Irresistible by Mary Balogh Page B

course.”
    “Then I certainly did not play my cards right,” Lavinia said. “Had I known he was eligible, Margaret, I would have danced with him and he would have come tomorrow to see Nat and offer for me, and all Nat’s troubles would be at an end. I, of course, would have lived happily ever after.” Being Lavinia, instead of looking flushed and irritable after delivering this tirade of sarcasm, she merely smiled dazzlingly at Nathaniel.
    He raised his eyebrows and absently patted Georgina’s hand. This was not going to be easy—but had he ever expected that it would be? And Lavinia’s gown was a bright turquoise, most unsuitable for an unmarried young lady who was making her come-out. White, yes. A pale pastel shade, perhaps. But bright turquoise? Even the combined forces of Margaret and the modiste had not been able to prevail upon Lavinia to conform. She was four andtwenty, she had been quite unembarrassed to remind them. The best they had been able to do was dissuade her from choosing a scarlet satin for tonight’s all-important first appearance before the beau monde.
    “Now, that other chit,” Eden had said this afternoon when he was leaving—he had just complimented Nathaniel on the prettiness and sweetness of his sister, “should have been taken over someone’s knee years ago, Nat—preferably someone with a large, heavy paw—and given a sound walloping. I suppose you feel it is too late now. One cannot imagine you spanking a full-grown woman. I pity the poor fellow who is going to have to face that sharp tongue across the breakfast table for the rest of his life.”
    Nathaniel had sighed. “I fear it might be me, Ede,” he had said. “Who in his right mind would have her even if she were not loudly declaring that no one ever will?”
    “You could not lock her up in a convent?” Eden had suggested. “No, wrong historical era. A pity.”
    But Lavinia was not beyond showing the occasional sign of being almost normally human. The carriage at first slowed and then came to a full halt at the back of a long line of carriages waiting to draw up before the carpeted pavement and steps leading to the Shelby mansion on Gros venor Square. Lavinia lifted her fan to her face and plied it quite vigorously despite the fact that it was not a particularly warm night.
    She was nervous. Good. It would serve her right if she had not a single partner all night, Nathaniel thought un-charitably. But he would, of course, dance the opening set with her himself. And he would present some of the friends and acquaintances she had not already met to her as partners and hope fervently that she would not repeat her ridiculous statement about being treated as a charity case. If she did, that was that. She was going home tomorrow to stay at the rectory with Edwina, his second eldest sister, until he returned home. She would hate it. She considered the Reverend Valentine Scott, Edwina’s husband, to be the dullest, most pompous man on earth, and Valentine considered that she should spend altogether more of her time in pious reflection and in the performance of good works.
    One false move tonight, Nathaniel decided, eyeing her across the width of the carriage, and he would hint to her the consequences of being rude to his friends.
    “It is amazing, Nat,” she said, her fan stopping abruptly in mid-wave, “that any battles at all had to be fought against Napoleon Bonaparte. If someone had just had the wisdom to seat you across from him so that you could glare at him like that, the poor man would simply have folded his tents and gone home to Corsica.”
    “But you,” he said, “are made of sterner stuff.”
    She smiled again suddenly and quite dazzlingly, reminding him that she was a considerable beauty—one tended sometimes to forget that fact. “Nat,” she said, “you are quite lovely when you are rattled. I am doing you a great favor, you know. All the ladies at the ball, married and unmarried alike, I daresay, will pull