Scandal at Christmas by Danelle Harmon

Author:Danelle Harmon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2017-12-16T18:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The main course was fish garnished with slices of lemon—flaky, perfectly cooked, and perfectly wasted on Letitia, who was aware of nothing but the fact that the handsome Lord Weybourne was here, in Leeds, at this Christmastide house party.

And sitting next to her.

Yes, there was fish, as well as winter vegetables and rolls and mince pies and wine, lots of wine. There was a fire in the hearth, mistletoe on the mantel, the smell of evergreen and burning wax and the warm glow of candlelight reflecting off the great windows that held back the darkness outside. Laughter, toasts, someone who’d imbibed a little too much doing a drunken rendition of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Winnie spilling her drink and being swept off her feet by the sudden, unexpected, and outrageously romantic entrance of Lord Trent Ballantine with a proposal of marriage. But Letitia was only dimly aware of it all. For her, there was only Tristan St. Aubyn and the deliciously warm tingles that skated over her flesh at his nearness, the sound of his deep voice, the occasional discreet brush of his fingers against her own beneath the tablecloth. He was talking about something—horses, she thought—but she was only half-aware of what he was saying, instead thinking about the way his auburn hair had a rakish insouciance about it that mirrored his very character, studying the little crinkles at the corner of his intense gray eyes when he answered Mama’s questions, and wondering if he, like she, was dreading the one question she was sure Mama was going to make inevitable.

“So tell me again, Lord Weybourne, how did you and my Lettie meet?”

Leave it to Mama not to disappoint.

Letitia’s stomach dropped somewhere down beneath the level of her hips and bounced back up again, taking her heart with it into her throat, but Lord Weybourne countered it with smoothness and ease.

“We met over horses, Lady Penmore.”

“I see.” Mama’s fork dropped to the lemon on her fish, pushed it gently aside with a barely perceptible flick of the tines, and sank into the tender white flesh. “And where was that, my lord?”

Beside her, the earl smiled and said genially, “Do you really wish to know, Madam?”

Letitia nearly choked on her own fish. Tristan St. Aubyn had bottom, that’s for sure, to be challenging her mama so, but she also saw the touché in her mother’s smile and knew that Mama appreciated Weybourne’s attempts to not only safeguard her reputation, but to go hand to hand with her in a clandestine battle of wits.

“Perhaps,” Mama said, smiling, “we will revisit this topic later. And in private.”

“As you wish.”

“As I would wish, too,” put in Simon from Letitia’s left, and she realized that he’d been listening to this exchange in his silent, observant way, choosing to add to it only when it suited him or he could get in a salvo of his own.

Which was good.

Anything to have her brother’s keen attention on her and Tristan as opposed to Christopher Chance, currently exchanging warm exchanges and conversation with Pru just down the table.

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