How to Dance With a Duke by Manda Collins Page A

means of getting her father’s journals, and she was not willing to give up. Even if it meant a little embarrassment.
    “Indeed, my lord. I was hoping you’d remembered me from our conversation earlier when you requested the first dance this evening?”
    She ended the statement with a questioning air, with just the right hint of tentative diffidence. She hoped.
    Maybe she needed to SBT again.
    But Deveril’s brow furrowed, and to Cecily’s profound relief, he seemed to relax and he smiled.
    “That must have been right when I came in, Miss Hurston,” he said apologetically. “It was a bit of a madhouse for those first few minutes and I remember signing someone’s dance card, but I hadn’t realized it was you at the time.”
    Though he professed not to remember, Cecily thought she saw a flash of understanding in his eyes. As if he knew she had appropriated Amelia’s dance card. But in a moment the look was gone, and for whatever reason, he chose not to take issue with her little deception.
    Deveril smiled down at her and tucked her hand into the crook of his arm. “Shall we?”
    *   *   *
    Lucas leaned against a pillar in the Bewle ballroom and watched in silence as Miss Cecily Hurston sailed by on the arm of Lord Alec Deveril for the second time. He’d watched her dance with a veritable parade of eligibles in the past two hours.
    Her dark curls, hidden beneath her ugly bonnet that afternoon, now were threaded prettily with a bit of ribbon, accentuating her wide green eyes and high cheekbones. Gone too was the drab gray dress she’d worn to the Egyptian Club, and in its place she wore a high-waisted yellow evening gown that suited her curvy figure. Only a eunuch could ignore the expanse of creamy white bosom on display above that prim bodice.
    And he was certainly no eunuch.
    He smiled, recalling her bout of flirtatiousness earlier in the evening. Perhaps he’d been too harsh with her that morning.
    Almost as soon as he stalked away from her in Bruton Street, he had regretted his outburst.
    She was not her father, after all, and probably had no idea about the circumstances that had led to his brother’s disappearance during Hurston’s last expedition.
    No, he thought, watching Miss Hurston laugh at something Deveril said, unless she had stowed away on the expedition herself, there was no way that she could know what really happened to Will.
    Lucas swirled his cup of overly sweet punch and stared into it as if he could read its shadows like tea leaves. But the drink was just as incomprehensible as the strange words his brother crossed and recrossed in his letters home from Egypt.
    There was something about the scribbled lines, something in the way his brother had chosen to include them in letters to their mother of all people—who had no more knowledge of foreign languages than she had of Napoleon’s bathwater—that niggled at him.
    Those letters, in fact, had been the sole reason for his trip to the Egyptian Club earlier today. He had hoped they might direct him to a scholar with knowledge of such things, but like Cecily he had not been able to get past the front door. “Members only” the guard had told him, and they were not currently accepting new members. When he had inquired as to when that happy event might occur, he had been told that such information was not available to the public. Even his title had carried no weight with the man—a first in Lucas’s experience since inheriting the dukedom.
    “Why the devil are you glaring at the dancers as if you are deciding on which one of them you wish to plant a facer first?”
    The duke glanced up. Colonel Lord Christian Monteith stood at his side, one blond brow lifted in inquiry.
    “Who precisely are we glaring at?” Monteith continued, leaning against the other side of Lucas’s pillar, and sipping his own cup of the wretched punch.
    “I’m not glaring,” Lucas said, glaring. “Not on purpose, anyway. I am merely watching the