SLIGHTLY WICKED by Mary Balogh

Author:Mary Balogh [Balogh, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ROMANCE
ISBN: 0440241057
Publisher: Dell
Published: 2003-12-11T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter XIII

Rannulf was seated between Lady Effingham and Mrs. Hardinge at dinner, his grandmother having been more discreet in her table arrangements than Lady Effingham was at Harewood. It was a relief to him, even though the one lady talked about nothing but the travails of having six daughters to bring out when one would like nothing better than to remain on one’s own country estate all year long, and the other tittered and commiserated with him over the fact that he had to keep two matrons company when he would doubtless far prefer to be seated by someone younger and prettier.

“Might I even say,” she suggested, arching him a sidelong glance, “a particular someone?”

Miss Effingham, farther down the table, on the same side as Rannulf, talked animatedly with Roy-Hill and Law, her table companions. A few times Lady Effingham leaned forward and wanted to know the cause of a particular burst of laughter.

“Lord Rannulf and I and everyone else feel very isolated from the merriment, dearest,” she said on one of those occasions.

Judith Law sat on the other side of the table and conversed quietly with her uncle on one side and Richard Warren on the other. Looking at her now, one would never guess that she had endured such a terrifying experience just a few hours ago. She was far more the lady than her aunt, despite the latter’s elegance and surface sophistication. Like the other ladies from Harewood, she had changed in a room allotted to her upstairs. She was wearing the same cream and gold silk dress she had worn at the Rum and Puncheon on the second evening. He remembered it for its simple elegance, which at the time he had thought deliberately understated, like the rest of her garments. It now had panels of a well-coordinated darker cream fabric set into the sides, a band of the same material lining the neckline so that far less of her bosom was visible, and an almost nonexistent waistline. She wore a fine, lace-trimmed cap, which, quite predictably, covered her hair.

How many of those seated about the table, he wondered, though they had been acquainted with her for a week, realized that she was below thirty years of age? Or knew the color of her hair—or of her eyes for that matter?

One thing had become distressingly clear to him in the course of the day. He could not—he really could not—marry the Effingham chit. He would be insane within a week of their marriage. It was not just that she was silly and empty-headed. It was more that she was vain and totally self-absorbed. And her only reason for trying to attach his interest was that he was the son of a duke and a wealthy man. She had made no attempt whatsoever to get to know him as a person. She probably never would. He might spend fifty years married to a woman who would never know—or care—that he had spent the last ten years denying

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