The Ardent Lady Amelia Read Free

decided as she studied the stranger. For he was a stranger to her. She had a very good memory for names and faces, and if she’d seen him at all, previously, it could only have been in a crowd. Certainly he’d never been introduced to her. She couldn’t very well have forgotten his impressive height or the fierceness of his nearly black eyes, or even the suppressed energy that seemed to radiate from him. He didn’t appear the sort of man who would suffer fools gladly, or even run tame at a polite social gathering. A man of action, she thought, not without amusement. A soldier not of the parade-ground variety, but of battle. She wondered how Peter had met him.
    “Ah, Verwood,” Peter said, seeming at something of a loss. “I thought we’d meet in the library. Should have told Bighton. Well, never mine. We can go through here.”
    If he thought by indicating the door he was going to escape without an introduction, he was sadly out. Trudy was not in the habit of watching young men wander through “her” drawing room without a proper greeting. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said, extending her fingers just slightly in the newcomer’s direction.
    Verwood’s alert eyes instantly swung toward her and he executed a stiff, if minuscule, bow as Peter mumbled, “Aunt Trudy, Lord Verwood. Verwood, my aunt, Gertrude Harting.” From her seat just opposite Trudy, Amelia watched in fascination as the man’s eyes took in every detail of Trudy’s appearance with the intensity of a beam suddenly loosed from a lantern in the dark. Though his countenance changed not a whit, Amelia had the distinct impression he’d formed an immediate judgment of the older woman, penetrated to some essential core of her, and extracted a definition he would not forget. It was an unnerving observation and she rather hoped Peter wouldn’t bother introducing the dark fellow to her.
    But in an instant the black eyes shifted to Amelia, subjecting her to the same sort of scrutiny as Peter reluctantly spoke her name. “Lady Amelia,” he murmured in a voice as deep as a coal pit and about as warm. This was not the manner in which Amelia was used to being treated by gentlemen and she couldn’t help the slight irritation which burgeoned in her bosom. She was aware that one of her brows rose slightly, though she had no control over it, but she couldn’t possibly know that her long, thin nose, which Trudy had so recently called aristocratic, actually twitched.
    If Lord Verwood considered this an extraordinary circumstance, he gave no indication of it. His bow to her was, if possible, even slighter than that to Gertrude, but there was no apparent disrespect in it. One so stiff, after all, might fall over were he to incline himself too far, Amelia decided.
    “Verwood,” Trudy was saying, her brow wrinkled with thought. “I remember a Vernon in Hampshire, but no Verwoods. And he was a baronet, if I’m not mistaken. What part of the country are you from, Lord Verwood?”
    “Derbyshire.”
    Trudy had expected a little more information than that, but she was undaunted. “And you still have a home there, do you?”
    “To the best of my knowledge.”
    If he had said it with a twinkle in his eyes, Amelia might have warmed to him, but no, his face and those unnerving black eyes were as politely cool as ever. Trudy persisted. “Have you family there?”
    “No.”
    “Ah, then they’re here with you in London,” Trudy surmised in the face of his unwillingness to be more forthcoming.
    “No.”
    Which left her knowing precisely nothing. He might have family (a wife) who weren’t either in Derbyshire or in London, or he might have no family (a wife) at all.
    “Do you plan a long stay in London?”
    “I haven’t any idea, as yet.”
    “Have you a house here?”
    “Yes.”
    “In South Street,” Peter offered, to propitiate her bursting curiosity.
    Trudy sat back a little in her chair, nodding as though satisfied. “There are some acceptable