After retracing her steps one more time, Georgie took a different path, following the distant sound of water that may have been the fountain Miss Howard had alluded to. Confident she’d found the right direction, she picked up her pace, rounding the corner where she expected to see the water feature. Instead, she found herself crashing into a rather solid, very masculine form.
“Excuse me,” she said at the same time she heard a deep masculine voice.
“So sorry.”
Mortification cut through the sensation of fine wool and finely embroidered jacquard, wrapped around a wall of chestmuscle. Bayberry and bergamot mixed with the lingering scent of tobacco—very intoxicating and so very male.
She pushed herself away—an act much more difficult than it should have been—and looked up, preparing to excuse herself to the stranger she’d so intimately collided with.
Blue eyes greeted hers. Blue eyes she knew.
She stepped back, shock making her movements clumsy. Her limbs felt heavy and light all at once as the shock of seeing him again played havoc with her senses.
It hadn’t been a ghost she’d seen in the shadows on the gaming floor. He was larger now, his boyish features filling out into the harder angles of manhood. He wasn’t smiling. And the blue eyes she’d remembered as mischievous and warm had grown cooler and serious. But it was him, somehow. Clad in a beautiful plum coat of fine Melton wool, pulled across his impossibly broad shoulders. Breeches stretched over long taut thighs, capped in black hessians polished so thoroughly they gleamed.
This wasn’t the happy-go-lucky son of a steward in a hand-me-down coat. This was a gentleman. This was—
“Tom?”
Chapter Four
The sound ofhis name on Georgiana Hawthorne’s lips was a surprise equaled by the feeling of her hands on his chest. Even through the layers of fabric, his body felt the heat of her touch. Since he’d left England, there had been so many days, and even more nights, where he thought he would have died to experience either. He’d buried those desires under duty, fatigue, terror, and drink in no particular order, so that by the time he’d stepped off the ship that had brought him back to England, he hadn’t given Georgiana Hawthorne a passing thought.
So what was his bloody heart doing pounding like that in his chest?
He stepped back, clasping his hands behind his back as he got that untamed organ under control.
“Lady Georgiana,” he said, nodding curtly.
Tension hung between them, like storm clouds crushing in on unsteady air. He tried not to gawk at her like some randy schoolboy. The pink ribbons she’d once worn to tie back her hair as a girl were still there, now interwoven into the elegant and fashionable hairstyle he’d seen on other young ladies. Her features had matured, and even with the elegant blue muslindress and yellow pelisse that deprived him of a more generous view of her bosom, he could see the gentle curves of her figure.
“Tom,” she repeated, more brightly this time, her throat working as she recovered her composure. “This is a surprise.”
Surprise? A surprise was discovering his sire was one of the peerage. A surprise was learning that he might inherit an even greater fortune simply by marrying the right woman. But seeing a woman so concerned with propriety as Georgiana Hawthorne at a place as infamous as the Lyon’s Den, unchaperoned at that, was mythical in comparison.
“I thought you were still in Spain,” she continued. “But I am glad to see you are well.”
At this moment, the very last word he would select to describe his current state was “well.” Still, he needed to shove aside this vexatious state of mind he was finding himself in. Georgie, for her part, seemed equally shocked to see him. Color bloomed in her cheeks, the sole indicator he had that his presence unnerved her.
“I returned just these past three months,” he said, and it occurred to him that Gabriel hadn’t shared the news with her. Of course, mail was notoriously difficult to get on the Continent. The letter from the viscount had been sent in September and only managed to reach him months later. “I was called home by my sire.”
He paused, watching with not a little satisfaction, as her eyes widened.
“Your sire?” she asked, her delicate brows dipping into a deep vee. “Do you mean Mr. Blakey? He did not mention it when I spoke with him last.”
A small stab of longing poked at Tom when Georgie casually mentioned the man who’d raised Tom as his own. Tom had contacted Robert since returning home, meeting him briefly in London when Robert was in town on business. He’d asked theman to keep his parentage a secret from the Hawthorne family, which was no small ask for a man who’d served the family as faithfully as he had. Clearly, however, he’d kept his promise.
Tom shook his head. “Mr. Blakey, as you already know, took me in as a small child. Indeed, I was called home by my father, Viscount Worthington.”
Even the very best of her breeding couldn’t keep Georgie’s mouth from falling open in a perfect littleo. And it took all of Tom’s very limited breeding not to savor the look on her face as she considered his announcement.
“Viscount?” she parroted.
“Indeed,” he said. “My mother, the third daughter of a Lord Malvern, had a tryst with Lord Worthington before either of them were married. She gave up the child without his knowledge, leaving me in the care of a distant cousin—the Blakeys.”
“That is remarkable,” she said. “And how did he discover the truth?”
“She wrote to him and confessed it,” he said. “She’d become rather ill and wanted him to know the truth before she died.”
