The Bedeviled Viscount Brockton by Kasey Michaels

Author:Kasey Michaels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: regency romance, clean romance, sweet romance, historical regency romance, sweet regency, clean regency, sweet and clean romance, funny regency romance, regency farce, regency comedy
Publisher: Kasey Michaels

Callie hadn’t realized how much she had been counting on Simon to become her dancing master until her real instructor had shown up, out of breath and perspiring quite heavily. He had doubtless run all the way to Portland Place—perhaps even leapfrogging over the knocked-prone body of his hapless current pupil in his haste to pocket the exorbitant amount of money Simon seemed compelled to pay anyone who so much as pointed him in the correct direction as he searched out the dining room in his own house.

Not that she wasn’t pleased with Mr. Odo Pinabel. He was certainly a nice enough man, if one didn’t mind his affected lisp, or the fact that his hands seemed perpetually cold and clammy. Or that his breath smelled of onions.

And then there was his eyebrow. The poor man only possessed one of the things—stretching straight across the bridge between his eyes and as thick and black as a woolly, creeping bug. She couldn’t seem to keep her gaze off it.

Although the eyebrow did come in rather handy, seeing as how Callie was already learning to count “one-two-twree” by its movements. She was entranced by its jerky climb up Mister Odo Pinabel’s tall forehead, moving hitch-hitch-hitch! with each beat, the last one signaling that, yes indeed, it was now time to dip and turn and begin to count again.

So there were the clammy hands, and the onions, the deliberate lisp, and the eyebrow—added to the Viscountess Brockton’s inexorable attack on the pianoforte—none of which made waltzing quite the romantic adventure Callie had pictured in her mind’s eye.

“One-two-twree, one-two-twree. Fasther, Mith Johnston, fasther!” Mr. Odo Pinabel commanded, his eyebrow climbing higher and higher, threatening to disappear into the thick black thatch of hair that seemed so out of place on his head—almost as if it had landed there by mistake and might actually belong to someone else entirely. “Mith Johnston, cro-operate, puleeze! It would be twerrible to twrip in public, and shimply crush-ing for my conseth-ah-quence.”

“Yes, Mr. Pinabel,” Callie said, averting her head, for it seemed that the dancing master not only lisped, his speech was as damp as his palms. She’d nearly drowned when he’d talked of crushing and consequences. “I’ll try.”

“It’h shimply the mushic, that’th all,” Mr. Pinabel assured her as the viscountess hit another chord, one that should be heard only the once and then lost for all time. This, however, was Callie’s second thought, the first being that there had been four unfortunately moist esses in Mr. Pinabel’s explanation. If there had been an even half dozen, she decided, prudently ducking her head and rolling her eyes as he whirled her into another turn, she’d have to learn to waltz with an umbrella guarding her face.

When the door to the hallway opened and Bartholomew Boothe walked in, Callie looked at the newcomer with enough smiling enthusiasm to make the clearly uncomfortable man blush above his high shirtpoints.

“I’ve come to rescue you from that jangle of well-meant noise I heard as

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