Read Online The Virgin's Daughter by Laura Andersen - Free Book Online Page B

died delivering their only son, Felix. How Nicolas had more or less shut himself up at Chateau Blanclair since then. Touched that he had come all the way to Paris to greet her when he could have waited for her to arrive at his home, Lucette smiled. “It has been the purpose of my voyage to dance with you, Nicolas.”
    She tried to ignore Charlotte’s expression—like a cat in the cream—and wondered for the first time what would happen to her investigation if she made the mistake of allowing her childish emotions to get the better of her.
    But this was France. Flirting was a game—no more, no less—and she would use it. If she happened to enjoy it, no one need know.
    At last she could not avoid greeting Julien without open rudeness. But he had no such scruples. Before she could do more thanlook his way, he said in rapidly clipped French, “You’re not very like your mother, are you?”
    In a flood of childhood indignation, Lucette remembered the claim Nicolas had launched at his brother during their trip to Wynfield: You’ve been panting after her all summer like a dog in heat . He had meant Minuette. Whom clearly Julien had found beautiful. And whom he had just casually noted that Lucette was nothing like.
    “Enough like her to recognize good manners or the lack thereof,” she retorted.
    Could it be that she’d stung him? She thought she saw a twitch along his jaw before he said, “That came out rather differently than I intended. I meant only that you are very dark. Your hair, at least. And your eyes—”
    “Are blue. I know,” she said shortly. Turning to Nicolas, she said, “May I introduce you to Dr. Dee? You’ll find him quite an entertaining storyteller while we wait for the dancing to begin.”
    Charlotte came with them, but Renaud drifted away in conversation with old friends. Julien turned on his heel and melted into the crowd.
    And Lucette told herself sternly to remember that liking or disliking had absolutely nothing to do with intelligence work. Just because Julien was as rude as he’d ever been didn’t make him an agent against England. It simply meant that her scruples in investigating him were lessened.
    —
    Julien walked way from Lucette with his head spinning so much he might as well have been drunk. He could hardly even remember opening his mouth, but somehow he’d managed to insult her very first thing. How had he let his thoughts tumble out of his mouth like that? He never spoke without thinking, for that was likely to get an intelligencer killed.
    At least he’d managed not to babble that she was far more beautifulthan he remembered even her mother being, that he—who had a specific type of woman, always blonde to some degree and charming and skilled at seduction—had been completely knocked off balance by the contrast of her dark hair and pale skin and sea-blue eyes. This is ridiculous , he told himself firmly. I do not believe in love at first sight .
    He wasn’t entirely sure that he believed in love at all. Not any longer.
    Best way to get a woman out of one’s mind, he knew, was to find another woman. Julien began to scan the crowds to find the best choice for the evening, one whose studied play would demand no more of him than surface expertise. Being Paris, he almost instantly marked three women and decided on the blondest, giggliest, silliest of the lot. He set off toward her and made it five steps before someone laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.
    “You’re heading for the wrong woman,” the familiar voice of Cardinal Ribault said softly. “I thought it was the Englishwoman your sister brought you here to charm.”
    “Not now,” Julien said under his breath. He was in enough turmoil without adding in the quick wits demanded of his work. At least not without warning. What the hell was Cardinal Ribault doing here anyway, at a party designed to welcome an emissary from that most heretic Queen Elizabeth?
    Ribault did not leave him long in ignorance. The