Page 35 of One Dangerous Desire
He wasn’t sure the damned thing had truly beat before that moment. And what a blasted nuisance it had proved ever since.
In those summer-flushed months with her, he’d allowed himself to believe. In his own worth. In love. In the sort of happy future that fiction writers fashioned. The kind he’d never had the brass to imagine for himself.
May sprinkled possibility in her wake. To a girl who’d been given everything, anything was feasible. And he’d lapped up every bit of it. Relished each moment in her company, came to adore all the aspects of her nature that her mother tried to discipline away—her nervous tapping, her trilling giggle, and her tendency to gape openly at anything that caught her interest. Dreamy, enthusiastic, irrepressible passion—that was the heart of May. Not just for him, but for art and those lucky enough to be called her friends.
Caught up in thoughts of the woman he’d vowed not to think about, Rex didn’t notice the carriage had stopped until the coachman opened the door to inform him they’d drawn up outside of the Sedgwick townhouse.
Footmen stood like sentries near the front door. As he stepped past them, one moved to take his overcoat, and Rex slipped the flask of whiskey into his trouser pocket. If he had to endure another evening of sickly claret, he’d be apt to stab someone with his stiletto.
“Good evening, sir.” On the threshold of a drawing room twice the size of his own, another servant lingered, no doubt waiting to announce guests.
“Spare me a moment, Mr. Leighton?” May stood farther down the hall, peeking out of a doorway.
Entering a space alone with her led to touching, kissing. Ah, hell, who was he kidding? He’d been unable to resist touching her in a crowded roller skating rink in front of hundreds of Londoners.
When he stepped inside the dimly lit room, she didn’t close the door behind them. He swallowed down his disappointment.
“Lady Caroline insisted I invite you. She gave me a list, if you can believe it. Guests to be invited to my own party.” May still glowed when she was angry, though with more fire than sunshine.
“You capitulated without a fight?” Few would look at May—diminutive, lovely, and perfectly polite—and consider her anything but agreeable and compliant. In many ways, she was. Yet deep in her nature, perhaps tempered by that inner light, there was a vein of steel. This was the woman who’d been prepared to defy her father, her class, and everyone she knew to run off and marry a reformed-criminal orphan who, when she met him, was nothing more than a poor shop clerk.
“I cannot fight with her.” She didn’t need to say the rest. That soon she might be Lady Devenham, wed to the earl and bound to Caroline as a sister.
“Has Devenham asked you to marry him?”
“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 REPEATEDthe 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.
