Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)

She looked shocked. “The style of—uh—ta heevil? No. Of course not. I understand completely.”


Blakely nodded, high-handed dismissal writ across his face, and continued to the front of the room. He faced the crowd. His gaze swept over the gathered throng as if it were a mass of lepers. Then he clasped his hands behind his back, and sang.

A frog croaking a tuneless, off-key baritone would have handily beaten Blakely in a singing competition. Ned’s expectations had risen as high as the soles of his shoes. They’d been too high.

This wasn’t an ode. It was carnage.

Ned put his hand in his mouth and bit down. It didn’t do much good. His shoulders still shook with laughter.

And then there were the words. Dear God. How long had it taken him to come up with them?

“One thing about Ned that will never spoil,” Blakely sang, “Is that he is indefatigably loyal/No matter the troubles in which they’re embroiled/He will not from his friends recoil.”

Ned bit harder. Teeth pierced glove and ground into flesh. He chanced a look around him. The faces nearest his were very guarded in response. Everyone’s, that is, except Madame Esmerelda’s. Her eyes were lit by a mischievous joy.

Happily, Blakely was not yet finished. “Ever jolly is Ned’s disposition/For this much, at least, he deserves recognition/He would make a fine politician/If ever he stood for a good proposition.”

Ned wasn’t sure whether that worked out to a compliment. “Ever jolly” certainly bore no resemblance to the truth. He chanced a look behind him. Unlike the rest of the crowd, Lady Kathleen was not watching with pretended interest. She looked carefully from side to side, her fingers cinched around the arm of her chair. As if the details of the room were of greater interest than the spectacle Blakely presented.

Blakely continued. “Ned is worthy of great esteem/For he is precisely as he seems/He has no plots or deceitful schemes/Unlike the one I intend to make—”

Blakely drew out that last note—if you could call that low, cracking tone by so innocent a name. He was looking directly at Madame Esmerelda, and Ned tried to fill in the rhyme to come. Make dream? Steam? Scream?

Madame Esmerelda blushed pink, one hand on her throat. How strange.

“—wince as I finish the last line without any sense of meter or rhyme,” Blakely concluded.

There was a moment of silence. Blessed silence. The glances around Ned all said the same thing—Dear God, please tell us it’s over. Blakely eyed the gathering with his typical lofty indifference, daring them to boo.

They did not dare. Ned could see the thoughts skim through their minds. He was a marquess, after all. Perhaps things were different in Brazil. The performance was exotic. It was short. And it wasn’t much more dreadful than the Chinese opera that had been performed last year.

“Bravo!” Ned called. He applauded madly. Thankfully, everyone joined in.

Blakely bowed, rather stiffly, and picked his way through the rows toward his seat. He didn’t even make eye contact with Ned, didn’t acknowledge that Ned had just saved him.

Ha. Just because Blakely had no humility didn’t mean Ned couldn’t try to humiliate him further.

“Encore!” Ned shouted.

Blakely fixed Ned with a look that promised eventual dismemberment. Luckily for the future attachment of Ned’s limbs, nobody else took up the cry. Blakely made his way through the seats amidst very polite, and not particularly encouraging, applause.

He brushed by Ned and had reached his seat on the other side of Madame Esmerelda, when the annoying woman on Ned’s right leaned over.

“Lord Blakely,” she said. “What an unusual style. I just want to know—who is Ned?”

Ned suppressed a grin. That, perhaps, was the best part. Almost everyone thought of him as Mr. Carhart. Just Carhart, to the friends he’d made at school. Only near family—he included Madame Esmerelda in that number, of course—called him “Ned.”

Blakely arranged the tails of his coat and sat down, straight-backed, before answering. “A person.” No further encouragement passed his lips.

“Oh.” A pause. “Is the style intended to be sung like that?”

Ned felt perfectly free to twit his own cousin, but he’d be damned if he let anyone else do it. “Dissonance,” Ned said airily, “is all the rage abroad this year. It’s such a shame London is behind the times.”

Blakely’s brows drew down and he shot Ned an unreadable look.

Ned decided to feel encouraged. An unreadable response was heaps better than an unprintable one.