Page 10 of One Dangerous Desire
Emily touched her arm, urging May to accept his offered hand. She obeyed and moved toward him, sliding her fingers against his until their palms met. Warm. How could a memory be so warm? But he wasn’t a memory. He was real. Alive. He was in London, had been for goodness knew how long, and she was meeting him in her dearest friend’s sitting room. By complete and utter chance.
“A pleasure to meet you, Miss Sedgwick.”
Same deep-toned voice. Same ability to raise shivers across her skin. Even when there was something silvery and practiced in his timbre, even while he still wore that placid mask.
“How do you . . . ” The rest wouldn’t come. May knew the words she was expected to say. Felt the gazes of Emily and her father. Sensed their discomfort at her odd behavior.
His hand tightened around hers, and the glass between them shattered. He blinked, a quick fan of sable lashes, and then those unique eyes of his saw her. Not as a stranger to whom he was being introduced, but as the woman he’d held and kissed. The woman to whom he’d broken every promise he’d ever made. She detected his recognition in the tremor of his lush lower lip, felt it through the heat of his skin, read it in his blue-gold gaze that flitted from her mouth to her eyes and over each aspect of her face.
“May.” He breathed the word quietly, intimately, just for her to hear, as if a duke and his daughter weren’t standing nearby.
Grief, too long repressed, welled up like floodwaters, fierce and fast and just as unstoppable.
May wrenched her hand from his with a burning friction of skin against skin. When she spun around, Emily’s face whirled past, a blur of confusion and concern. Moving, walking away from him, felt good. Like victory. Like strength. Like she would finally get to choose the conclusion to their tale. She needed it to end and had never gotten the satisfaction of a proper parting. She would explain her rudeness to Emily later, but for now, she needed to find the mettle to keep going. To leave him as he’d left her.
Chapter Four
“WAIT!” REX SHOUTEDthe word and forced himself not to follow her. He would not chase May Sedgwick down the street like a lovelorn fool. He started breathing again when she stopped, but May didn’t turn back. She halted on the pavement as if she’d hit a wall.
Glancing over his shoulder, he waved off Lady Emily, who stood watching from Ashworth’s front step. The lady dipped her head and retreated inside, apparently content with his brief explanation that he and May had known each other in their youth.
A few steps ahead, May stood stiff and still, her fists clenched at her sides. She hadn’t even bothered to retrieve her cloak and gloves when she’d fled Ashworth House, and he shrugged out of his overcoat as he approached her from behind. He moved as he would toward a skittish creature, afraid she might bolt at any moment.
Before he could settle his coat on her shoulders, she twisted around and glared at him.
Letting her go would have been the wiser choice. Her accusing gaze bore into him and there was nowhere to hide, no time to feign disinterest and smooth his expression into one of indifference as he had in Ashworth’s sitting room.
Whatever he was, whatever the yearnings of his twisted heart, he suspected she could read every shade of it in the way he looked at her.
Her mouth had gone round in shock when she’d first seen him, and he’d hated himself for wishing for something more. Some flicker of pleasure. Some glint in her eye to tell him she remembered the parts of their past that haunted him. When her mouth trembled, he’d waited for tears. Now it was clear she would give him nothing but wrath. And he couldn’t even claim he didn’t deserve it.
“I thought perhaps you were dead,” she said, her voice breaking on the final word.
He’d thought so too for a while. Maybe some piece of him had died when they parted. Certainly he’d shed that naive and hopeful fool Reginald Cross long ago. There’d never been another choice. Being fearless, willing to do anything to survive had meant the difference between wallowing in misery and stepping forward into a chance at success.
“You almost sound as if that would have pleased you.” He lifted his coat to arrange it around her shoulders, careful not to step too close or touch her. Electricity never sparked more brightly than May’s eyes as she stared at him, warily watching his every movement.
When he reached up to tug the coat snug at her neck, she shoved his hands away and pulled the lapels together herself.
“Truth pleases me most of all, Mr. Leighton, or Cross, or whatever it is you call yourself now. Do you even know how to tell the truth?” Her breath puffed out as she spoke, and the cool air rouged her cheeks and mouth into tempting daubs of color in her otherwise pale face.
“I never lied to you.” He couldn’t meet her eyes, couldn’t let the loathing in her sapphire gaze seep in beyond his well-constructed walls.
“You said I should wait for you. I went to Central Park, just as you requested, and you never came.” She swallowed convulsively, as if she was choking on the words. “You promised we’d never be parted. The least you did was lie to me.”
“I’m sorry.” The words came out too quietly. Memories connected to them were raw as a fresh wound. With Sedgwick’s threats fueling him, hehadgone to the park, determined to be with May, whatever the cost. But certainty faltered as she’d approached up Fifth Avenue. Ten dollars tucked into his pocket was all he’d managed to save after months of legitimate work. What could he offer one of New York’s wealthiest heiresses?
Retreating without her seeing him, he’d battled the urge to turn back with every step. He hadn’t kept his promise, but leaving her alone in the park had torn something inside him that still ached.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated more loudly.
She made a little sound. Distress or disgust, he couldn’t be sure which, and he reached for her. He owed her comfort, at least. Once, he’d wished to give her so much more.
“Don’t touch me. You never get to touch me again.” She dipped her shoulder and moved away from him, then turned and began striding along the pavement.
“Leighton was my mother’s surname.” He shouted it in the middle of the Ashworth’s fashionable London street, when he hadn’t ever acknowledged the truth of it to anyone but Sullivan.
She stopped walking but didn’t look at him.
