An Improper Duchess. Amanda McCabe

with her gloved hand, and Melisande made herself keep smiling. Younger sons of good families, she’d often found, were a strange breed usually best avoided. They liked to dance and flirt—and proposition, as if they had nothing better to do with their time. Unless they went traveling, as this young man seemed to do. She did remember scraps of gossip now, gathered when her stepdaughter made her debut. He cared for nothing in his respectable parents’ world, causing trouble around Town, until he vanished. To the tropics it seemed. The usual sort of thing.

      But her smile faltered when she saw the man making his way toward them through the crowd. He looked like no rakish younger son she’d ever seen. He looked like no one else at all she had ever seen.

      He was tall and lean, but not thin—he seemed sleek and powerful beneath his well-cut dark blue coat and silver brocade waistcoat. His dark hair was brushed back from the chiseled angles of his face, but one wave of it insisted on being unruly and draping over his brow, which called attention to brilliant sky-blue eyes and sharp, high cheekbones. Those eyes were bright and aware, as if he saw and noticed everything around him.

      Including—especially—her. He watched her as he came close and she found she could not look away. She felt utterly foolish, like a silly girl just out of the schoolroom giggling over the first handsome man she saw, yet she couldn’t seem to stop. There was something in that man’s eyes that just seemed to capture her.

      What is wrong with me? she thought frantically. She tightened her grasp on her glass until it bit into her hand.

      “Duchess, this is my son, Lord Grayson Sanbourne,” the countess said as he reached her side. She took his arm and he smiled at her, but he still looked at Melisande. “Grayson, this is the Dowager Duchess of Gifford. Her Grace was expressing interest in the West Indies, my dear.”

      “That is very kind of the duchess,” he said, smiling at Melisande. It was an infuriatingly knowing smile, as if he could see her very thoughts.

      As she smiled back at him, she found she very much wanted to know his thoughts too. But that charming smile of his gave nothing away.

      “Perhaps we could talk about my travels over a dance later in the evening, Your Grace,” he said.

      Dance with him? Melisande knew very well she should do no such thing, even as she also knew how foolish she was being. For a woman determined to ruin herself, she was feeling very missish indeed. But Grayson Sanbourne wasn’t a man like Lord Abercrombie, a man where she knew very well what was expected from her and what she could expect in return. One quick smile from this man and her world seemed to tilt.

      That was dangerous, especially now.

      “Thank you, Lord Grayson,” she said. “But I don’t intend to dance tonight, I think.”

      “And you did promise to dance with Lady Branch’s daughter, don’t forget, my dear,” Lady Sanbourne said quickly. “In fact, we should look for her now...”

      As the Sanbournes turned away, and Melisande was released from the force of Lord Grayson’s smile, she felt her shoulders slump and her smile fade.

      What on earth had just happened?

      * * *

      Melisande. Such an exotic name for such an intriguing woman...

      Grayson took a deep drag on his cheroot, staring out over the dark, cold garden as he hid on the terrace from his mother and her “suitable” debutantes. He needed the quiet moment to take a deep breath and think about her. The duchess.