Don't Tempt Me by Loretta Chase

“No chairs in Cairo. When I sit in one, my legs want to curl up under me.”
    â€œThis isn’t Cairo,” Augusta said. “You would do well to remember that. But of course you won’t.” She turned to Marchmont, who was with difficulty maintaining his composure. “Marchmont, you may find this all very amusing, but it would be a kindness to Zoe to face facts: It will take years to civilize her.”
    She’d got him aroused in an instant, the little witch, and made him laugh at the same time. Zoe Octavia had never been fully civilized. She’d never been like anybody else. Now she was less so.
    He let his gaze slide up from the hips and bosom to which she’d called his attention. Up the white throatand delicate point of her stubborn chin and up, to meet her gaze.
    It was the gaze of a grown woman, not the girl he’d known. That Zoe was gone forever, just as the boy he’d once been was gone forever. Which was as it should be, he told himself. That was life, perfectly normal and not at all mysterious. It was, in fact, as he preferred it.
    â€œIf by ‘civilized’ you mean she must turn into an English lady, it isn’t necessary,” he said. “The Countess Lieven isn’t English, yet she’s one of Almack’s patronesses.”
    â€œWhat is Almack’s?” said Zoe. “They keep screaming about it, and I cannot decide whether it is the Garden of Paradise or a place of punishment.”
    â€œBoth,” he said. “It’s the most exclusive club in London, impossibly hard to get into and amazingly easy to get thrown out of. Birth and breeding aren’t sufficient. One must also dress and dance beautifully. Or, failing that, one must possess sufficient wit or arrogance to impress the patronesses. They keep a list of those who meet their standards. Some three-quarters of the nobility are not on the list. If you’re not on the list, you can’t buy an admission voucher and can’t get into the Wednesday night assemblies.”
    â€œAre you on the list?” Zoe asked.
    â€œOf course,” he said.
    â€œMen’s moral failings tend to be overlooked,” Augusta said.
    Marchmont ignored her. “You’ll be on it, too,” he told Zoe.
    â€œThat,” said Gertrude, “will take a miracle, and Ihave not noticed that you and Providence are on the best of terms.”
    â€œI don’t believe in miracles,” he said. “Not that Almack’s signifies at present.”
    â€œDoesn’t signify?” Augusta cried.
    Why would they not go away? Why had Lexham not strangled them all at birth?
    â€œI’ve disposed of the mob,” he said. “Next is the newspapers.”
    He walked to the door, and the tragic chorus gave way.
    He summoned a footman.
    â€œYou will find a disreputable-looking being named John Beardsley loitering in the square,” Marchmont told the servant. “Tell him I shall see him in the anteroom on the ground floor.”
    As one would expect, this set off the chorus.
    â€œBeardsley?”
    â€œThat horrid little person from the Delphian ?”
    â€œWhat is the Delphian ?” came the lilting voice from behind him.
    â€œA newspaper,” said a sister.
    â€œGhastly, gossipy newspaper.”
    â€œHe’s a vile little man who writes stories for it.”
    â€œSometimes in iambic pentameter. He fancies himself a writer. ”
    â€œYou can’t mean to have him in the house, Marchmont.”
    â€œWhat will Papa say?”
    â€œSince I am not a mind reader, I haven’t the least idea what your father will say,” said Marchmont. “Perhaps he will say, ‘That was an excellent idea theancient Greeks had, of abandoning female infants on a mountainside. Why was that practice given up, I wonder?’”
    Having rendered them momentarily mute with outrage, he turned to Zoe. “Miss Lexham, would you be so good as to walk