A Daring Alliance by Karla Hocker

Author:Karla Hocker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626815728
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

“Shameless!”

“Brazen!”

The whispers hit Georgie like pebbles thrown at her back. She was relieved when coffee and liqueurs were cleared away and Caleb Morris’s servants brought the ladies’ wraps from the cloak room. Gratefully she slung the wide, gauzy scarf around her shoulders. It did not cover her skirt as a cloak would have done, but at least she could screen her bosom from hot male glances and female dagger looks.

She had done exactly as Mother Bainbridge had bidden her and had worn her most elegant dinner gown: the diaphanous white muslin with the gold border in Greek key design that had last graced Sir Charles Gray’s dinner party in Curzon Street. The night she and Barrett had not engaged in a single bout of verbal fencing!

Georgie had smiled when she donned it, thinking that fate must have lent a hand when Mr. Selwyn grabbed a few of her gowns and carried them off the Rutledge Pride. There had been a water stain on the skirt, but Rose had been able to remove it.

Alas, the square neckline, which had seemed quite modest in London, plunged deeper than the décolletages shown by the Boston ladies. The tiny off-the-shoulder sleeves looked like chemise straps when seen next to the puffed half sleeves worn by Hester Morris and her friends. And the skirt of her gown, cut by the master cutter at London’s finest modiste to flow and cling with the wearer’s every movement, caused a gasp of outrage among Caleb Morris’s female guests. It was scandalous! Indecent! It didn’t have an underskirt but only a filmy, flesh-colored petticoat.

Yet Barrett hadn’t been shocked! He admired the gown in London!

Even Daniel, when Georgie had peeked in on him before leaving for Caleb Morris’s house, had voiced unstinting admiration. “Cor, Lady Georgie!” he had mumbled. “Don’t you look a picture! I wish I was growed up. I’d take you to the dinner myself!”

Murmuring excuses, Georgie slipped around a cluster of chattering women. They appeared to be in no great hurry to drive out to the Common where sheep and cows had been temporarily banished in favor of music and fireworks for the celebration of Independence Day; it was otherwise with Georgie. Wanting only to disappear inside Letty’s carriage and praying that the illuminations on the Common would be feeble, she flitted past Caleb Morris and Edward Gray, engaged in a low-voiced conference in the entrance hall.

They smiled at her, and Edward Gray said, “You look beautiful, Georgiana. I only wish Barrett were here to tell you so.”

A wave of gratitude made her eyes sting. Impulsively she stepped up to him and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered. “That means more to me than Barrett’s compliments could have.”

Outside, the courtyard was bright with the glow of lanterns, but beyond the fence Summer Street stretched obscure and shadowy, its only source of lighting a faint half-moon. Boston, Georgie had learned, had fewer streetlights than London.

One by one, carriages started to roll into the yard to stop before the great double doors and take on their passengers.

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