ROOK AND RAVEN: The Celtic Kingdom Trilogy Book One by Julie Harvey Delcourt Page B

rescued by a friend or was about to confront an importunate male with nefarious plans.  What she saw was Sebastian.
    Her mouth gaped open rather comically and before she could even form a word she found herself being roughly shaken.
    “What the bloody hell do you think you are doing?  Is this the kind of company you keep?  The way you preserve that precious reputation of yours?  This is the last place beside an out and out brothel I would have expected to find you after everything David told me.”  His face was pale with fury and the glitter in his eyes was more than a little unsettling.  She needed some composure and she needed it now.  But two shocks in a row were her undoing. And what the hell (she couldn’t help the unladylike word popping into her head) had David told him?  Nerves, anger and embarrassment came out in a violent torrent of words she couldn’t stop.
    “Well I see you here!  Isn’t what’s good for the goose also good for the gander my lord?  Why the sudden concern for my reputation?  Aren’t you the one who this very evening offered to make me your whore? Certainly this place is too tame for you.  Shouldn’t you be the one at a brothel?”  And she instantly knew she had gone too far.  Long strong fingers bit into her shoulders and she knew she would have marks there come tomorrow.  
    “What am I doing here you ask?  Attempting to save your much vaunted reputation. I thought maybe you didn’t realize where you were going, but after seeing how that eunuch of a French major domo treated you, you are a regular.  Much thanks I get for rescuing you from that filth.  I suppose I should just return you to the show.” He sneered.
    “Oh don’t be an idiot.  That look has never worked on me,” she tossed out. “Of course I don’t want to see that dreadfully ridiculous show.  I have never seen anything like that here before.  I would have turned around and walked out myself if I hadn’t been so shocked.  It’s that fool Lord Marsh.  He has the tastes and inclinations of a fourteen year old boy.”  She set the wine glass in her hand down with a snap after having taken a good sized gulp of it.
    “What are you doing here Sebastian?  And playing knight errant to,” she laughed with a slight sneer of her own. “I would have imagined that while that show wasn’t to my tastes it might be right up your line. Even cut off one has heard things from Celtica over the last years.  Your reputation has proceeded you home.” 
    “I’ll let the last bit pass other than to say I have never, not since I was fourteen anyway, been that tasteless or juvenile.  I am here because of you.  I saw you leave the ball after Tamworth and wanted to talk to you. I asked a footman where you were headed and could barely believe his answer.  You need a chaperone now and always did.  You don’t have any more sense now then you did at sixteen.  I don’t know how you have managed in London at all.”
    “Is it any of your business where I go or what I do?  You think you can just show back up all these years later and start following me about?  Dictating who I have for friends and how I spend my time?  Would it be inappropriate for me to be here if I had taken you up on your offer earlier?  I think I recognized plenty of mistresses out there this evening.  Don’t I fit right in?” She tossed her head and provocatively cocked one hip as she slipped the domino aside with one slim hand. She’d been on the edge of snapping all evening, since seeing him sitting in that box in the theater, and now it was expressing itself in a rage.  How dare he?  How dare he act like he had a right to tell her how to do anything at all?  
    Sebastian eyed her uneasily.  It had seemed the right and proper thing to do to follow her, protect her from herself if he had to, but he had forgotten how formidable she was in a temper.  If she didn’t get it under control they would make a more obvious scene than