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He was right, of course. Noblemen made cold matches for much less. For the bloodlines, the connections, or simply the money.
“I do not believe I want to live a double life,” she started.
“No, do not answer me yet,” he insisted. “Take your time to consider this. It would be the perfect solution.”
“Solve one problem by creating another?”
“Solve both our problems,” he amended. “Promise me you will at least give it some consideration.”
With that reluctance born of the certainty she already had the answer, she nodded. The blonde man smiled and kissed her hand.
A
Brandy. Edmund needed a glassful of it. Or a whole bottle, perhaps, he thought as he left the dance floor after the most hellishly provocative waltz of his life. Had he known it would not be a choreographed set of steps but downright lovemaking, he would never, ever, have danced with her.
Wrong. He would not have missed it for the entire riches in the world.
The signs this evening would be nothing less than prophesy started the moment the woman appeared on the top of his townhouse stairs. Clad like a goddess, she wore a dress that did not favour virtuous thoughts at all. He had cursed himself for employing the best modiste in town, only to applaud her skill for the feast it blasted on his senses. Creamy shoulders uncovered and full breasts wrapped like a present to be opened and savoured. Diaphanous skirts billowing around her shapely legs, the same which flew around his ankles during the waltz. A dress made for tearing apart in the urgency of their desire.
In fact, his affliction started the previous evening when he opened the door to the drawing room to find her sitting serenely with her embroidery and the kitten. The view was so domestic, so daily-life-like that, for the first time since he took residence in Thornton House, he felt…at home. A cosy, soft, welcoming home. The impression stormed in him the second he saw her; head bent to the needle, a content expression when she looked at the little stray devil.
Remind me why I brought her to town again? He questioned himself inwardly, with no clear answer, however.
But the room smelled of orange blossoms, making any answer to any question impossible to obtain together with every other logical operation. The simple, daily dress did not help with the task. Even though it was demure, it bared his own want all too undeniably.
And then her gaze seemed to devour him from head to hessians while her hand caressed the kitten with slow agonising motions. If Merlin himself had puffed in the place and transformed him into a black kitten, he would have lived in happy oblivion his entire life. As it was, his mind envisioned her fingers doing it to him. To the whole of him.
She had continued stroking the lucky devil. The agony became medieval dungeon torture with the predictable reaction of his flesh.
He must put distance between them before he burst. For
that reason, he had propped on the escritoire, the furthest he could go from her.
There had been no avoiding the bursting of his temper though, which resulted in that crazy conversation and him storming out like a bull that had seen a red cloth. It had to be that or ravish the woman in the most erotic way he could think of preferably involving a certain escritoire.
Damnation!
After their waltz, she vanished, he realised now. He stood in the middle of the crowd, looking around in search of the peach silk catastrophe.
“Hey, Thornton.” The Duke of Brunswick placed a hand on his shoulder.
Very tall, with a unique presence, Titus Haughton had become one of his best friends in Oxford.
Absently, Edmund turned to him. “Brunswick,” he greeted.
“Your charge is beautiful tonight,” the other man commented.
His friend’s opinion pierced through Edmund like a short poke to a dormant lion. A mercurial charge of possessiveness locked his muscles, and he had this urge to shut the man’s mouth physically. For no apparent reason.
“She is not my charge,” he replied, tamping down his uncivilised impulses.
Everyone knew she would never be so due to her circumstances. Her status in society proved so insignificant no one cared she did not even have a chaperone. Her on-the-shelf age seemed to dispense with one, in any case.
“But you are sponsoring her. Kind of you, I reckon.”
“I agree,” Harris Darroch said, nearing both men. The Scottish shipping magnate, a tall, broad man with dark wavy hair must have good connections to receive an invitation to the Linton Ball.
Edmund nodded, renewing his survey of the room, and wondering if kindness had any role where the siren was concerned. “It is the least I can do,” he dismissed, thinking of his esteemed cousin.
