Caprice: The Masqueraders Series - Book One by Laura Parker

We’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Lady Jane Blackburne’s radiant smile rested on her brother. “Mama says that now that you’re home, you will escort me to my first ball.”
    “Did she?” Hadrian tried to keep his expression pleasant, but the thought of the pinch of formal shoes gave his smile a brittle edge. “When is this grand occasion to happen?”
    “In two weeks.”
    The poised young woman with chestnut hair coiled sleekly about her head was almost a stranger to him. Lord, how the girl had grown. He tried to readjust to the vision of womanhood before him. “No doubt you’re in need of a hefty sum to have the requisite gown run up.”
    “Mama’s modiste has already made it. ’Tis my very first Season. Just think. I could be married by Christmas!”
    Hadrian winced at the thought, but Jane flung her arms about him, too happy to notice. The lilacs survived the crushing, but just barely. “I’m so glad it shall be you escorting me instead of Emory. He thinks far too much of himself these days.” Her tone was one of pure malice. “Serves him right to be taken down a peg. Earl, indeed! Well, no more. Eleanor McEvedy hopes his more unspeakable friends will drop him.” She clapped a hand over her mouth a bit belatedly. “I wasn’t supposed to say that.”
    Hadrian gently relieved her of her floral burden. “Whyever not? Are all Emory’s friends unspeakable?”
    “Some of them are,” she answered and cast so flirtatious a glance at her brother that it made him catch his breath. “But I wasn’t supposed to say so, not to you.”
    “I see. Then you mustn’t say anything more.” He deliberately turned his back on her. Gad, but the girl had bloomed in his absence. There was nothing but Blackburne filling out her gown. And if he didn’t know better, he would suspect that she had been practicing her considerable charms on some unsuspecting young male. He’d arrived home just in time.
    Jane cast a speculative eye at her eldest brother’s back. She had been breathless with joy since his return and wanted badly to impress him with her savoir-faire. “I don’t suppose that it matters now. Since I said as much …” She dangled the words in appeal, but Hadrian kept his back turned, determined not to help her put her neck in the noose. “Fie! What do I care what Emory says? He’s no longer the head of the household. You are.”
    “Most assuredly,” Hadrian replied as he deposited the lilacs on the spinet top.
    “Then you should be privy to all household matters,” she remarked by way of salving her conscience for betraying one brother to the other. “Eleanor is my friend, and if Emory hasn’t the good sense to see that she loves him, and that he ought to love her, then he deserves to be unhappy. It’s the fault of that fast set he’s been running with. I don’t care that they are Tulips.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “You’ve been away too long, brother dear,” Jane answered with great authority. “One must fall in with one or another mode of gentlemen’s dress these days. There is the Wanderer, the Revolutionary, the Bohemian, the Aesthete, the Visionary Poet, the Romantic, the Tulip, and the Sportive.” She cast a practiced eye over his clothing. “You are Sportive.”
    “I see.” Remembering his brother’s daffodil-yellow trousers, Hadrian understood at once why his brother fit another mode. “As for these—ah, Tulips, why are they thought to be bad company?”
    “Mama says they’re simply too self-involved. That’s because they spend all day being fitted for trousers and buying scented gloves, and all evening”—her voice dropped to a confidential whisper—”in gaming hells.”
    “Where on earth did you learn such language?”
    She smiled. “Emory says the most shocking things when he’s diddled.”
    “Diddled?” Hadrian repeated in further amazement.
    “It means—”
    “I know what it means,” he said repressively. “But you should not!”
    “Every