Page 38 of The Duke of Deceit

Yet he didn’t move to leave. Instead, he simply stood there and let an awkward pause settle over the room, staring with a smile at Jess as if he were admiring one of Lord Elgin’s Greek goddesses.

Lady Holkham stepped forward. “There’s no need for you to hurry away, Your Grace.” Her comment was forced yet colored by a thrilled tone in her voice that a duke had deigned to call on her. “Please stay and enjoy tea with us.”

That wholly insincere invitation was expected. Just as he was expected to reject her offer to join a room filled with matrons and painfully respectable misses.

Instead, he answered, “I would be honored to join you.”

A gasp of surprise went around the room, followed immediately by—

“You can’t!”

Every set of eyes in the room swung to Jess at that outburst, just in time to see her face flush scarlet.

“Oh?” Lucien asked, feigning innocence. “Why not?”

“Because you’re—” She stopped herself in mid-sentence, then snapped her mouth shut.

She knew she was trapped; he could read it on her face. She couldn’t say he needed to leave because he was a blackguard and so not fit for proper society, not when she was working so hard to reform his reputation.

So with an apologetic smile, she said instead to the roomful of women, “Surely His Grace has more important things to do than drink tea and talk flowers with us ladies.”

“Not at all!” He feigned wounding that she’d even suggest such a thing. “I love spending time with ladies. At the opera, at balls…” He brought the full force of his grin onto Lady Holkham, who was the only one he had to win over. “In lovely garden rooms having tea.”

Giggles floated over the tables at that bit of charming nonsense. But it worked. Lady Holkham’s cheeks pinked, and she quickly ordered her butler to find another place for their unexpected guest. At her table.

On the other side of the room, Jess sank onto her chair, still staring daggers in his direction.Smart girl,he thought, in keeping her silence like that. Any more outbursts would only bring increased whispers and rumors about them.

Sadly, it would be hard to rattle her further, now that she was on her guard.

But then, Lucien always did love a challenge.

Chapter Twelve

Lunch was utterlyinterminable.

Jess had never realized until that afternoon how torturous tea could be. Or how perfect a scone would be to hurl across the room as a projectile.

Even now, as she determinedly kept her gaze firmly focused on her plate and its little sandwiches and cakes she hadn’t touched at all, she could feel Lucien’s eyes on her from across the room. It had been like this for the past hour. Whenever she did accidentally glance in his direction, she met that scoundrel’s gaze, and the smile he gave her only frustrated her more. Because she knew his smiles weren’t for her. They were for the audience of ladies sitting around them, who made no attempt to hide their gawking curiosity about the true nature of Lucien and Jess’s acquaintance.

With a heaving sigh, she pushed her plate away. She couldn’t bring herself to eat a bite.

Lucien, meanwhile, seemed to have a voracious appetite. He was either so famished that he couldn’t resist a third plate of the miniature cakes, tiny sandwiches, and citrus biscuits—or he was attempting to use food as a way to avoid Lady Holkham’s chitter-chatter. The woman hadn’t stopped talking since he joined her at her table, but then, how often did Lady Holkham have the ear of a duke, an ear she was currently talking off?

Jess smiled in petty revenge. The blasted man deserved every boring minute of it, too.

Yet due to an accident of table arrangement—and the cruel humor of fate—Jess and Lucien faced each other across the room. She spent the lunch ignoring him, while he used the time to stir up trouble by sending her flirtatious glances.

Her gaze wandered across the room to him.

His eyes met hers, and an amused smile curled at his lips. But this time, that devil didn’t stop with merely a smile. This time he lifted his teacup to her in a toast. And winked.

Jess glanced away, her heart thudding painfully in her chest.Good lord, he’d winked! Every woman in the room saw it, too. Or at least it seemed that way from the titillated whispers that passed between the ladies at the possibility of the rumors being true, that the most notorious rakehell in Mayfair had been domesticated.

Jess knew better.

“He won’t stop looking until you stare him down,” Viscountess Bromley muttered to Jess from her chair beside hers at the table. The woman stared blatantly across the room at Lucien, going so far as to lift her lorgnette for a better view. “Your determination to ignore him only encourages him to continue. To make it worse, in fact.” She arched a brow and mused, “If they didn’t have to shave, I would believe that men stop maturing completely at age twelve. They simply replace rocking horses with racing horses and toy soldiers with real ones.”

Jess stifled a laugh, only for her amusement to fade beneath the reality of her situation. “I can’t stare him down,” she admitted in the same low mutter as the viscountess. “He’s a duke.”