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Chapter Seven

Yasmin and Silvester were still nestled on the sofa when he said, “Jove himself just entered the drawing room with his sister, darling.”

“Don’t call me that,” Yasmin said automatically.

“Wearing black, of course, although he complied with the duchess’s request by wearing a pink neck cloth,” Silvester continued, ignoring her. “His valet must have washed it in beet juice. Lilford is broodingly handsome, don’t you think?”

Yasmin did think, but she wasn’t going to admit it. She deliberately did not look about the room for Giles. “You are just as handsome.”

“Not a bit of it,” Silvester said cheerfully. “I have the family nose, and I’m no good at looking stern and moody, which my sisters tell me is what makes the earl so desirable. Personally, I think it signals nothing more than irritability and likely indigestion. Just look at him now. He’s in a fury. Perhaps he ate too many beets in preparation for the ball.”

Yasmin gave up her principles and looked around for Giles. “Where is he?”

“Over there with his sister, talking to our host.”

Yasmin could only see Giles’s profile. She couldn’t crane her neck, as that would lead to gossip that she had ogled the earl. Yet even from here, she could see that the tendons in his neck were strained. Likely he was clenching his jaw, which in her experience, he did when he was furious.

“I don’t care for his sister,” Silvester observed. “Lady Lydia always looks at me as if she were measuring me for a wedding coat and finding that I come up short.”

At that moment Lydia turned away from the group and began strolling toward the ballroom, her hand on Lord Turing’s arm. Her eyes paused for a moment on Yasmin’s face before she looked away.

The duke let out a low whistle. “My grandmother used to have a little dog who would bare her teeth the way that woman just did. Is Lydia the reason why he hasn’t strode over here like a disapproving god and demanded your hand for the next waltz, since he missed the first?”

“Quite possibly,” Yasmin admitted.

“That woman will do you an injury if given a chance. What on earth did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” she said, untruthfully.

Obviously, Giles had told his sister that Yasmin was the source of gossip about Lydia’s escapades in gardens. In fact, she never shared unkind gossip about a woman. In France, gossip was a blood sport. People who hadn’t known the details of the week she spent with Hippolyte had made them up.

The last straw before Yasmin accepted her grandfather’s invitation to visit England had been when a lascivious gentleman made a jest about clipping one of the emerald buttons on his coat and offering it to her, as emeralds were her family’s favorite gem.

Everyone around the dinner table laughed, which was when she realized that she would never escape the French court’s fixed conviction that she could be bought for an emerald, as Napoleon had bought her mother. She had informed her parents she was leaving for England the very next day.

Mabel had nodded and said, “I do find it dismaying to have a young girl living with me.”

None of the sentences that had come to mind—But I’m your daughter!—were worth saying aloud, so Yasmin offered the airy kisses that Mabel preferred, ordered her trunks packed, and left.

“Lady Lydia doesn’t care for me,” she told Silvester.

“Why not?”

“I believe she considers me shamefully dissolute.”

Silvester raised an eyebrow. “You don’t kiss men in alcoves. I accidentally walked into her canoodling with young Harriford a few weeks ago. Not that I had ever considered marrying her, but the way she smirked when she saw me was enough to put me off.”

“You mustn’t tell anyone that,” Yasmin said.

“I never do,” Silvester said. “Gossip of that nature is so dreary. Her brother’s behavior is far more interesting.”

“Why?”

“He’s handed off his sister, but he is not coming straight to your side like a homing pigeon. In fact, he’s not looking in this direction, which suggests that he knows exactly where you are.”

Yasmin flipped open her fan and waved it lazily before her face, just in case Giles did look in their direction. But he didn’t. As she watched, Merry introduced him to a soberly dressed young woman with her hair in a no-nonsense chignon and spectacles perched on her nose.

“The Marquess of Tatton’s granddaughter, Lady Stella,” Silvester said.