“Are my gloves very cold?” Yasmin asked. “I’ve been outdoors and it’s beginning to rain.”

“Not the weather,” Parnell said. “The earl. Lilford.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Chilly bugger, isn’t he? Oh, dear, I shouldn’t have used that word in front of a lady.” His eyes laughed at her.

Yasmin let his cheerfulness replace the sick feeling in her chest. This duke liked her as she was. “Bollocks!” she said, grinning back at him. “You don’t care for the earl?”

“We were at school together, but he decided early on that I was a frivolous excuse for a man and not worth his time.”

A shared confession felt soothing. “Alas, the earl has a similarly low opinion of me.”

“More the fool he,” the duke said, twirling her in a circle.

“No flirtatious comments,” she ordered, letting her smile fall. “I like you too much for that.”

“I am not fool enough to join the parade of besotted men at your heels. Of whom, I might add, the Earl of Lilford is definitely one. I’ve caught him more than once standing at the edge of the ballroom, staring at you like a mooncalf.”

“Nonsense. Lord Lilford was preparing his next insult.” Yasmin had no intention of discussing Giles with anyone, let alone one of her suitors.

“It’s irresistible, given how you look in that gown.”

“Enough,” Yasmin ordered. “I’m sick to death of flattery.” Silvester Parnell was fast becoming one of her closest friends—but only as long as the duke avoided the kind of flummery that made her uncomfortable.

“It’s irresistible to tease you.”

She frowned.

“Anyone who watches you closely will notice that you are a flirtatious minx in public and prudish in private. Most of my fellows haven’t noticed because they’re imbeciles in public and private.”

“Do not watch me closely,” Yasmin ordered.

“Do not watch me closely, Silvester?” he amended.

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Very well.”

Silvester’s grin was charming; he was intelligent, fairly handsome, titled. Giles didn’t have his charm, so why was she still thinking about his kisses? It was absurd. Obviously, she should marry the friendly duke, who liked her, and laughed at her jokes.

If her grandfather had attended this ball, His Grace would be nodding with approval from the sidelines.

Her grandfather was under the fixed conviction that the only way to heal the shame Yasmin’s mother had brought upon the family was for her daughter to marry a highly respected peer. “If only Mabel had chosen to engage in garden-variety adultery,” he had told Yasmin a few days ago, “no one would give a damn. But no. She had to sleep with an emperor!”

Yasmin reserved judgment about adultery; it seemed to her that malicious gossip circulated widely, no matter the indiscretion.

Still, according to her grandfather, marriage to a duke would remedy the family disgrace.

Yasmin had the distinct sense that Silvester—for all his claim not to be one of her suitors—was a purposeful man. In the past three weeks, he had danced with her, plied her with champagne, and told her stories of his family.