Lord Langley Is Back in Town by Elizabeth Boyle Page B

even for her shroud. “You tease us, certainly.” She sidled once again in front of the duchessa, much to Lucia’s annoyance. “Marry this one? Why it is impossible! She has no . . . no . . .”
    “Passion,” Nanny Tasha finished for her rival. The princess made her move then, taking center stage. “No essence, no fire. Nor has she wit enough to keep you entertained. No offense meant, Lady Standon.”
    Minerva would like to have possessed enough manners to manage a “None taken,” but she found herself boiling mad and filled with an insensible . . . an enflamed . . . well, passion, that suggested the princess had it all wrong. They all did.
    “How could she be offended when it is so very obvious,” Nanny Lucia sniffed. The others nodded in agreement, as if Minerva wasn’t even in the room.
    She drew a deep breath, even as her fingers balled up into an uncharacteristic fist. Echoes of her grandmother’s taunts that her father would never get away with marrying her to the Marquess of Standon. That he would be doing naught but making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, to all their ruin.
    “Oh, but looks are deceiving, ladies,” Langley was saying. “And I assure you, Lady Standon possesses all those qualities and more. She has made me the happiest man in England by agreeing to be my bride.”
    Minerva’s head swiveled toward him. His bride? Was the man mad? First he came tumbling into her bedchamber and now he thought them engaged? No, not just mad. Utterly insane.
    She should have pushed him out the window when she’d had her chance. And it was on the tip of her lips to call him out, to denounce this lie of his and then happily feed him to these imported wolves, but once again he caught her unawares.
    For while she stood there fuming and plotting, he moved closer and slipped his hand around hers. The second their fingers twined, something very odd sparked, a flicker that ran from her fingertips through her limbs as if tapped from a Leyden jar. She couldn’t help herself, she looked at him.
    And discovered that it only took a spark to ignite a blaze.
    His blue eyes danced with a naughty, wicked light that would make a less sensible woman believe they gleamed like that only for her.
    Minerva considered herself far too sensible to be swayed by a pair of mesmerizing eyes, by handsome Roman features, by stone chiseled lips and an air of confidence that could inflate a balloon and send it aloft to the farthest corners of the earth.
    No, this is naught but more of his rakish parlor tricks, she told herself even as he drew up her hand and then tipped his head down to place a kiss on the tips of her bare fingers.
    When his lips touched her, that rare fire burned anew, as if his very breath reignited the smoldering embers. Her knees knocked and trembled in a most insensible fashion.
    How could they not when his lips whispered once again over her, a warm, heated kiss that sent shivers trembling out in hurried waves up her arm and down through the rest of her limbs?
    His other hand curled around her waist, catching hold of her, drawing her in closer so that she was encircled by him, protected, desired by him.
    “Darling, dearest girl,” he mused. “I fear our secret is no longer that . . . our secret .”
    If she hadn’t been doing her best to keep upright, she swore she could have mustered a snort of derision that would have met with even the approval of Knuddles. But good gracious heavens, how this man could utter two words, “our secret,” and make them run down her spine with the same sensual tease as his fingers had earlier.
    “You want us to believe you are engaged to her?” Nanny Helga did manage to make an indelicate snort that said everything Minerva wished she could manage, and would muster once she got out of Langley’s enticing grasp.
    Away from the spell he’d cast over her.
    “She is right, cara ,” Nanny Lucia agreed. “It is impossible to believe.”
    The Russian moved again, in that