“No!” She protested as vehemently as she’d once declared her love. Blowing out a long breath, she turned her back on him and moved toward a vase of flowers to begin rearranging the fat pink blooms. Peonies, he thought. She’d once mentioned her love for the flower. Peering back over her shoulder, she asked, “Have you asked Lady Caroline?”
“No.” His halfhearted tone was equal parts regret and guilt. He should have asked the lady by now. Or another one like her. He hated admitting his resistance. Hated that May might see through it and know that she was the reason. He had no wish to be a stumbling block in her path, and he had to win the duke’s damn wager.
“We should join the others,” she insisted, stepping away from the flowers.
The arrangement looked better after her tending. Would she have the same effect on him? Considering the kind of man he’d been before meeting her, perhaps she already had.
May swept past him, her brisk footsteps muffled by rustling silk and swishing skirts. He reached out and caught her around the arm, hooking his elbow with hers, linking them like puzzle pieces.
She emitted a little gasp, and then rapid puffs of breath wisped against his face. For a moment, he said nothing, simply savoring being close to her. “You mustn’t marry him if he doesn’t suit you. Certainly not for a duke’s ridiculous wager.”
“What if he loves me?” she asked, breathy and low.
“Does he?” A vise twisted his gut, tension ratcheting tighter each moment he waited for her reply.
“I have no idea.” She seemed disinterested in the answer, and that pleased Rex exceedingly. “You’re one to talk. Is it a love match with Lady Caroline?”
Flexing his arm, he pulled her near. His mouth was an inch from her cheek, his arm snugged against her bodice. “You know it’s not.”
This was right. Holding her, touching her, honesty between them and none of the pretense they put on for everyone else.
Raucous laughter echoed down the hallway. Her father’s deep belly chortle was unmistakable and usually followed the telling of one of his brag-filled stories or an off-color joke that he found far more entertaining than his audience did.
She finally faced him, eyes wide. “My father. I’d better go and save the guests from any more of his tall tales.”
“I’m sure they’ll thank you.” Rex smiled so inadvertently he didn’t realize the gesture until she mirrored it with a blinding grin of her own. “You should go first. I’ll follow in a moment.”
How could he be cool and calculating when one smile from her made him burn so hot? How could he look at Lady Caroline, or any of her ilk, and consider marriage and a future when May was in the room? In London. Anywhere that he could find her and touch her and make her smile at him again.
“BREATHE.” MAY REPEATED the word as she pushed back her shoulders and remembered Mama’s lessons in deportment. Head up, chin out, waist in, back straight. “And breathe.” Somehow, in addition to all of that, and after another encounter with the man who drew her like a magnet despite her vow to avoid him, she also had to remember to breathe. Preferably not in the erratic rush that kept puffing out of her now.
“Miss Sedgwick, you are a vision.” Emily’s father met her on the threshold of the drawing room and worsened the blush that still burned her cheeks, neck, and the tips of her ears.
“Thank you, Your Grace. Didn’t Emily join you this evening?”
He glanced left and his eyes widened, as if he was as surprised as May not to find his daughter beside him. “She did indeed. Perhaps she’s refilling her glass or taking a bit of fresh air.”
The night had just begun, and the room was not yet crowded with enough guests to be overly warm.
“I’ll go and see if I can find her. Thank you for coming, Your Grace.”
Emily always provided a sensible perspective. May needed that. Sensibility had abandoned May the moment she’d looked into Rex’s gilded blue eyes. And let him touch her. Again.
“May, there you are!” Lady Caroline zigzagged between two couples to reach her side. “You were nowhere to be found when Henry and I arrived.” Caroline grasped May’s hand and kissed her cheek, a warmer greeting than the earl’s sister had ever offered.
“Forgive me for failing to welcome you both properly. I need more practice as a hostess. I’m forever attending to some detail and missing the party myself.” May signaled to one of the footman, who approached with a tray of properly diminutive glasses filled with a cordial.
“Thank goodness Mother enjoys hosting balls and dealing with all the fuss.” Caroline’s blonde brows lifted and her voice grew huskier. “I imagine myself as a less conventional wife. With a much less conventional husband.”
Rex had entered the room. May sensed him, felt the energy in the air shift, without needing to turn and confirm that Caroline’s hungry gaze followed Rex’s progress across the drawing room.
“Where is Lord Devenham this evening?” He was the man who should be filling May’s mind, making her cheeks flush and her breathing ragged. Regardless of the fact that he’d never achieved it before, perhaps tonight would be the night.
Caroline blinked and pulled her gaze from Rex as if she’d awakened from a daze. “Henry? He was just speaking with your father.”
Not anymore. May’s father was cloistered in a corner, whispering with the Duke of Ashworth. May silently prayed he wouldn’t proposition the duke for a loan twenty minutes into their first dinner party of the season.
“Let me see if I can find the earl.” And Emily. And some tiny sliver of composure.
Out in the hallway, she could finally breathe. Rex’s scent drifted up from her clothes, and she swiped gloved hands down her bodice and skirts, though it only seemed to stir up the aroma of his cologne. Fresh air would do the trick. A few gulps on the front balcony, and she’d resume her search for Emily and the absent earl. After ascending the stairs, she approached a set of French doors. Dueling voices halted her steps.
“Either you tell her, or I will.” Emily’s stern tone carried through the partially open door.
“We’re family, Em. Have a bit of loyalty. You’ll tell her nothing.” Devenham spoke in a half shout, half whisper.
“Henry, you’re in love with someone else.”
May closed her eyes, her breath pinched and painful in her chest.
Devenham huffed out a disgusted chuckle. “You always were too fond of romance, cousin. May Sedgwick will make me a millionaire. Her dowry will secure the estate for generations. I’ll leave love to fools.”
“And give yours to a parson’s daughter.”
A rustle of movement drew a gasp from Emily. May stepped closer to peer through the doorway. Devenham had gripped Em by the upper arms and pulled her near to whisper. “The parson’s daughter can never be my wife. I need an heiress. If not Sedgwick’s, then another like her.”
May pushed the door wider and took one step into the sitting room. “Perhaps you should leave my home now, Lord Devenham, and begin your search for that other heiress.”
“May!” Emily pulled away from the earl and started toward her.
May shook her head. “No, Em. I don’t require an explanation. I know how it works. The game of wealth for titles has never been a mystery to me.” She sought Devenham’s gaze, but he stared at the carpet. “I’ve only just realized I don’t wish to play.”
Spinning on her heel, she headed down the stairs, ignoring Emily, who called after her, and marched past the drawing room where she was utterly failing as a hostess. She sought the small, dark-paneled room where she’d started the evening linked arm in arm with Rex. After slipping into the parlor, she inhaled the sweet odor of fresh-cut peonies. Their powerful scent overtook any remnants of spice and bergamot in the air.
Pulling the thick drapes aside, she sank onto the edge of a settee, turning her body so she could stare up at the full moon glowing over Belgravia. Her hands trembled in her lap. Why tremble to learn what she already knew to be true?
“S
illy woman.” She’d made marrying an aristocrat the object of a wager. Were Henry’s intentions any worse? He wished to marry her for money. Rather, her father’s money. No surprise there. Her dowry had always been what set her apart from every other debutante. She’d never been prettier or more accomplished than any of them. Just richer. And yet to be pursued for it, married for it, wasn’t enough. Perhaps she was the romantic that Lord Devenham accused Emily of being. Was it wrong to want to be loved for whatever unique qualities she might possess rather than her million-dollar dowry?
“Wishing on the moon, are you?”
The voice that usually sent shivers skittering up her spine made her shoulders sag with relief. At least he wasn’t Emily with excuses for her cousin, or Henry, tripping over an apology. Still, Rex Leighton did rank high on her list of people she didn’t wish to see when she was feeling like a fool.
“Right now I’m wishing I was alone in this room.”
“Too late, I’m afraid.” His voice dropped lower as he drew near. “Here I am.”
His scent was winning. The odor of peonies faded.
“It’s a small room, Mr. Leighton. A few steps would take you back out again.”
He took a few steps, but they weren’t toward the door. They were toward her. He loomed directly behind her. “I prefer this room to the other. It’s smaller, quiet, and smells good.”
“That’s the peonies.”
He lowered himself onto the settee, his weight dipping her lower into the upholstery. She moved away from him, but he leaned close, his heat warming the side of her body. “It’s you, May. You’re always what draws me.”
When she turned to face him, he leaned forward and reached a hand up to her face.
“W-what are you doing?”
After drawing a feather-light touch across her cheek, he drew back to show her his wet fingertip. “You’re crying.”
“I’m not crying.” May lifted a hand and swiped at her cheeks, stunned to find dampness on both.
“Then it’s worse than I feared.” One of his lopsided grins made her stomach tumble. “It seems you’re leaking from the corner of each eye.”
“Don’t tease me.” Pushing lightly against his shirtfront to create a bit of space between them, May found her palm crushed against the solid plane of his chest.
He clasped her hand in place with his own. “Feel that?”
“I . . . ” Her mind failed her. Her tongue tangled in her mouth. Sensation was all she could manage, absorbing the jump of his heartbeat against her skin.
“No feigning. No tease. That is what you do to me.”
She’d felt like this before. Tipping, her heart in her throat, her head in the clouds. Toppling, faster and further, into a love that would swallow her up if she let herself go.
“I’m not the girl I was six years ago.”
He wrapped his arm around her, nudging her closer, lowering his head as if he’d take her lips. “I know who you are, May. I’ve never forgotten.”
“I’m not the same.” The years had changed her. Made her long for something more than the match her parents had raised her to seek. She’d discovered her passion for art and design, begun to nurture a desire for a business of her own. When she’d met Reginald Cross, she’d been naive and less certain of herself. He was her first certainty—that she desired him, needed him, loved him.
He caressed her cheek, his large hand impossibly gentle as he stroked ribbons of sensation across her skin. When he placed a kiss at the corner of her mouth, his lips were as tender as his touch. “You taste just as tempting.”
“And you still know just what to say.” She hadn’t intended the derision in her tone.
Rex sat back stiffly against the settee as if she’d cursed him. “I am not lying to you.” He looked frightfully grim. “My feelings for you were never a lie.”
“So you told the truth.” May smoothed her fingertip along the frown marring his brow. “When you said you wanted me?”
“Yes.” He gripped her round the waist and pulled her so close she was almost in his lap.
May went into his arms, settled her chest against his, twined her hands around his neck. “And when you said you loved me?” She pressed her mouth against his before he could speak, fearing his answer as much as she needed to hear it.
His kisses melted her while his roving hands drew circles over her back, gripped her hips, and pulled her closer. “Yes,” he rasped against her mouth.
“Yes,” she breathed. The sentiment slipped from her lips as it hummed through her body.
She may have changed, but her feelings for Rex hadn’t. Along with that certainty came another. Whatever the consequences, however disappointed others might be, she couldn’t marry Devenham. She couldn’t imagine loving or giving herself to any man, except the one in her arms.
Chapter Thirteen
THE NEXT DAY, she could still hear Rex’s voice in her head.
He said yes.
Such a simple little word. Three letters. A single sibilant breath. Yet there was power in it. Perhaps enough, May thought, to take her future and reshape it entirely. Could it overturn the plan upon which her life had been shaped? Marriage to a nobleman. Acquisition of a title that could never be earned, an honorific as impressive as the wealth her father had accumulated through tenacity and financial wiles.
Emily gripped her arm and pulled May from her tangled thoughts—of yes and Rex and the conundrum of what to do with her irrepressible, inconvenient feelings for him.
“Thank you for accepting my invitation. I can’t tell you how mortified I am about last evening’s unpleasantness.” Emily’s tone took on an irritatingly reedy quality when she was feeling guilty.
And there was no need for it. As far as May was concerned, the awkwardness with Devenham was the least memorable part of the evening. She tapped two fingers against the art exhibition brochure in her hand and considered how best to convince her friend that more apologies were unnecessary.
“Let’s put it aside, Em. I bear no grudge against you. How could I? Based on what I heard through the doorway, you took my side in the matter and intended to tell me all of it if Henry would not.”
“But it’s dreadful that you had to hear it that way. What a shock it must have been.”
“Honestly, it wasn’t.” A shock to learn the earl wished to marry her for the million-dollar dowry her father had been touting since their arrival in London? Not at all. Henry’s love for another didn’t even nick her pride. Not truly. He’d feigned interest in her, and she’d barely encouraged him. But now, in the cold light of day, May couldn’t say she hadn’t sensed the truth between them all along. She’d never imagined marriage to the Earl of Devenham would be a love match.
“You spoke to me a few weeks ago about practicality, Em. I know the Devenham estate is in need of funds, and Henry’s and Caroline’s marriages are meant to shore up the family coffers. How can I blame them for a situation they didn’t choose?”
“Perhaps I’m not as practical as I thought I was.” Emily twisted her gloves in her bare hands as they progressed through two halls at Burlington House set aside for a Royal Academy exhibition. Though the exhibit was not yet open to the public, a small group of academy patrons had been invited to an early viewing. “It bothers me to speak of money so plainly.”
Wealth and the lack of it were never easy to discuss, in May’s experience. Her parents had retreated behind closed doors whenever financial matters arose, keeping any mention of dollars spent or earned hidden like family secrets. Which only made May doubly curious to learn what all the fuss was about.
She knew Rex had struggled through desperate times after losing his mother, but he’d revealed little about the years between entering an orphanage at ten and the afternoon May met him in the glassware shop.
Memories of that day were still sharp. He’d looked like some undercover warrior masquerading as a shop clerk, with a cut just above his dark brows and the shadow of a bruise on his left cheek. His mu
scular arms and shoulders had strained against the confines of his clerk’s uniform. Starched cotton and heavy wool could do nothing to conceal the energy coiled beneath.
Thinking of him brought the previous evening to mind. Much of it was a blur. She’d sat through the meal and after-dinner conversation, warm and dazed from his kisses.
“Let’s discuss something else, my dear. I can’t leave today without purchasing a few paintings. Help me decide.” Emily hooked her arm through May’s. “Choose some for Ashworth House, and I’ll convince Papa to hang them wherever you say.”
The last person to clasp her arm had been Rex, and she couldn’t shake the memory of it. There had been no promises, no offers, but he admitted that he’d loved her once. Did he still? Her need to find out obliterated any possibility of continuing the pretense of finding an aristocratic husband.
“I haven’t won the wager, Em.” Nor did she any longer have a desire to win. Did Rex? Would he continue his pursuit of a blue-blooded bride? He’d avoided Lady Caroline during the dinner party, despite her attempts to insert herself by his side.
“Papa was wrongheaded to suggest it. As practical as I may be, even I know finer feelings must inform any decision to marry.”
No part of the reaction Rex sparked in May was as mundane as fine.
“I hated the notion of you rushing into an engagement,” Emily continued. “Or Mr. Leighton, for that matter. No one should enter a union as important as marriage just to satisfy my father’s predilection for wagers.”
“But Mr. Leighton requires your father’s investment in his hotel.” May wanted to know more about Rex’s hotel, but every time they were together, circumstances or duty drew them in opposite directions. “Will the duke still give his support if we forfeit the wager?”
“Oh, I think he will. Papa rarely mixes wagers with business. I’ve no idea what possessed him this time.” Emily patted May’s arm comfortingly. “Leave it to me. I’ll convince him to assist Mr. Leighton and allow you to give us beautiful red walls in the library.”
“Thank you, Em.”
One Dangerous Desire (Accidental Heirs) Page 12