by Kay Hooper
She blinked at that last candid statement, knowing without a doubt that she was blushing furiously. But before she could either deny his words or somehow defend herself, she found herself caught by his intent gaze. The flicker in his night-black eyes had become the heated look that was achingly familiar to her, like the sensual curve of his lips and the faint rasp in his low voice. She felt her heart skip a beat and then begin to pound unevenly, and heat was rushing through her body even before he came to her and pulled her into his arms.
All the long days without him had only sharpened the need he had created in her, and Cassandra molded herself to him instantly, her mouth wild and eager under his, her arms slipping up around his neck in total surrender. He crushed her against his powerful length, his arms fierce and his mouth ruthless as it plundered hers. And when he jerked his head up at last, his eyes were brilliant with fire and ferocity.
“Do you understand now?” he demanded roughly. One of his hands slid down her back to her hips, and he pressed her lower body hard against his. “Do you?”
Cassandra caught her breath, dizzy from his kisses and the shockingly intimate awareness of his blatant arousal. Her body was trembling and she thought all her bones had melted. She could only stare up at him, mute, electrified, and enthralled.
His embrace gentled, his hands stroking up and down her back slowly, and his lips feathered over her flushed, heated face. “I wanted you so badly I knew it was only a matter of time before I lost my head,” he muttered.
When he drew back just a bit to look down at her again, she touched his cheek with wondering fingers, and a tremulous smile curved her kiss-reddened lips. “That was why you were so—so distant that last day? Why you said I should go?”
“Yes.” He turned his head to kiss her palm lingeringly. “Cassie, you were under my protection. I may spring from a long line of rakes, but only a monster would take advantage of a girl under such circumstances. And—”
“And?” she prompted.
He hesitated, then said, “At twenty-one I fancied myself in love, but what I discovered was that to one so young, powerful emotions are often something entirely different from what one supposes. I wanted to make certain you had the time to consider what you felt, Cassie, before anything irrevocable happened between us.”
She frowned a little. “Is that why you waited all these days, leaving me to wonder if I would ever see you again?”
He bent his head and kissed her in apology, leisurely this time but with unmistakable hunger. When he raised his head, she was trembling again, and his voice was hoarse. “Can you forgive me for that? I promise you, it was the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life to stay away from you.”
Cassandra drew a shaky breath. “I—I suppose I shall have to forgive you.”
He chuckled, then gently drew her arms down and stepped back, holding her hands in his. Reluctance was clear in his eyes. “If I do not leave you now, I will not be able to.”
“I suppose you . . . could not stay,” she ventured.
Bluntly Sheffield said, “However willing your uncle is to allow you to manage your own life, my darling, I doubt very much that he would be sympathetic if he found me making love to you under his roof.”
She found herself both smiling and blushing, pleased by his frank talk of his desire for her even as she was a little embarrassed—or thought she should be.
He smiled at her. “Do you attend the St. Valentine’s Day Ball tomorrow night?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Save all the dances for me.”
She nodded without hesitation, but couldn’t help saying, “I won’t see you before then?”
Sheffield smiled but shook his head. “There are things I must attend to. Remember, it has been quite a few years since I’ve been in town during the Season.”
Cassandra nodded reluctantly in understanding, and she managed not to throw herself back into his arms when he kissed each of her hands and then released them. She didn’t object when he said goodbye, but when he reached the door, she said, “Stone?”
One hand on the knob, he turned to look at her.
Burning her bridges, Cassandra said steadily, “I am very sure of how I feel—I want you to know that. I fell in love with you that first night.”
She had no idea what was in her eyes when she said it, what expression she wore, but whatever the earl saw caused him to release the doorknob and take a jerky step back toward her—and his face was taut with hunger.
He stopped, struggled visibly with his baser instincts, then muttered, “My God, Cassie—you’d tempt a saint,” before jerking open the door and striding from the room.
Sir Basil, who had received the news of Cassandra’s stormbound stay at Sheffield Hall philosophically, reacted to the news of the earl’s return to London with characteristic perception. When Cassandra very casually mentioned after supper that evening that Sheffield had called upon her in the afternoon (since the earl had not stated his intentions in so many words, she was hesitant to inform her uncle that she was being courted), Sir Basil looked very hard across the dining table at his niece.
“I somehow doubt Sheffield’s come to London to be measured for a new pair of boots, not when he’s avoided the place for the better part of ten years. Should I expect a visit from him, Cassie?”
She hesitated, then replied, “I don’t know.”
His brows flew up. “You don’t know if he means to offer for you?”
Candidly she said, “I don’t know if he would ask your permission to offer for me.”
Lady Weston, who sat opposite her husband, said, “Dear me,” quite placidly and looked at Cassandra with interest. “You never seemed to wish to discuss it, dearest, but we gathered you had formed an attachment for the earl. You were so careful to barely mention him, you know, and that is always a dead giveaway. And then, naturally, we’ve noticed your low spirits since you came back to town.”
Sir Basil, dryly, said, “Quite different from tonight, in fact. A blind man could see how you feel about the man, so I hope you don’t intend to try keeping it a secret.”
Cassandra smiled on them both, immensely grateful for their love and trust in her judgment. “People will probably talk,” she said ruefully. “Even if there is no gossip about my stay at the Hall, I have a notion that Stone has no intention of being . . . circumspect in his attentions. And since he has been away from society for so long—”
“He will definitely be under observation,” Sir Basil finished. “Some will call him a fortune hunter, you know; even a man with adequate funds risks that when he pays his addresses to an heiress.”
“They may just as easily reproach me and say I wished only to be a countess,” she commented in a dry tone.
“Very true, I suppose. But more likely to go the other way. Will that disturb you, Cassie?”
Cassandra smiled faintly. “No, why should it? I know he is indifferent to my fortune.”
Sir Basil eyed her thoughtfully. “You do, do you?”
“Oh, yes.” There was something of her aunt’s utter placidity in that response, and her uncle looked satisfied; when Eden women had at last made up their minds and were certain of something—of anything—they were invariably right.
It was a family trait that Sheffield would no doubt soon discover, Sir Basil mused. If he had not already.
It was an old English belief that birds chose their mates on February fourteenth, and out of that conviction had sprung up in London society the yearly event known as the St. Valentine’s Day Ball, which was held on the evening of the thirteenth of February. It was a masquerade ball like any other, where the ladies wore costumes or dominoes with masks, and the gentlemen costumes or merely evening dress with masks. Dancing and conversation were exactly as usual, with the only difference being the Midnight Waltz.
At midnight the final waltz would be announced, and gentlemen were invited to choose their partners. Those gentlemen who did so were, by tradition and accepted practice, a
nnouncing publicly their choice of life mate.
Naturally, most of the couples who took the floor for the Midnight Waltz were either married or betrothed; for all its air of impulse and romance, the tradition offered few surprises because it was a rare gentleman who risked public rejection in the event his chosen lady refused him, and a rare lady willing to announce her engagement in such an impromptu manner.
In all honesty, Cassandra had forgotten the significance of the Midnight Waltz. She had certainly enjoyed the evening, not in the least because Sheffield had come to her within five minutes of her arrival and had not left her since.
To the astonished members of society, as yet still ignorant of Cassandra’s stay at Sheffield Hall, it must have appeared the most startling and incredible romance of the Season—perhaps of many Seasons. The scandalous earl, after many years of travel and (it was said) adventure that had left him older and wiser and much more flush in the pocket (a pirate’s treasure was alluded to, though no one seemed to know by whom) had returned to London society and, the very day after his arrival, become instantly smitten with the lovely but elusive heiress, Cassandra Eden.
While she was masked, for heaven’s sake!
More than one former suitor of Miss Eden’s, glumly watching the dangerous earl obviously delight and enchant her with apparently little effort, longed wistfully for the cachet of a mysterious and/or wicked past. And more than one scandalized debutante could nevertheless not help but think how thrillingly romantic it must be to know those black eyes followed one’s every movement, and with a light in them that was really . . . quite extraordinarily amorous. . . .
“We are the talk of the ball,” Cassandra informed the earl solemnly late in the evening. She had chosen to wear a blue dominoe rather than a costume, but her gray eyes, framed by the gleam of her black mask, seemed fittingly mysterious.
Sheffield, who had scorned a costume and early disposed of his mask (like many other gentlemen), could only agree with her. He knew most of their observers were scandalized—but in a relatively mild way. Not that he cared. Except where it concerned Cassandra—as when he had worried she might be wary of him because of the tales she had heard—he was indifferent to his reputation.
“I suppose they must talk of something,” he allowed.
Rueful, she said, “Well, we have certainly given them something.”
“Do you regret it?”
Cassandra smiled up at him. “Of course not.”
Sheffield was about to speak again when the musicians struck up a flourish of drumrolls, and the dance floor began to clear of couples.
“The Midnight Waltz!” the lead musician announced.
Smiling, the earl reached up and untied the ribbons holding Cassandra’s mask. “I believe this is my dance, ma’am,” he said.
It took a moment for Cassandra to remember the significance of this particular dance. When she did, she murmured, “But, Stone—they think we have only met tonight, and that this is the first time you have seen me unmasked—”
“And now they will believe I fell in love with you at first sight—which is perfectly true.”
Cassandra thought her heart would burst, it pounded so rapidly. “You—you did?”
“Certainly, I did.” He tucked her mask carefully inside his long-tailed coat as one would a keepsake, then bowed low before her as the musicians struck up the Midnight Waltz. “May I have your hand in marriage, Miss Eden? Will you dance with me?”
Without hesitation she placed her hand in his and curtsied, her eyes glowing with happiness. “If you please, sir.”
He kissed her hand and then led her out onto the dance floor, and it was only then that Cassandra realized they were the first couple to begin—because every other eye in the room had been fixed upon them in fascination.
“We have shocked them all,” she murmured as, slowly, other couples joined them on the floor.
He was smiling down at her, his mouth both tender and sensual, and his black eyes heated. “We will shock them still further if I am able to persuade you to marry me quickly, my love.”
“How quickly?” she asked, solemn.
“By the end of the week—if I am able to wait that long.
A special license, a private ceremony—and a very long honeymoon.”
Still solemn, she said, “I believe I would like that of all things, my lord.”
And her lord, inflamed by the love and desire shining in her gray eyes, waltzed her out of the ballroom and onto a dark and private terrace, under the shocked, scandalized, and wholly envious eyes of society.
Kay Hooper
is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of many suspense and romance novels. She lives in Bostic, North Carolina. Visit her website at www.kayhooper.com.