Page 19 of How to Seduce a Duke this Autumn
Her eyes briefly rested on his hair. Dark.
A breath of relief escaped her, but just momentarily, because she hadn’t been wrong. She had recognized him. He was a Cross. Just not the Cross she thought.
He stood apart from any other man, not in defiance of the crowd but as though the space around him bent to accommodate him. His hair gleamed under the flickering light, each step drawing reflections from the polished marble beneath his boots. The line of his broad shoulders shifted with a kind of quiet intensity that struck her like a chord struck true.
Charlene blinked, unsure why her breath had hitched.
Adam Cross.
Here, in the flesh.
The new duke, not the boy she’d called her friend as a child—Adam.
The one who’d come to interfere when his brother had… well… and yet, Charlene didn’t quite manage to give either of them credit—not even when it was due.
It wasn’t that he was like the other gentlemen. He didn’t have their polished air, their effortful refinement. Rather, he carried himself with a rhythm and force that felt utterly untamed.
Especially when he was near his twin brother.
His movements weren’t like the dancers’, who flicked their arms and arranged their feet in deliberate, practiced poses. No, his body moved as if the steps answered to him instead of the other way around. His strides, even off the dance floor, were deliberate but fluid, each one falling with a precision that seemed to echo some unheard drumbeat. He didn’t need music to guide him—he was the beat, the pulse of energy threading its way through the crowd.
Maddie’s head suddenly pressed close. “At whom are you gazing so intently? Has some gentleman managed to capture your attention after all?”
Yes.
“I wish to know the same thing,” Ashley piped up.
Something stirred inside Charlene, unfamiliar and unwelcome. Her pulse throbbed faintly in her ears as her fingers curled at her sides, her nails brushing the fabric of her skirts. He turned then, not sharply but with a natural grace that made the layers of his dark coat ripple faintly.
“Rotheworth,” was all she said.
Her friends gasped. “The Rotheworth?” Maddie asked.
“Well, we always knew he might be here,” Ashley said. “He’s staring this way and patting something in his coat.”
“His heart?” Maddie asked.
“His pocket.” Ashley tilted her head in an effort to see better.
For a moment, the crowd surged around him, blocking Charlene’s view. But she didn’t look away—not even when the heat of watching him made her cheeks prickle beneath her mask. When he reappeared, the light caught the edge of his jaw beneath his mask, the curve of his neck above his cravat. There was nothing exaggerated in him, no artifice. And still, he stood out in a room full of opulence and feathers and gold. Her heart gave a small, unsteady kick as he moved again, cutting through the throng with simple, quiet purpose.
He made the rest of the masquerade feel like hollow decoration, as though, without him, the chandeliers might as well have burned out and the music fallen silent. She swallowed hard, ignoring the flutter low in her stomach. No matter who he was, whatever spell his presence had cast over her, she couldn’t quite convince herself to look away.
Her brother and friends told her but still, some part of her hadn’t truly believed it.
He really was back.
And it seemed this time, for good.
“Are you all right?” Maddie asked. “We can leave if you want.”
“No, I’m fine,” Charlene said. “It’s not like he will recognize me or we’ll cross paths.”
If he was aware of her scrutiny, he didn’t show it. Yet Charlene couldn’t shake the growing sense that the pulse driving his steps was the same one now thrumming faintly in her chest. Some untamed rhythm—irresistible, unrelenting—that she had been swept into without even realizing.
“Your brother won’t be happy,” Ashley said.
Charlene grimaced. While she’d narrowly escaped that fate worse than death, she couldn’t hide her swollen eyes or her torn clothing from her brother. He still didn’t know what had happened, but he did know David and Adam Cross had been involved. “He will be fine, just like me.”
