The lazy smile, the rumpled coat, the ripped breeches. That deliciously dawdling length of silk trailing down his chest, leading her attention into murky waters. No man in the village looked like this. She’d have remembered. Perhaps used the attractive vision to her benefit on a lonely night. Satisfaction came by her own hand.
It was certain her husband had never brought her pleasure.
If the stranger on Seamus’ cart felt the weight of her gaze, he ignored it, ignored her, speaking to the groom with a half-grin splitting his cheeks, long legs still swinging. Confidence in repose. Leaning back, he muscled a flask from the inside pocket of his coat and lifted it to his lips. Alexandra watched in captivated horror as his throat pulled as he swallowed, his cheeks hollowing.
A burst of internal sunlight hit her, making her skin glow, the sensation claiming her body irrefutable. She recognized lust, even if she’d had little exposure.
As if he felt it, too, his gaze touched her, his lips tightening for an instant before a shadowy smile settled back into place, and he turned away.
Alexandra scowled and wrapped the rag around her fist. Even as she’d prayed for invisibility for much of her life, she wasn’t used to being overlooked. Her keen attractiveness, bequeathed from her mother, was a curse that had rendered her first Season her only. She’d had offers, more than any sensible young woman could refuse without guidance—and she’d not been sensible or had guidance. Rather, she’d been desperate to escape the chaos. Roses filling the foyer, calling cards spilling from silver salvers. Moonlit near-kisses, groping hands and drunken leers.
One gentleman—Baron Neeley?—had stood beneath her bedchamber window and sung ballads until her servants hustled him down the mews. The gossip rags had detailed the exploit the following morning as London’s breath caught in wait for the next scandal. Feverish and troubled, she’d accepted Amberly’s offer on the first asking. Because he’d seemed to understand. He’d seemed to want more than a beautiful trinket dangling from his pocket like a fob. He’d seemed to want her. Promised to give her the family she’d never had.
When he’d merely wished to possess her dowry. She’d no idea the enormous gambling debts he’d incurred the year before their marriage.
Seamus gave the filly another gentle stroke, preparing to lead him across the courtyard to his owner. “You don’t recognize him, then?”
Oh. “Should I?”
Seamus ticked his chin toward the cart. “He’s one of the DeWitt trio. Twins and another so close in age you’d think he come spilling out with the other two. Lads always brawling on the front lawn, ruining gardens and breaking windows. You must recollect. Now breaking hearts, if you believe the chatter. Grown men’s antics. I had to get after them more times than I care to recall. But boys will be boys, won’t they? I should know as I have two of me own roughhousers.”
The rag slipped from Alexandra’s fingers to the dirt. “The Duke of Herschel.”
Separated by more years than could sustain a friendship, especially between the sexes, the neighboring DeWitt boys had been a thorn in her side. Teasing pranks. Games she’d not wanted to play but been forced into. Their bows and arrows scattered across the lawn. Lads growing into men, never to be seen again when they were feasibly becoming interesting. She entered her first season while they headed to Eton or Harrow or Rugby. She’d been living alone by then with a string of inattentive governesses and jaded companions, pondering an uncertain future. She’d not thought of the DeWitts in ages.
Seamus started his trek across the yard, the glance he tossed over his shoulder highly amused. “No, lass, the other one. The second son. The true rabblerouser.”
Alexandra’s breath seized. Cortland. The specimen of masculine perfection lounging across the way was the mature version of her childhood tormentor? She searched her memory. Chestnut curls and a gaze as green as Christmas holly. Gangly, his arms too long for his body, his smile gap-toothed and teeming with mischief. He’d been behind her every time she turned around an eternity ago. Underfoot, an annoyance, a nuisance. The younger twin by mere minutes she recalled, either safeguarding him from the burden of a title or snatching it from his grasp.
She would love to know which he believed it was.
He’d tried to kiss her once, a charmingly awkward production in the kitchen garden. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen to her near nineteen.
As she stared, the world narrowed until she viewed it through a scope. The stunning creature shoving off the donkey cart to claim his horse, hooking his boot in the stirrup and pulling his broad body astride it was little Cort DeWitt? Why, the top of his head had barely reached Alexandra’s chin during that kiss, the difference in height part of the reason for its inelegance.
Although she avoided the scandals sheets unless forced to read them, she’d nonetheless heard about his antics. The Troublesome Trio, the ton called the DeWitt brothers. A moniker almost as silly as the Wintry Widow.
Sighing, Alexandra blinked the mist of the past from her eyes.
The allegations about his outrageous liaisons now made sense. Life was easy for brothers of dukes who looked like gods.
Bewildered, she crouched to retrieve the rag, the sound of hoofbeats meaning she wouldn’t have to spend another second trying to unravel the incredible mystery of passing time.
Cort was out of sorts.
Off-kilter. Riding a fine edge of irritability.
He knew it and so did the cluster of dimwits in the Hanover Square ballroom.
They stayed away, eyeing him with wary vigilance from his position tucked in a dark corner. In the shadows, not where he usually kept himself. Just beyond, dancers circled the floor in time to the muffled strains from the orchestra on the balcony above, diaphanous silk and satin coloring a kingdom of gray. Chalk dust scattered on slick marble to keep people from slipping to their bums stung his nose and made him wish for an unpolluted breath.
Rolling his shoulders inside his superfine coat, he sighed, realizing how detached he was from this world. The enticements—music, drink, women—held no value at present. Not when he’d left part of his mind in a Hampstead stable courtyard, with a woman he’d not anticipated seeing again in this lifetime.
And if he’d halfheartedly imagined seeing her, he’d hoped his reaction would be different.
As it was, his heart had taken the predictable leap from his chest and landed somewhere in the vicinity of her muddy boots. Like they stood in that garden with him bouncing on his toes to reach her lips.
Beautiful Alexandra Mountbatten, the feisty chit who’d loved rejecting him.
