Notorious Pleasures (Maiden Lane #2)(8)

Thomas pursed his lips. On the dance floor, Lady Hero was frowning at Griffin and the sight relieved him. “Catch enough of the gin sellers and it will impact the makers as well—I assure you. The clause is only months old. We must give it time, my friend.”

“I haven’t time,” Wakefield replied. “London is wasting under this plague. More citizens die than are born in our great city. Bodies litter the streets and garrets of the East End. Wives are deserted by their drink-destroyed husbands, babes killed by their drunken mothers, children abandoned to die or prostitute themselves. How can England prosper if the workers deteriorate in mind and body? We will wither and fail as a nation if gin is not eradicated from our city.”

Thomas knew that Wakefield was concerned about the gin problem, but to care so deeply about this one cause? Such passion didn’t fit the man he knew.

A movement from the other side of the dance floor caught his eye and scattered his thoughts. A woman stepped to the edge of the crowd. Her skirts were a flaming orange over primrose petticoats. Her hair was a deep, impossible wine-red, her lips and cheeks artificially rouged. Every man on that side of the dance floor watched her as she flirtatiously rapped her male companion’s arm with her folded fan. He said something, and she arched her white throat and laughed, making her breasts jiggle.

“… only if a man of substance is brought to account for gin making,” Wakefield said.

Thomas blinked, realizing that he’d missed most of what his companion had said. He turned his head to the duke, but out of the corner of his eye he could still see the woman playfully drawing her fingers across the slopes of her breasts. “Wanton baggage.”

“Who?”

Damn, he’d spoken aloud and now Wakefield waited for an answer.

Thomas grimaced. “Mrs. Tate.” He jerked his chin to indicate the woman across the room. “Every time I see her, she has a different beau, all younger than herself. The woman should be hauled up on indecency charges. Anyone can see that she’s five and thirty if she’s a day.”

“Eight and thirty,” Wakefield murmured.

Thomas turned to look incredulously at him. “You know her?”

Wakefield’s eyebrows rose. “I believe most of London society knows her.”

Thomas glanced back at Mrs. Tate. Was Wakefield speaking of biblical knowledge? Had the duke bedded the woman?

“She has a quick wit and an easy manner,” Wakefield was saying lightly. “Besides, she married a man three times her age. I don’t begrudge her a little merriment now that she’s widowed.”

“She flaunts herself,” Thomas gritted. He could feel Wakefield’s look.

“Perhaps, but only with unmarried gentlemen. She is careful not to dally with a man otherwise engaged.”

As if she’d heard the word engaged, Lavinia Tate suddenly looked up, her eyes meeting his across the distance that separated them. He knew, even though he could not see them now, that her eyes were a plain brown. That, he thought with satisfaction, was something she couldn’t change. Her eyes were and always would be ordinary brown, no matter how much paint she employed.

She held his eyes and lifted her chin in a challenge that would bring any red-blooded man to attention. It was a look as old as Eden, as old as Eve daring Adam with a bit of over-ripened fruit.

Thomas deliberately looked away from her proud gaze. He’d tasted that fruit once, and though it had been difficult, he’d weaned himself from its heady sweetness. The woman was a jade, plain and simple. And if there was one thing he’d had enough of in this lifetime, it was jades.

LADY HERO’S FACE was calm and grave and almost beautiful—and she looked not at all impressed by Griffin’s dramatic recitation of his sins.

“I had already decided you were a rake,” she said as he halted before her. She sank into a graceful curtsy. “But as you are to be my brother-in-law, Lord Reading, I think avoiding your company entirely may be somewhat difficult.”

The woman certainly knew how to prick a man’s illusions about himself. Once again he was hit with the awful irony that this woman out of all the women at the ball should be the one Thomas had chosen as his bride. A woman who made no bones about her displeasure with Griffin. A woman who had seen him at his very worst—and showed no signs of forgetting the sight. A woman who was proud of her snowy-white soul.

Lady Perfect—a perfect lady for his perfect brother.

He eyed her with disfavor, watching as she arched her damned left eyebrow in pointed query. She wasn’t quite a beauty, his brother’s fiancée. Instead she had that sort of elegance that was found sometimes among the upper crust of English society—creamy pale skin, a slightly overlong face, properly neat features, and hair that was red without going so far as to be gauchely ginger.

He’d seen her type a hundred times before, and yet… something about Lady Hero was decidedly different. For one thing, most of the ladies of her rank would’ve simply left him to his fate in the sitting room. Yet she had gone against her own rigid morals to save both him and Bella. Had she acted out of compassion for two strangers? Or merely a stolid code of ethics that superseded even her own distaste for what she’d found in the sitting room?

Griffin looked about. The music had halted, the dance was at an end, and he was supposed to escort her back to stodgy Thomas. Which he would do, of course—just not yet.