The Magic of His Touch (May Day Mischief) Read Free Page A

entirely
the wrong shape, and passably pretty at best. Perhaps that was why she’d had
such a shocking reaction to what he’d said.
    “A lovely girl like you deserves better than this,” the man
said.
    She wanted to scream at him. She wasn’t lovely at all. She’d
been assured of that often enough. His words hurt, which was ridiculous, seeing
as she didn’t know him and didn’t care what he thought. Covering herself took
forever and made her angrier with each passing second, at both him and
herself.
    When she finally emerged, he wasn’t watching her anymore, but
gazing across the meadow as if alert for something. His lecherous friend?
    Unnerved, she hastened into her gown and settled the skirts
about her. “You may leave now,” she said with what she hoped passed for icy
dignity.
    He turned and eyed her. The corner of his mouth curled up.
“Your stockings and boots.”
    It was infuriatingly obvious that he wouldn’t budge until she
obeyed him. She sat on the cold, damp ground and pulled on her stockings and
then her boots. She stood and grabbed her shawl.
    “Ho!” came a distant voice. “Where are you, old fellow?”
    “Coming!” cried her persecutor. “Go home,” he said softly. He
vaulted onto his horse and was gone.
    Deprived of even the pleasure of stalking away in high dudgeon,
Peony did as she was told.
    When Lucasta tapped on her bedchamber door a while later, Peony
was stark naked again. “You may come in if you don’t laugh,” she said bitterly,
turning the key in the door.
    Lucasta slipped in, her usually tidy hair falling down around
her ears, and mud, leaves and several white blossoms clinging to her gown.
    Peony burst into giggles. “Whatever happened to you? All that
mud! Your gown is ruined.” She locked the door again.
    “A stray bull,” Lucasta said, “and it’s all your fault. I saw
you were gone and went out to check on you, but the horrid creature took a fancy
to me. I’m lucky I arrived home intact.” She eyed Peony and snorted. “You’ve
bits of grass and weeds stuck all over you.”
    Peony shivered, returning to the painstaking task of picking
every bit of greenery from her skin. “I should love to wash it off, but I
daren’t ask for a bath. The maids will be sure to tell Mrs. Groggins, and she’ll
tell Aunt Edna and Papa, and then I’ll really be in the soup.”
    “Let me help.” Lucasta shed her gown. “We can say the mud and
grass were stuck on me. I shall explain that I went out to check precisely where
the sun first falls on the Enchanted Meadow on May Day. I’ll say it’s
significant in an ancient Beltane rite.”
    “Thank you,” Peony said dully. “Is it?”
    “I have no idea, but it’s absurd enough to be plausible.” She
poured wash water into the basin, wet a towel and wrung it out, and began to
swab the debris from Peony’s goose-pimpled skin.
    Her cheerfully sympathetic expression only made Peony feel
worse.
    “I gather rolling in the dew produced no result,” Lucasta said
after a while.
    Peony shivered all over, and it wasn’t just from being naked
and cold. She pushed the memories of the man who’d ruined everything to the back
of her mind, along with her inappropriate reaction to him. “It was freezing cold
and sopping wet, and I felt horridly exposed. Now what am I to do?”
    “Maybe you could try something that will give Lord Elderwood an
immediate disgust of you, such as passing wind at dinner. Your father and Aunt
Edna won’t dare to push you at him after that.”
    That made Peony laugh, but of course she would never do
anything so impolite.Later that afternoon, she made her way slowly downstairs to
cross the Great Hall to the drawing room, still casting about for ways to
convince Aunt Edna to give up on Lord Elderwood, when a bustle at the front door
made her pause.
    Surely not. Please, not yet!
    Her heart pummeled inside her breast. She backed up a few
stairs. At the sound of male voices, she backed up even more.
    “Whatever