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Chapter One
"Lady Redcomb." Lord Weatherby greeted Madeline with an affable smile, both hands extended, palms up.
Madeline Fallon smiled back and refrained from doing anything nasty. After all, she was only a witch in the most technical sense of the word. In actuality, she had always been quite a nice person. Soft-spoken, gentle, and well-mannered. But what had that foolish tolerance gained her?
"You look most ravishing tonight," Weatherby said, and lifting her hands, brushed his lips across her knuckles.
Madeline smiled with demure femininity. Truthfully though, she was fully aware that she looked ravishing. She had looked ravishing since the day she had popped from the womb, perfectly coifed and immaculately groomed. Or so her sister was wont to say.
It was simply that Madeline failed to care.
Delicately waving her fan, she gazed, limpid-eyed, over its lacy top at her admirer. He was probably not an unattractive fellow. Tall, wealthy, and confident, Lord Weatherby was a man to draw a woman's attention. Unfortunately, she was not drawn. Indeed, she wished quite desperately that he would go away. Wished, in fact, that she could skim her gaze across the cavernous ballroom in a foolhardy attempt to find the one man she must ignore.
"Lord Weatherby . . ." Madeline fluttered her fan and gave him her most beguiling smile. "You flatter me."
"Not at all." He preened a smile and leaned half an inch closer. "You are, very possibly, the most ravishing woman in this room."
Madeline blushed modestly and allowed herself a fleeting glance to the left, but Jasper Reeves had not yet arrived at Lady Sedum's annual ball. Indeed, he was probably doing what he did best: scheming like a mad Frenchman, and all the while planning to give the most harrowing missions to other members of the coven. Faye perhaps. Or Shaleena.
Madeline stifled a snarl of frustration. Snarling was, presumably, considered somewhat uncouth at posh soirees.
"And therefore the most sought after," added Weatherby.
"Hardly that, my lord," Madeline demurred, remembering her companion's presence and raising the frilly fan to cover her peaked chin. Just the carefully pigmented bow of her full upper lip would show. Which made her wonder who the genius was who decided women should carry fans. The lacy accessories were quite indispensable, able to hide a hundred emotions while conveying just as many. Or, in a pinch, they made decent weapons if delivered with panache and a reasonable amount of force to a man's exposed trachea. Then again, if handled properly—
Weatherby moved a little closer, brushing her knuckles with his. "Indeed, when I am near you I can think of little else but how you would look . . ." His eyes gleamed. ". . . au naturel."
Madeline caught her breath audibly and opened her eyes wide as if embarrassed. But annoyance would more adequately describe her feelings. Dammit. Had the conversation slithered so far in that lascivious direction? If she wished to avoid his attentions, which she most certainly did, despite the fact that she fully intended to become quite scandalous, she was going to have to pay better attention . . . or employ the fan. The idea was irritatingly tempting, but she only fluttered her would-be weapon with ladylike precision.
"My lord, I am quite shocked!" she said, and glanced to the right, looking for someone more suitable with which to become outrageous. She hated to delay any longer; she had already wasted too much time pining over someone she would never have, someone who would never return her affections. But surely she could find someone more appealing than Weatherby to begin her life as an easy lady-bird.
Her companion laughed. The sound rumbled through the vast, buzzing chamber. "Are you indeed? Tell me, my lady, how long were you wed?"
It was time to move on, Madeline realized, before the conversation became any more involved, before he inquired about other issues she had no intention of addressing. Lowering her eyes, she made certain she looked soft and feminine and mournful. It was a fair performance, considering her dearly departed husband had never actually existed.
"I fear my sweet William succumbed to consumption well before his time," she murmured.
Weatherby shifted his hand up her arm. It was bare. Madeline didn't favor the long kid gloves oft worn by the ladies of the ton, for she was a tactile creature, able to "feel" as much as she could see.
Lord Weatherby, she mused, "felt" irritating.
"It is rumored . . ." He gave her a smoldering look, designed, she assumed, to make her smolder. ". . . that your bridegroom died before the two of you were truly . . ." He twirled a finger into a ringlet that had been designed to look as if it had somehow accidentally escaped the confinement that so artfully captured the others. ". . . joined."
Madeline managed another modest blush, letting it pinken her cheeks but not her ears. She had heard the rumors, of course. Indeed, she had initiated most of them herself. Few things were, after all, what they seemed. The idea that she was British, for instance. Or the ridiculous notion that she was normal . . . or wished to be.
Indeed, she would give much to possess her sister's dynamic powers. But while Ella had been gifted with seemingly infinite abilities, Madeline had been granted little more than a visage that drew men like fruit flies. A parade of foolish dandies that must be brushed away at every turn.
And all the while she had worked like a conniving mule to achieve even a modicum of what Ella could do in her sleep. But perhaps that was changing.
"I've embarrassed you," Weatherby said, and raised his hand to her inflamed face. "My apologies." His tone was raspy. "I had no wish to make you uncomfortable. Indeed . . ." He stroked her cheek. "I've a desire to make you so much more than comfortable." He raised a manly brow. "Ecstatic even."
Seduced By Your Spell. Copyright © by Lois Greiman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Excerpted from Seduced by Your Spell by Lois Greiman
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