Scandal of the Year by Laura Lee Guhrke

Author:Laura Lee Guhrke
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

As Julia had predicted, he was groped beneath the dining table by Lady Esterhazy, who sat on his other side, but once she’d been allowed an appreciative feel of his thigh and knee, the elderly lady proved a surprisingly interesting dinner companion. Her late husband had been a diplomatic attaché in Ceylon, and their conversation centered on her life there with her husband. He was grateful for the distraction. If his dinner companion had been dull, he doubted he could have managed to keep up a pretense of disinterest in the violet-eyed woman across the table.

After dinner, however, when he and the other gentlemen joined the ladies in the music room for entertainments, Julia became harder to ignore.

She was standing by the open doorway onto the terrace when he came in, talking to Eugenia, Phoebe, and Phoebe’s older sister, Vivian, but when she caught sight of him entering the room, she murmured something to her aunt, and a moment later, he found himself at Eugenia’s mercy. She bustled over to his side, issued a fervent promise to make his stay at Danbury as enjoyable as possible, and ushered him at once to a tête-à-tête sofa and a blushing Miss McGill. “There, my dears,” Eugenia said, thrusting him toward Miss McGill with all the delicacy of a freight train. “Now, do enjoy yourselves.”

With that, she departed in a flutter of ecru lace, leaving Aidan and the girl facing each other on the S-shaped settee. They both stared for a moment, seeming equally disconcerted, and then they both laughed.

“That was deuced awkward, was it not, Miss McGill?” he murmured.

“I should say. I feel like a card forced at bridge!”

“An apt description. Lady Danbury is not the most subtle hostess, I fear.”

Again they looked at each other, and there was a long, rather awkward pause. She glanced around the room and so did he, but when his gaze came to rest on Julia, who still stood by the terrace door with her friends, Aidan knew this wouldn’t do. He took a deep breath and forced his attention back to his companion.

“Is your family near here, Miss McGill?” he asked.

“Yes, at South Brent. My father has an estate there.”

“He is a man of property, then?”

“Yes, he is a squire.” At his urging, she began to tell him about her family, much to his relief, but it wasn’t long before his relief began to evaporate into dismay, for within half an hour, he found himself on the receiving end of a dissertation that could have been titled, “The Pranks of the Family McGill.”

All of them, he learned, had an inordinate fondness for practical jokes, including Miss McGill herself. Her initial awkwardness having evaporated, she confessed with relish to turning drawers filled with clothes upside down, slipping garden snakes between bedsheets, and putting salt in the jam pot, and despite his best intentions, Aidan’s attention soon drifted, sliding eventually back to the terrace door. Julia was no longer there, but a quick glance around located her on the other side of the room beside Paul at the fireplace.

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