Read The Wedding Game for Free Online Page A

Duncan,” Prudence said as her younger sister came up to them. “The Contessa Della Luca . . .” She waved an introductory hand between them.
    Chastity shook the hand of a woman well into her middle years, coiffed in somewhat spectacular style with ostrich plumes swaying in her graying pompadour. Her gown was of blue and gold damask, bustled and tightly corseted, with leg-of-mutton sleeves. It was slightly old-fashioned but it suited the woman's rather stately figure. The diamonds at her throat and ears were magnificent.
    “Welcome to London, Contessa,” she said, smiling warmly.
    “Why, thank you, Miss Duncan. Everyone has been so kind.” Her voice had a slight hesitancy, the barest trace of an accent, not as if she was speaking a foreign language, Chastity thought, but more as if her English was overlaid by a language she was more accustomed to speaking.
    “And this is Miss Della Luca,” Prudence said. “Miss Della Luca, my sister Chastity.”
    Laura Della Luca looked down upon Chastity. She was very tall and thin, dressed in a high-collared, very decorous gown of dove gray that hung from her narrow shoulders as if from a clothes hanger. Her hair was severely parted in the center and drawn back over her ears in two neat, braided circles. Her gaze was supercilious. Her narrow mouth moved in the semblance of a smile. “Delighted,” she said in a voice that quite failed to express delight. “I am so unaccustomed to being called
miss.
” she said. “I am so much more comfortable with
signorina.
”
    “We must try to remember that,” Prudence said with a smile that came nowhere near her eyes. “Foreign ways are so new to us.”
    Chastity caught Gideon's eye. He seemed to be well aware that this particular guest was sailing a little close to the sharp edge of his wife's tongue. Not that anyone but Prudence's immediate family would be aware of it. Signorina Della Luca would be entirely oblivious of the darts of mockery that would puncture with unerring accuracy any attempts at pretension.
    “Yes, I find the English are so poorly traveled,” the lady said. “Travel is so broadening for the mind.”
    “Indeed,” Constance said with a smile very similar to her sister's. “How strange, then, that it should so often breed contempt for the natives of these backward lands.”
    Max and Gideon exchanged looks that mingled reluctant amusement with a degree of desperation. Once their wives were up and running in this fashion, very little could stop them.
    Chastity, however, came to the rescue. “Oh, you must tell me all about Italy,” she said. “My sisters and I spent some time in Florence with our mother, but it was a long time ago. Or it seems so,” she added. “You know Florence intimately, I'm sure.”
    “Oh,
Firenze,
of course,” said the lady with a trill. “We have a villa just outside. I sometimes think that the Uffizi is my second home.”
    “How fortunate for you,” Chastity said. “We were only able to spend a month there ourselves.”
    “A month is long enough to get to know the gallery very well, Miss Duncan,” said the contessa with a pleasant smile.
    “With due study, of course,” her daughter put in. “But I hardly think, Mama, that a tourist visit to
Firenze,
even for a month, can be any substitute for living there.”
    “Dinner is served, Lady Malvern.” The sonorous tones of the butler brought a timely conclusion to the conversation and Gideon breathed again.
    He offered his arm to the contessa. Max, at a nod from his sister-in-law, performed the same service for the signorina, and the party fell into couples, the procession moving in stately fashion across the hall and into the dining room.
    Prudence had seated the contessa in the place of honor on Gideon's right. The signorina she had placed between a judge colleague of Gideon's, who sat on her own right, and Max. She was thus in close proximity to her guest. Fortunately, Chastity and Roddie Brigham sat opposite at the same end