Scandal at the Midsummer Ball by Marguerite Kaye & Bronwyn Scott

Author:Marguerite Kaye & Bronwyn Scott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2016-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Two

Kael Gage recognised a cat-and-mouse game when he saw it. He and the striking woman in the butter-yellow muslin were initiating a subtly aggressive flirtation, each of them seeking to command the other, their roles switching from pursuer to pursuant with a motion of the eyes and the flick of a fan from across the room.

It was his turn to answer and he would do so with a calculated move. He would wait and make her wonder if he would indeed respond. There was no need to rush over immediately. To do so would concede early victory and put him in her power as a man she could manipulate. It would not enhance his appeal. A woman liked nothing as much as the man she couldn’t have. Likewise, a woman lost interest in a man who was too easily won. Near unattainability was key.

Kael turned his attentions back to the conversation between Falkner and Farthingale, which had its own engaging value, Falkner in his dark, puritanically plain clothing questioning the business practices of the flamboyantly garbed Sir Timothy Farthingale, but there were practical reasons too for not approaching his lovely butter-gowned flirt just yet. To do so while she was in the duke’s company and her mother’s would be to court rejection outright.

He didn’t need to be a mind-reader to know what the duke was whispering to the pretty brunette right now, or to know the meaning behind her mother’s brief, shrewd glance in his direction. Kael smiled in their direction, indicating he was aware of their polite censure and that he didn’t care a whit. During his ten years on the town, he’d fought three duels of honour—two with pistols which meant he’d faced mortality at twenty paces at dawn, one of the more frightening things a man could do. He would not be intimidated by a matchmaking mama’s stare and a duke’s whisper.

Still, whatever they whispered to his flirt was undoubtedly true. That he was no good; he fraternised with the wrong sort of women—opera singers, actresses, jewels of the demi-monde and a certain kind of experienced tonnish woman. He couldn’t deny it. He did more than fraternise with them. He seduced them, bedded them, found physical pleasure with them. But a lot of men did that, even married ones. What was probably less forgivable in their eyes was that he had no prospects. His family tree was a stump with broken branches everywhere. His grandfather had been an earl with a prolific ability to produce reckless sons—seven of them, in fact, only the heir still living—but a less prolific ability to generate income which had left six of those careless sons to fend for themselves, his own father included.

As a result, Kael had his good looks to recommend him, but not much else except a small horse farm in Sussex. It meant he was fit for a squire’s daughter or a gentleman farmer’s girl—a lesson that had been drilled into him since he was eighteen; the fine debutantes of the ton might flirt with a man like him, but they’d never marry him.

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