Page 18 of Bad Luck Bride

“You mean you didn’t come here to ravish me?” He shook his head, putting on a show of mock regret. “How disappointing. What did you come for, then?”

“We need to talk. It’s important,” she added when he didn’t reply.

“I daresay,” he conceded. “To bring you alone to my hotel room, it must be.”

“Well, then?” she prompted when he fell silent. “May I come in?”

He didn’t jump to let her. Instead, he tilted his head to oneside, studying her through the open doorway, unable to imagine what she could possibly want to discuss with him now that was so important she’d take this sort of risk. Still, whatever her reasons, from the look on her face, he was sure letting her in would be something he’d regret.

“I’m not sure that’s wise,” he said at last, compelled to remind himself and caution her. “Someone might find out, and that would start tongues wagging about us all over again. If anyone sees you here, the scandal would be—”

“The longer you make me stand here in the corridor,” she said, flattening a hand against his chest, “the greater the risk becomes.”

Even through the cotton of her glove, he could feel the heat of her palm, and his stomach dipped as if he’d just started down in the Savoy’s electric lift. When she pushed, her hand pressing against his heart, arousal flickered dangerously within his body, and even as he tried to suppress it, he allowed himself, for some stupid reason he could not fathom, to be pushed backward into the sitting room.

“Besides,” she assured him as she followed him in, closing the door behind her, “scandal is nothing new to me, thanks to you.”

Guilt shimmered through him at that reminder, for he knew he deserved a good part of the blame for what had happened, though not all of it, by any means. Either way, a chap had his pride, and Devlin decided he’d rather be damned for all eternity than allow Kay to see any pangs of conscience on his part.

“Is that why you came?” he asked instead, shoving aside any foolish emotions of guilt or desire, reminding himself the days of both were gone for good. “About fourteen years too late for us to talk things through, isn’t it?”

“Your despicable conduct in the past is not what I want to talkabout. I’m here about the present. And no one’s going to find out I’ve been here, unless you tell them.” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “Not that such conduct from you would be much of a surprise.”

The accusation that he would pull such a dirty trick flicked Devlin on the raw. “Now, wait a damn minute—” he began, but she cut him off.

“I came here because there’s something I simply must know. Did you—” She stopped abruptly and swallowed hard, her anger suddenly, inexplicably faltering. “That is… I mean to say, if you—”

She stopped again. Lifting her hands, she hooked the fingers of one hand with the fingers of the other, took a deep breath as if bracing herself, and opened her mouth to try again. But then she tossed up her hands as if in surrender.

“I can’t,” she declared as she let her hands fall to her sides. “I simply can’t have a conversation with you when you’re in this state. Will you please put on a shirt?”

At that question, his anger faded, and amusement took its place. “No, Kay,” he answered, grinning, immensely gratified by her obvious discomfiture. “I don’t believe I will. Why should I?”

“Because it’s not decorous. It’s not…” She paused, and though she didn’t look down, her tongue darted out to lick her lips. “It’s not decent.”

“So much maidenly modesty,” he murmured. “I never knew you were such a prude.”

She didn’t reply, and he grasped the ends of the towel around his neck in a deliberate move to draw her eye, provoking her for reasons even he couldn’t quite understand. “After all, it’s not as if you’ve never seen my naked chest before. Remember?”

Just as he’d intended, her gaze slid down to his chest. As hewatched the blush in her cheeks deepen, his mind flashed back to the last—and only—time she’d seen his bare chest. That fateful night at a roadside inn just north of Birmingham was as close to Scotland as they’d managed to get before her friends, the Duke of Westbourne’s sisters, had come swooping in to rescue her from his nefarious clutches. Looking at her, he wondered if she was thinking of that night, too.

Not that it mattered, he supposed, for when she looked up at him, her expression made it clear that if she was thinking about that night, it was not with any tender regard or lingering passion or even regret about her choice to leave him there and return home.

He shouldn’t be surprised by any of that, he supposed, and yet, it stung. Because for him, the memory of what they’d felt for each other fourteen years ago was as vivid as if it had all happened last month. He kept his gaze on her face, for if he looked down, his imagination would begin stripping her down to her chemise and drawers, just as he had that fateful night on the road to Gretna Green, reminding him of how close he’d stood to paradise, and how it had slipped through his fingers.

And that, he realized, was what compelled him to goad her so mercilessly. To cover his own weak spot, a weak spot he’d had from the first moment he’d ever laid eyes on her lined up at one side of a London ballroom with all the other wallflowers, a weak spot that he’d only realized he possessed when he’d pulled her into his arms on the ballroom floor and those strange, haunting eyes had looked at him as if he were king of the earth, a weak spot that even after all that had happened and all the years that had passed was still there inside him, making him as much of a fool at thirty-four as he’d been at twenty.

“Do you, Kay?” he asked softly, breaking the silence, closing the distance between them, savoring the alarm that rose up in her eyes. “Do you remember?”

Her chin jerked, her shoulders squared, and her eyes were cold enough to freeze the fires of hell. She leaned back, away from him, but to her credit, she didn’t retreat. “I can see that you are determined to be uncivil. What a surprise.”

“You pushed in,” he reminded, straightening away from her with a shrug of nonchalance that he could only hope was convincing. “It’s hardly my fault you interrupted me while I was in the midst of getting dressed. Speaking of which—”

He paused, making an exaggerated show of glancing at the clock on the mantel. “I have plans this evening with my fiancée’s family to celebrate our engagement. And I’m already late, so I’d appreciate it if you’d come to the point and then get the hell out of my room.”

If he’d hoped his mention of Pam would get a rise out of her, he was disappointed.

“Very well. Back in January, did you or did you not know about my engagement?”

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