Page 12 of A Bride By Morning
She took up so little space, yet he was aware of her with every part of his body. He knew he’d find her in the corner of the ballroom with Lady Derby. And there she was, observing the dancing couples with an emotion that he did not comprehend. Though she had kindled his long-dormant feelings, they came to him like a language he’d forgotten: entirely familiar and yet indecipherable all the same. It concerned Gabriel that she could leave him so unfocused when he ought to have been concentrating on Medvedev.
And yet . . . he could not bring himself to think of his nemesis.
Gabriel studied every aspect of Lydia, from the soft curls in her hair to her skin’s glow in the candlelight. Who was this woman now? How had she transformed into that warrior goddess in Coningsby’s study? His childhood friend had been the very description of delicate and kind. What had happened to her in the years since? Gabriel had been so determined to avoid Lydia that he hadn’t bothered to consider that she, too, might be fundamentally altered.
She was a cryptograph that he couldn’t crack. It vexed Gabriel that she should be so impossible for him to comprehend. He was used to decoding things: messages, people, movements. Understanding motivations. Why not hers? Why couldn’t he decrypt her as easily as a hidden missive, one he ought to be familiar with?
“Lord Montgomery.”
The matron and debutante who approached him smiled, and every part of Gabriel congealed to ice even as he returned their greeting with a friendly nod. The matron relaxed. He had, after all, perfected this role down to its every insignificant detail. Gabriel understood that people were all too willing to trust a handsome gentleman who did and said all the right things.
They’d never know that he was a wolf who smiled just to show his teeth.
“Lady Archer, is it?” he said, gently taking the older lady’s hand to squeeze her fingers. He repeated the motion with her daughter. “And Lady Cressida. A pleasure.”
His grin stretched over the bones of his face—he visualized it as a grotesque sneer that did little to hide the wolf that had taken up residence within his bones. But the effect, he knew, was entirely his imagination; mother and daughter blushed at his attentions. Lady Cressida meekly lowered her lashes in the way of a practiced debutante.
Gabriel thought once more of Lydia and the steel of her eyes. She would lower them for no one. Their gazes would meet like two swords colliding.
“I hope you’ll pardon my impertinence at approaching without a formal introduction,” Lady Archer said. “I’ve been away at my residence near Alnwick until Cressida was ready to enter society, but I was a good friend of your mother’s. God rest her soul.”
Gabriel’s cordial expression remained in place. Though he didn’t know his mother—she’d died in childbirth—he’d heard only kind things about her.
“I’m always pleased to meet someone who knew and loved my mother,” he replied smoothly. Like most sentiments he expressed in society, this was a lie. Any compliments about his mother, father, and brother only served to remind him that he was an outlier in his family. They would all be revolted by the man he’d become.
Lady Archer spoke again, but a movement in Gabriel’s periphery drew his attention. The matron before him took no notice of the imperceptible shift in his features, the way his body moved ever so slightly toward Lydia as if he were a weather vane pivoting with a new direction of the wind.
Lydia excused herself from her aunt and hastened across the ballroom. The back of her pale pink dress swayed in a frothy concoction of lace and silk as she hurried toward the terrace with the quickness of prey darting through the forest.
I’m a hunter, sweetheart,he thought to himself.Wherever you go, I’ll find you.
He thought he felt her eyes rest on him the moment before she slipped through the open terrace doors and out of the ballroom.
“—isn’t that lovely?” Lady Archer was asking.
Blinking, Gabriel returned to his discussion with the matron, who was clearly counting on a polite convention that dictated he ask her daughter to dance. He had, after all, not claimed any dances yet that evening.His habitual three had become a familiar pattern to the mothers in that ballroom.
Lady Archer was about to be sorely disappointed.
Gabriel spoke for a few minutes and then murmured, “I beg your forgiveness, but I’m afraid I must depart for the evening. Good night, Lady Archer. Lady Cressida.”
He ignored their mutual expressions of disappointment and departed their company with a short bow. He had a quarry to pursue.
The night was brisk as he stepped onto the terrace. A few other couples conversed near the open doors, taking advantage of the darkness and the relative isolation to stand closer than convention commonly allowed.
But Lydia was nowhere to be found.
Gabriel descended the terrace steps into the garden, traversing the pathways as he considered the girl he’d once known: her apprehension over social interactions, nerves that often rendered her inarticulate. Lydia would seek a private recess of the gardens for solitude. Use it to gather herself.
After a few minutes of quietly searching, he found her at the bottom of the garden. Gabriel paused as he took in the sight of Lydia seated on a bench near the fountain, a discarded shawl and gloves nearby. God, but she was fucking beautiful. The glow of the full moon and garden torches lovingly caressed the delicate bones of her face, bathing her in pale light as she dropped a bare fingertip into the fountain water. Lydia traced circles across the surface as if she were stroking a lover’s bare skin.
He watched that motion with a fevered sort of focus, noting the fragile bones of her hand, the graceful arch of her wrist. The soft splash of water somehow penetrated the din in his mind that hungered to feel something. And she accomplished in one small movement what he’d destructively sought for years.
You will break her,his mind reminded him.
Gabriel jolted at the reminder and let his mind recompose its icy walls. Then he stepped out of the shadows. “Miss Cecil.”
Lydia jerked her hand out of the water with a startled gasp. “Oh,” she said, with an almost displeased look. “You.”
