Page 30 of Nothing Compares to the Duke
“Not quite yet. Good to see you, Lewes.”
The old man gave one curt nod, and Rhys stepped past him and headed for the stairs. The path to herchamber felt as familiar as if he’d tread the path yesterday, yet when he reached her door, he didn’t knock.
What the hell was happening to him? He wasn’t a man who ever hesitated. Half the problems in his life could be ascribed to his very bad habit of giving in to reckless impulses.
Whatever lingering connection he had with Bella felt fragile. He refused to let himself sift what seeing her again had sparked in him.
Rather than knock and step inside as he would have done years before, he rapped gently and waited.
Bella opened the door on a frustrated huff, as if he’d interrupted. Her cheeks were flushed, her brow crinkled in a frown, and she held her coiffure in place with one hand. Whether he’d interrupted or not, her green-gold eyes widened at the sight of him.
“You don’t look happy to see me.”
“I thought you were the maid. Why are you up here?” She gripped the edge of his waistcoat, glanced both ways down the hall, and pulled him into her room. “You really are determined to start a scandal.”
“Old habit,” he told her as she let go of him and closed the door. “I always came upstairs to find you rather than waiting for you to come down.”
She gave him a harried glance over her shoulder as she worked at winding her loose hair into artful pinned curls.
“I thought it best to decide on our plan of attack.”
“The only plan is for you to be downstairs makinga grand entrance and all of our gentlemen guests nervous,” she told him as she approached her vanity to rifle through a crystal dish.
Rhys swallowed hard and curled his hand into a fist.
Three buttons at the back of her gown were unfastened, exposing her lovely freckled skin. Long auburn waves of hair had fallen from her half-pinned coiffure, and he longed to reach out and sweep them aside. To see more of her.
Good God, what was wrong with him?
He’d seen Bella disheveled before. Covered in pond muck, rain soaked, even splashed with paint from the one occasion when they’d decided to try their hand at watercolors.
This was different.
He’d seen her as a friend then. A child. Now he saw only a woman. An inconveniently desirable woman. And he had taken the liberty of coming to her room, to her bedchamber. Uninvited.
He wasn’t unused to entering ladies’ bedchambers, but he only ever did so with an explicit invitation.
Casting his gaze away from her, he noticed a series of documents strung along the wall. They weren’t art. He recognized Bella’s handwriting and what appeared to be sketches of some of her puzzle games.
“What’s all that?” He gestured toward the wall and started to move closer.
“A project I’m working on. Nothing I have time to talk about.”
“Perhaps you’ll tell me some other time.” There wasa period in their lives when he knew everything she was up to, all her secrets and plans. He missed being privy to Arabella Prescott’s projects.
Turning to him with an irritated look, Bella seemed to be suffering with none of the sentiments he felt.
“Does this look all right?” She’d put a bejeweled comb in her hair but it was crooked and only half in place. “It doesn’t, does it? Would you ring the bell again?”
Rhys approached the mantel and gave a tug on the bellpull. Her frustration was palpable, and his impulse was to help, but all he knew about ladies’ coiffures was how to take them down.
“I should be in the drawing room by now.” She stuck two hairpins between her lips and a third into her hair so violently, she dislodged a few other curls. When another strand of hair became dislodged, she let out a little yelp of distress. “I’m making it worse.”
“Sit down.”
She snapped her gaze to his, eyes glittering with annoyance at his commanding tone. Then she seemed to realize what he intended and her expression softened.
Rhys felt something in him ease too. He approached her where she sat on her vanity bench. She straightened her shoulders and held out a palm full of hairpins.
