Page 3 of Ravishing Camille
“Dear sir,” she teased him, “I am the official welcoming party and I’m thrilled to be here.” She tugged at her gloves, ignoring her urge to push up on her toes, kiss him and demonstrate how this more mature woman did not define friendship.
But Pierce leaned down, one of his hands on her shoulder. A foot taller than she, he’d always seemed enormous to her. Enormously protective. Excessively brotherly. Impossibly indifferent. “You look like a wise old owl to me.”
She shivered in a dramatic rejection. “Wise and old. Hmmm. Yes. Next year, by society’s rules, I shall officially become a spinster. But I am not decrepit yet!”
“God help us, a spinster? Aren’t we done with that idea yet?”
“You have not been away that long, my brother. We’re not even done with royal debuts and dowries, either.”
“A disaster,” he mourned.
“Tell me!”
“I hope you never lose your insights into society’s foibles.”
“Never. It’s fodder for my novels.” She wrote romances that scared and seared and delighted her female readership. “My readers exclaim over my heroines. How hard they must fight to keep their integrity.”And their lovers.
“And your heroes?”
“Ah!” She lifted a finger in the air. “How devilish, how reclusive. How secretive.”
He threw back his head to chuckle over that. “Dear God. Do you paint them all like that?”
She grinned at him.You are my every brooding hero.“Each and every one.”
“Oh Camille!” He hugged her to his side again and her body burned wherever his touched. “I was right to come home. I needed to laugh with you. With all of you,” Pierce added as Killian made his way toward them, his work ordering luggage done.
So there it was. Pierce’s assessment of her. The inherent insult sparked her disappointment.
After all, she was worth more to anyone than simply someone to laugh with. Much more.
Chapter 2
“Shall we go to the carriage?” Killian asked them.
“Let’s.” Pierce offered Camille his arm. She took it and hooked her other arm through Killian’s. The three of them wove through the throng along the cobbled street.
The bustle of the port filled his senses with the old comforts of the land he’d called home for most of the past decade. English shouted among the dock workers and murmured among the passengers brought a smile to his lips. Squared architecture, white Palladian Greco-Roman forms and red brick muscular Victorian dripping with too much decor had him nodding. The aromas of pasties full of potato and meat from the shops wafted, heavy on the briny sea breeze. The paved roads of Macadam and sturdy well-fed horses painted a picture of structure and order lacking in the treaty ports where chaos reigned among the coolies. Grooms and footmen in livery added to the illusion of order and precision. The lack of flimsy rickshaws led by emaciated barefoot runners spoke of the vast differences that still prevailed between the imperial western powers and the rigid and backward empire of China.
This homecoming was what he’d craved for many months. After receiving a letter from his step-mother late last spring, his desire to return to England and his family had grown each day.
He squeezed Camille’s hand with the joy of being home.
Purposely, this time, he’d journeyed home more quickly than he usually did. Possessed of a need to bask in the affection of his family, he’d avoided his usual stops in ports around the world to meet with others for business. In Bombay, he’d disembarked only for one night while theEmpressrestocked her supplies and took on new cargo. He’d cabled ahead to an old school chum who lived in Jaffa in Palestine to meet him in port one evening for dinner in the souk there.
But his journey—a month and a half long as it was—had not prepared him, no matter his admonitions to himself, for first sight of his father and Miss Camille Bereston. His father, still a brawny Irish fellow, looked chipper as ever. But with more silver in his hair, more lines fanning from the the corners of his eyes, the man who had built an empire, a fortune and a family of nothing more than ambition, energy and devotion was growing older. At fifty-seven, shipping and industry mogul Killian Hanniford appeared to be more pensive, but still a hearty creature. Pierce made a note that at some point he would have a word with his father about his health and be very careful not to poke the man’s hard scrabble pride.
As for Camille, she was as ever incomparable and he fought to keep his gaze off her. He’d learned about fabric, silks especially, because he exported them all over the world. By his own Chinese silk weavers, he’d been taught color, drape, weight, warp and weft. Camille might not know all of that, but she knew what looked good on her.
He appreciated her understanding of it, too—and he smiled. In a day gown of jade cotton twill trimmed in deep golden ribbon at her bodice, she seemed to glow like a pearl. Her little spencer jacket hugged her long arms and framed the square décolleté of her gown to illustrate how her perfect breasts perched above a wasp-like waist. He’d watched her grow up, loving her choices of color and fabric, watching her turn men’s heads, inspiring envy in women’s, eschewing a coming-out, spending her days scribbling and then selling her first novel at age eighteen.
He’d known her for a decade. he had only one idea why her looks should make his heart skip a beat. She had changed. Of course, she had! And quite a bit since last he’d laid eyes on her two years ago. At twenty-two, she’d still had a few features of girlhood about her. Chubby cheeks. Small breasts. An inability to tame her thick locks of honey red hair.
The red in her hair that had been so blinding when she was fifteen that her mother declared she looked more like a poppy than a camellia, had since burned down to old gold. Her eyes, a fathomless brown color that varied with the light, searched and smoldered and seared beneath long earthy brown and gold lashes. Her looks had once amused him. Today…today they arrested him and suddenly, he was possessed of this yearning to put his mouth to her eyelids. To feel them flutter beneath his lips. To taste the lush cream of her cheek and put his hands over her large ripe…
He shot to attention.Absurd, Hanniford.
“How was crossing the Channel?” Killian asked. “Lloyd’s published reports of a storm last night.”
