“You’re lovely,” he blurted out.
She blushed, twin splashes of pink on either cheek.
He stepped close, forgetting the man behind him, the gawking gazes of the others around them, the room itself, and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “For a moment, I thought you’d left me at the mercy of the peerage.”
Her lips tipped in a coy smile. “You’d have preferred the wild dogs.”
She knew him so well.
He tucked her hand in the crook of his arm, feeling at once comforted by her at his side and inanely foolish for the unfamiliar, gentlemanly action. “Dogs are far more interesting than people. They shred apart their prey for substance and survival.” He glanced about the room. “Instead of these vultures that wait until one of their own has fallen and scavenge the ruin until there is nothing left.”
She laughed. “Keep referencing the animal kingdom and my brother will dighisclaws into you.”
Percy envisioned a burly man with a taste for upholding sisterly honor. “Should I be concerned?”
“Only of long nights researching the flight patterns of the brown long-eared bat.”
“Scholarly minded.” Percy grimaced thinking of Gregori, Hamish’s foreign inventor and their friend, and the man’s terrifying focus. “I’ll take the dogs and the vultures.”
Danny’s teasing tone was filled with amusement. “You fear book-laden lairs?”
“Any lair where neither survival nor malice are motivators.”
“What, then?”
“Curiosity.”
Danny laughed. “I have to disagree. Don is harmless compared to the other one.”
Her smile was contagious. Other one? “Another brother?”
“Worse.”
“Talking about me already?” someone said.
Percy turned to view their latest party addition, a woman who bore a striking resemblance to Danny with almond-colored hair and a full mouth, but where Danny’s eyes filled with challenging fire, this younger woman’s gaze was nothing but cold calculation.
Danny groaned beside him, and the sound seemed to spurn the other woman’s smile.
“Come now, Danny,” the woman said, the cold gaze giving way to mischief. “Won’t you introduce me to your new friend?”
*
“Where is Mrs.Pebblestone?” Danny asked.
“I lost her around the punchbowl.” Denise’s gaze didn’t leave the Duke of Grandfellow. “You’re short for a man.”
Danny sighed at her sister’s thinly veiled insult. This was going to end in tears.
Danny thought she’d feel more over losing her virginity: regret, anxiety, fear. But being in the Duke of Grandfellow’s presence again had diminished any lingering concern. Frankly, she didn’t miss the society-coveted chastity, and the man had a way of putting her at ease—ridiculously—considering he offered no real information about himself without a fight. Fighting with him was electrifying.
A fight between him and her overreaching, brutally forthright sister, however...
Weighing the options of a doomed introduction or the future wrath of her mother, Danny reluctantly, albeit childishly,made a grand flourish of her hand to encompass all that was her troublesome sister. “Your Grace, may I present my sister, Lady Denise. Denise, this is Percival Cole, the new Duke of Grandfellow.”
Denise’s eyes widened over Percy’s obligatory kiss to the hand. The look she threw Danny’s way had her groaning a second time in as many minutes. “You’rethe handsome, interesting one?”
Percy glanced at Danny, brow raised. “Handsome?”
