Beauty and the Duke Read Free Page A

could not!
    Then Joseph laid his hand on Amelia’s arm, and the moment for talking was gone.
    He pressed his other hand against Amelia’s back, his gaze hesitating on Christine as if accepting that she would not follow. “You’ll be sitting at the head table with Lord Bingham and the other dignitaries,” he said. “We probably won’t have an opportunity to speak to each other later. I just wanted to congratulate you for having the courage to publish your father’s work. I know it would have meant a lot to him.”
    Before she could tell Joseph to go to blazes and that she loved her father, despite what people may have thought, he had already turned away, placing Amelia slightly ahead of him, a stance that safeguarded her from arms and elbows. Christine watched them disappear, her height allowing her to follow his progress easily amid the thinning crowd. They were an attractive couple, she admitted, as they shuffled through the doors. The same doors Lord Sedgwick and his sister had entered minutes before. The urge to weep suddenly vanished.
    Erik .
    Here in London. At this very gala.
    And a newer more terrible thought than Joseph and Amelia traveling to the other side of the world took hold in Christine’s mind. Lord Sedgwick was a duke. He and his sister would probably be sitting at the same table of honor as she.
    She raised her gaze to the heavens. And the night had only just begun.
     
    Erik watched as Christine accepted another glass of champagne off a tray presented her by one of an army of footmen. Her fourth, Erik considered, as he sipped his own glass. Beneath an enormous chandelier, footmen threaded their way among the tables carrying large silver platters crowded with demitasse-size cups of melting sherbet. At the far end of the hall, an orchestra played a jaunty reel and most of the younger guests had already made their way onto the floor.
    He found his sister enjoying the lively music. Becca was the reason he’d consented to come here tonight. But she was not the reason he stayed. He looked past her toward the elaborate entrance to the exhibits. The museum had closed its doors to the public hours ago and only the guests of the gala roamed the inner sanctum of the museum. Towering planters of palms and strands of orchids festooned the rotunda recalling the garden of Babylon, a place in history noted for wealth, luxury, and wickedness. He thought it an amusing contrast for the Fossil Society, an organization that fostered images of carnivorous monsters that once roamed the earth.
    An hour had passed, during which the members present ceremoniously honored the achievements of their dead Society members. Christine sat farther down the table from him, her father’s plaque beside her, a simple tribute given to her for Professor Sommers’s work. Erik watched her gently polish it twice when she thought no one was looking—only to look up this last time and discover someone was watching. She eased a serviette over the plaque.
    They had not spoken since their introduction outside on the steps of the museum. Tonight was the first time Erik had seen her in ten years. Her body was a little fuller and rounder, and looked softer in all the places a man would find his pleasure. She had the same full mouth he remembered. She had not worn spectacles when he knew her before, but she still had the same large, intelligent blue eyes that surveyed the world with a mild skepticism. Eyes that had a way of looking inside you.
    The way she had always looked at him.
    The way she was looking at him now. Half-annoyed—flushed, as if he’d caught her performing fellatio rather than the simple human act of remembering her father.
    He grinned into his glass as if to tell her she could glare him to hell and back and it made no difference. He’d do as he pleased. She was still self-governing, opinionated, and willful, and completely unaware of the way every man at the table watched her, he thought as he shifted his attention to the