The Devil in Her Bed (Devil You Know #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,17

his most confounding fantasies.” Ramsay might as well have pointed outright for all the subtlety in his gesture, and it took everything Francesca had not to shush and grapple her best friend’s fiancé.

“Look away, you dolt,” she hissed. “I see him plain as day.”

Ramsay wrinkled his nose with apparent disgust, an oddly boyish gesture for a man as imperious and imposing as he. In that moment, Francesca objectively understood Cecelia’s attachment to him. The man was tall and wide as an American redwood with a sense of humor to match, but his ice-blue eyes and tawny hair rounded out his stern—almost savage—features in a way that wasn’t … completely oafish. She supposed he might be attractive, if one found a Scottish barbarian giant alluring. Which she didn’t.

“You’re still staring,” Francesca admonished though clenched teeth as she widened her smile for anyone who might be watching. “You’re going to ruin our introduction if you’re so bloody obvious.”

Ramsay’s features maintained their grimace of disgust. “Are ye certain ye want to leave with him?” A visible shudder rippled through him. “He’s just so … ugly.”

“I see that Cambridge education granted you descriptive eloquence, my lord.” Francesca rolled her eyes and smirked, but sobered when she met his earnest look of concern.

Uncomfortable with the sentiment, she slid her gaze away. “I’ll be fine. I always am.”

“If ye say so.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Cecelia worries about ye, is all.”

“Cecelia worries about everyone. It’s alternately her most irritating and wonderful trait.”

At that, Ramsay let out a commiserative chuckle. “Ye’ll forgive me for asking, Countess, but how are ye going to seduce a man whose taste runs to young girls? Ye’re not exactly … that is to say…”

“I’m a dried-up old spinster?”

His perpetually grim features twisted with chagrin. “I didna mean to imply.”

“Don’t overcontemplate this, but I have my ways.” Setting her glass of wine on the tray of a passing footman, she swiped another of the glorious vintage and drifted away from Ramsay and toward her mark.

Lord Brendan Murphy. He was high up in the council, and she and Ramsay both knew it. They suspected he’d had something to do with the recent debacle with Cecelia’s business, and all Francesca had to do was wrest the proof from him. One way or another.

He was on her dance card in three waltzes, but half of the game of seduction was proximity. Eye contact. Complimentary glances. Coy smiles. All that boring tripe.

She skirted the edges of the dance floor, nodding at chaperones and wallflowers to her right and leaving plenty of room for the swirling couples on her left.

Cecelia waltzed with a somewhat clumsy man Francesca didn’t recognize, who was a good three inches shorter than her. The disparity in height didn’t seem to bother her good-natured friend or the partner, though a quick glance at Ramsay told her the surly Scot didn’t appreciate where the shorter man’s eyes kept landing.

Cecelia’s generous breasts.

Smothering a smile, Francesca sipped her wine and turned toward Murphy.

Before she could close in on her prey, a familiar feeling lifted the fine hairs on her body. A strange dichotomy of warmth and chill. Something like the gaze of a god, or the presence of a ghost. It struck a chord of awe in her, and a bit of fear, if she were honest.

Turning, she used a sip from her champagne glass as an excuse to scan the teeming, glittering, whirling mass of revelers.

There. Across the ballroom. A man stood out by standing still.

He stared at her from the shadows of deep-set eyes.

And just like that, in an overheated room overfilled with people, they were utterly alone. She and the ghost.

Francesca blinked a few times to be certain he wasn’t, indeed, some figment of her imagination or truly a specter of the dead.

No, he was still there. Staring.

Strangely discomfited, Francesca affected an air of nonchalance. When others would have retreated, she lifted her glass in a slight toast.

I see you. I see you watching.

Her next thought was to wonder how on earth she’d missed him before.

He had harsh-hewn features that contrasted with his immaculate, elegant attire, and a commanding brow. His nose was bold rather than broad, and his mouth defied description. It shouldn’t have tempted her. Not as hard as it was.

Hard like his gaze.

He was a hard man all over, it appeared, and extraordinarily fit. Not as monstrously big as Ramsay, or as tall and rangy as Redmayne, but a man of medium height, bred to stand in a crowd not