Lord of Fire Read Free

tolerable, exactly?”
    She gave him a quelling look and refused to answer.
    “Come, tell me.”
    “Forget about her!”
    “I’m only curious. What color are her eyes?”
    She ignored him, nodding to a lady in a feathered turban.
    “Oh, Caro,” he murmured playfully. “Are you jealous of little luscious twenty-one?”
    “Don’t be absurd!”
    “Then where’s the harm?” he insisted, goading her. “Tell me what color
Alice’s eyes are.”
    “Blue,” she snapped, “but they are lackluster.”
    “And her hair?”
    “Blond. Red. I don’t know. What does it signify?”
    “Indulge me.”
    “You are an utter pest!
Alice’s hair is her crowning glory, if you must know. It hangs to her waist, and I suppose you call the color of it strawberry blond,” she said peevishly, “but it is always filled with the crumbs of whatever kind of muffin the baby ate for breakfast. Quite disgusting. I have told her a hundred times that long, cascading Rapunzel hair is entirely out of fashion, but
Alice ignores me. She likes it. Now are you satisfied?”
    “She sounds delicious,” Lucien whispered in her ear. “Might I bring her to
Revell Court
instead of you?”
    Caro pulled back and smacked him with her black lace fan.
    Lucien was still laughing at her ire as they sauntered into the knot of red-coated soldiers. “Ah, look, Lady Glenwood,” he said in bright irony. “It is my dear brother. Evening, Demon. I’ve brought someone to see you.” Sliding his hands into the pockets of his black trousers, he rocked idly on his heels, a cynical smile sporting at his lips as he waited to watch the show unfold.
    Damien’s fellow officers looked disparagingly at Lucien, muttered farewells to their colonel, and predictably walked away, lest their honor be tainted by contagion, he thought dryly. With a war-hardened visage and lionlike decorum, Damien pressed away from the wide pillar where he had been leaning and gave Caro a stiff bow.
    “Lady Glenwood. It is a pleasure to see you again,” he clipped out in a low, brusque monotone. Damien’s manner was so grave that he might have been laying out battle plans for his captains instead of greeting the damsel of his choice, Lucien thought. Indeed, after serving in nearly every major action in the war, Damien had come home with a deadened, icy look in his eyes that rather worried Lucien, but there was nothing he could do to help when his brother would barely talk to him.
    “I trust you find the evening’s entertainments to your liking, my lady,” he said gravely to the baroness.
    Caro smiled at him in an odd mix of patience and lust, while Lucien suppressed the urge to roll his eyes at his brother’s tense formality. Damien could lop off an enemy’s head with one blow of his sword, but put him in the vicinity of a beautiful woman, and the steely-eyed colonel turned as shy and uncertain as an overgrown schoolboy. The ladies of the ton were such sugar-spun confections that he seemed to fear that if he touched them he might break them. The hardy lasses who worked St. James’s Park at night put the war hero much more at ease.
    Ah, well, Lucien thought, shaking his head to himself, it was comforting to know that his exalted brother had his foibles. He looked on in amusement as Damien cast about haphazardly for something to say and suddenly seized on a topic.
    “How’s Harry?”
    Lucien shut his eyes briefly and pinched the bridge of his nose in irritation at his brother’s dim-wittedness with the opposite sex. Could he have made it any more obvious that he only wanted a highborn broodmare? No pretty compliments, no requests for a dance. It was a wonder women bothered with the great brute at all.
    Even Caro looked uneasy with his choice of subjects, as though to admit that she had borne a child was to admit she was beyond the first blush of her youth. She glossed over her reply, not bothering to mention the boy’s illness, then quickly steered the conversation to other matters.