No Proper Lady by Isabel Cooper Page A

his mind was in the same place.
    “Do they dance at all where you’re from?” His voice was thick.
    “Yes. But not like this.”
    There’d been one room in the tunnels, one dark room with a string of tiny red lights and music as loud as you could get from a dying tape player. One-Eyed Charlie ran it, and he’d sell you booze or stronger things when the raids went well and you had something to trade. She’d gone there to drink, but sometimes she’d danced too.
    “How?” Simon asked.
    “Less formal. Faster. And you don’t have partners. Well, not always.”
    With another rush of heat, she remembered writhing forms pressed against each other, legs clamped around thighs, the smell of sweat and perfume and rotgut like an aphrodisiac. There were a lot of ways to release tension. Sometimes dancing had been one. Sometimes it had been a prelude, and not all that pre either.
    Simon swallowed. She watched his throat move. “Ah.”
    Back home, she’d have made him an offer, they’d have gone off to her room, and this crazy tension would’ve ended. It was just excess energy, really, and the presence of an attractive man, both easy enough to deal with back home. But here they assigned some sort of crazy meaning to sex, and she had to work with him. Even back home, she hadn’t slept with anyone in her squad.
    If a mission had ever been critical, this one was. She wouldn’t put it at risk to scratch an itch. No way. No matter how much she was tempted.

Chapter 11
    At first, keeping busy had been easy. There had been the business of the estate, for one. As much as Simon had tried to keep up with things when he’d been in town, some matters really did demand his personal attention, and enough of them had piled up to keep him occupied for some time. He’d had to answer correspondence from his acquaintances in town as well and handle affairs there. And he’d certainly had plenty of research to do.
    Simon had welcomed all of it at first. In the days since Joan’s arrival, he’d felt the need to face the future with as much information as possible and with his affairs laid in order as best he could. He’d also wanted to build a wall out of fact and footnotes and duty, a wall between him and rash actions or unwise decisions, or simply to keep from looking too long at the task ahead of him.
    Joan had been part of what he didn’t want to look at. He was thankful for her presence with Eleanor and fascinated by the things she mentioned about her world, but when he spoke to her, he felt as if the world whose solidity he’d always taken for granted was as fragile as an eggshell.
    He retreated from that feeling to his books and his accounts, but the strategy didn’t quite work, because he found himself thinking of Joan anyway. When he read about breaking spells with salt, he wondered if her people had tried that. When one of his books described a man being turned into a dog, he imagined her remarking that it wasn’t really that much of a change. However he tried to blot her from his mind, she wouldn’t go.
    On a sunny morning, after he’d exhausted his own books and then posted discreetly pleading letters to magicians miles away, Simon discovered two things. First, he had nothing more to do. The accounts had been sorted and the tenants visited, and he’d searched every book in his library for references to geasa . Second, he was restless and utterly tired of sitting in small rooms reading or making respectable conversation with strangers.
    He dressed for riding. Then he went down to the dining room and joined Eleanor and Joan for breakfast.
    When he came in, Eleanor turned away from Joan and stopped whatever she’d been saying in mid-sentence. It stung to see that, but young ladies didn’t want to discuss some things with men, even their brothers. Besides, Eleanor looked decidedly improved. She had more color in her cheeks, her eyes were brighter, and the plate in front of her was well filled. He could certainly be content