That woman would not come near his sister again. That woman would not come near him.
That woman was nothing but trouble.
CHAPTER 1
The Worthington ball was, by all accounts, the event of the early Season, and Cassian Arnolds was bored to death.
He stood at the edge of the ballroom with a glass of something warm in his hand and watched the ton mingle. The candles were too high. The room was too hot. A young matron in puce had been trying for the better part of ten minutes to gain his attention without appearing to gain it and was failing on both counts.
“Such a delightful turnout, do you not agree, Your Grace?”
Lady Whitcombe had come up on his right at last. She was perhaps a year older than him and twice married. She angled her face toward his glass, tipped her fan, and looked up from under her lashes in a manner that had clearly required practice.
“Quite,” he replied.
“The Worthingtons do throw the most charming little affairs.”
“Quite.”
“And the music. Have you ever heard such fine string work?”
“Quite.”
She paused. He did not look at her. After a moment, she gave a small breath of a laugh and moved away to find better sport. He did not watch her go.
His sister was on the dance floor. He could see her bright head bobbing among the others. Joanna was twenty-three years old, redheaded, and possessed of an aggressive enthusiasm for life that had not been dampened by the long mourning for their father. The only consolation available to him at any social gathering was the knowledge that she would make it out without having become engaged to anyone disastrous.
Her best friend was less of a consolation.
Cassian’s eyes drifted, against his will, toward the wall opposite the orchestra where Lady Alice Lockwood was standing in a pale green gown and pretending to take great interest in the company.
He had been pretending not to notice her for the past forty minutes.
Two years had not made her any less of a problem. She had grown up. She had filled out in the way young women did when they stopped being girls and became something the rest of the room had to reckon with. Tonight, the silk did unkind things to the dip of her waist. Her dark hair was pinned up, and a single curl hung loose against her neck, as if her maid had given up on it.
He looked away.
He had told his sister, on no fewer than a dozen occasions, that her friendship with Lady Alice was unsuitable.
Lady Alice was not unsuitable in any of the obvious ways. She was the daughter of an earl. She moved in the right circles. She danced well, played the pianoforte excellently, and was reported to be capable of running a household.
She was unsuitable in the way that only certain women were unsuitable which was to say that she carried herself like a person who would do something inadvisable at any moment and enjoy it. She had thrown pebbles at his window two years ago. She had told him plainly that she did not particularly care what he believed. He had not forgotten it. He had tried.
His sister had not listened of course. Joanna had taken every warning he had ever issued and shown her teeth at it. The two of them had become inseparable, and Cassian had given up trying to forbid it, partly because forbidding things made them attractive to Joanna and partly because Lady Alice had in a strange way been good for her.
His sister had stopped weeping. She now laughed at things.
He owed Lady Alice a debt he would not repay because gratitude implied warmth, and he did not feel any.
He looked back across the room. Lady Alice was still feigning interest. She had her fan up and was using it, to his growing disbelief, to point at men. His sister was standing beside her now.
Joanna finished her dance, then.
He watched, with the stillness of a man witnessing a slow-moving disaster, as Lady Alice angled her fan toward a young viscount in a green coat and raised her eyebrows. Joanna squinted and shook her head. Lady Alice then pointed her fan at a baron, and Joanna shook her head again. When the fan moved on to a tall captain in regimentals, Joanna paused, considered, and grimaced. Lady Alice laughed, and Joanna followed.
They were rating gentlemen.
In the middle of the Worthington ball while Cassian watched, his sister and Lady Alice Lockwood were standing at the edge of the dance floor and rating eligible bachelors with a fan and a series of facial expressions. The worst of it was that no one else seemed to notice.
