all too good a view—of Miss Southford, her graceful glide of a walk, that temptation of thick curls balanced on the arched perfection of her neck, the shapely arms beneath the flutter of dark sleeves. Much as he tried to rein it in, to his disgust his body was as enthusiastic as Jeffrey in appreciating the lady’s charms.

There was no question of proceeding down that path. His goal was only to protect, as much as it was possible to protect a man who’d reached his majority years ago, his vulnerable friend from unscrupulous husband hunters.

He dragged his eyes from watching for tantalizing hints of the trim posterior beneath her silk gown and fixed them firmly on his friend’s back. The fact that she was making no attempt to flirt with Gilen, who wherever he traveled seemed to be instantly identified by every unmarried female in the vicinity as a prime matrimonial prize, was both a relief and a promising sign.

Or perhaps it was just that his reputation as being impervious to female wiles had also preceded him, and Miss Southford realized Jeffrey’s easygoing person and titleless wealth made for an easier target.

Uncharitable, he chided himself. He mustn’t let Jeffrey’s recent unhappy experiences cause him to suspect the motives of every unmarried lady his friend encountered.