Velvet Read Free

dearer to me than my own
. “Of course not,” Gabrielle said. “Was I rude? You know what my tongue’s like when it runs away with me.”
    “I thought you’d find a sparring partner in Nathaniel,” Miles remarked. “And I suspect you’ll find him a worthy opponent.” He grinned. “However, I think you won that round, so perhaps I’d better go and smooth his ruffled feathers.” He went off chuckling with, the slightly malicious pleasure of one who enjoys stirring up the complacent.
    “Miles is wicked,” Georgie declared. “Nathaniel Praed’s his closest friend, I don’t know why he so relishes making mischief.”
    “Oh, dear,” Gabrielle said. “Should I beg Lord Praed’s pardon?” Her expression had changed completely. There was warmth in her eyes as she smiled at her cousin and a vibrancy to the previously bland expression. “I didn’t mean to disgrace you, Georgie, by offending your guest.”
    “Stuff!” Georgie declared. “I don’t like him myself, really, but he’s a most particular friend of Simon’s. They seem to have a kind of partnership.” She shrugged. “I expect he’s something to do with the government, whatever he might say. But he’s such a cold fish. Heterrifies me, if you want the truth. I always feel tongue-tied around him.”
    “Well, he doesn’t intimidate me,” Gabrielle declared. “For all that his eyes are like stones at the bottom of a pond.”
    The butler announced dinner at this point and Gabrielle went in on the arm of Miles Bennet. Nathaniel Praed was sitting opposite her, and she was able to observe him covertly while responding to the easy social chatter of her dinner partners on either side. His eyes were definitely stonelike, she thought. Browny-green, hard and flat in that lean face, with its chiseled mouth and aquiline nose. He reminded her of some overbred hunter. There was the same nervous energy to the slender athletic frame, supple and wiry rather than muscular. His hair was his most startling feature: crisp and dark, except for silver-gray swatches at his temples, matching the silver eyebrows.
    She became abruptly aware of his eyes on her and understood that her own observation had ceased to be covert … in feet, not to put too fine a point on it, she’d been staring at him with unabashed interest.
    Thankful, not for the first time in her life, that she rarely blushed, Gabrielle turned her attention to the man on her left with an animated inquiry as to whether he was familiar with Sir Walter Scott’s poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.”
    In the absence of their host, the men didn’t sit long over their port and soon joined the ladies in the drawing room. To his irritation, Nathaniel found himself looking for the titian, but the Comtesse de Beaucaire was conspicuous by her absence. He wandered with apparent casualness through the smaller salons, where various games had been set up, but there was no sign of the redhead among the exuberant players of lottery tickets or the more intense card players at the whist tables.
    He examined the faces of the men at the whist tables.One of them at some point in the week would be revealed as Simon’s candidate … once Simon decided to stop playing silly undercover games. He’d dragged him down here with the promise of a perfect candidate for the service, refusing to divulge his identity, choosing instead to play a silly game with a ridiculous form of introduction.
    It was typical Simon, of course. For a grown man, he took a childish delight in games and surprises. Nathaniel took his tea and sat in a corner of the drawing room, frowning at the various musical performances succeeding each other on harp and pianoforte.
    “Miss Bayberry’s performance doesn’t seem to find favor,” Miles observed, wandering over to his friend’s corner. “Her voice is a trifle thin, I grant you.”
    “I hadn’t noticed,” Nathaniel said shortly. “Besides, I’m no judge, as well you know.”
    “No, you never have