Page 28 of How to Seduce a Duke this Autumn
She caught her breath. With trembling fingers, she closed it and unfolded it again, as though reading the words a second time might change them. It didn’t. Hides nothing? What did he mean by that? And the invitation? The audacity!
She traced the edges of the note. Even with his boldness, he was not wrong. About the hiding. Only he would know, wouldn’t he? The paradox of those words unsettled her. Had Adam seen her so clearly—or had he hoped she would see herself?
A warmth kindled in her chest and spread with slow, beguiling insistence. She tried to temper it with reason, ticking off his flaws in her mind. He teased too much. He smiled too often. And yet… it had been so long since she’d been something other than a title, a person altogether apart from a daughter, a niece, a name attached more to a dowry than to an independent soul.
The words bespoke of a lovely lie, a dangerous truth.
What game was he playing?
What role was she about to step into?
And did she want to lose that sense of being wholly, completely known? Her stomach flip-flopped; her heart betrayed her with its quickened pace. She pressed the note closer to her skin, a tiny smile tugging at her mouth.
Perhaps, just this once, she would play along.
What did he say? Meet him at the park? She tossed the note aside. Why did he have to send that? Did the man think to mock her? How infuriating!
Man. Duke.
Fern. Orchid.
She couldn’t trust her own senses when it came to the Cross brothers.
Charlene scowled and poked at her ghost orchid. They weren’t exactly the prettiest in comparison to others, and they tend to grow on the bark of a tree in the darkest part of the wild, but they were still rather rare. And some were even very funny-looking.
They did, however, never fail to make her smile.
They were leafless.
They hovered.
They only bloomed once a year.
She traced its stems with her fingers and thought it wouldn’t be enough all her life, would it? Well, on the more positive side, they had scales instead of leaves. And roots, of course. They also smelled of apples. And, while they hovered, they gave off the appearance of floating. It wasn’t easy to mimic their preferred environment. They were stubborn and difficult to cultivate.
But they appeared the loneliest of all of her rare ones.
Unlike Adam.
What are you thinking, Charlene? You can’t compare this beautiful, floating orchid to that man. Well, perhaps only in the fact that she wished he was still a ghost in her life. But he was determined to re-enter her life as though his brother hadn’t torn it apart. Urgh! They were friends once. But friendship… Some friendships weren’t meant to last. And as her brother so often pointed out, a woman can’t just be friends with a man. Such things did not exist. She hadn’t listened to him in the past.
Perhaps it was time to do so now.
But what was she to do about his improper invitation? She should ignore it, right? She peeked at the discarded note.
She had read the thing a hundred times already, and it made less sense each time. Meet her in Green Park. At dawn. To practice her dancing. Was he serious? Or sarcastic. He was a duke now, for stars’ sake. She should show some sense! They might have been friends once, but this man was a stranger to her.
The memory of their dance the night before flared in her mind—the way he had moved so effortlessly, so maddeningly, told her to relax.
Hah! She was relaxed. Very, very relaxed!
Charlene balled her fists so hard, her nails dug into her palms.
And he wanted to be friends again. Friends. As though one year of silence and—Charlene’s chest tightened—everything else could be easily swept away.
Well, it couldn’t.
And she was most certainly not meeting him in the park. The last time a Cross had extended an invitation to somewhere private, it had turned out disastrous. He should know better than anyone that this was the worst way to approach her.
