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he would have him again.
It was there in the secret tilt of her lips and the wicked quirk of one eyebrow. It was there in the curve of her fingers around his arm. Not tight and grasping, but easy and light. She laughed up at him, and Jude smiled.
That smile. That crooked half smile he saved for Marissa. He gave that stranger the smile that never ceased to make Marissa's heart skip a beat, and when the woman turned her head to the side, his eyes slid down her throat.
Everything inside Marissa's body went cold, even as her skin inched toward a burn.
Aidan said something, but she couldn't make out his words. "Pardon?''
"I asked if you wanted something else to drink."
"No, it's fine." To distract him, she sipped her drink as she watched Jude and his partner disappear into the crowd. She was left with watching the other dancers, just as she'd spent countless hours watching before. But tonight, the dancers seemed ... shifted. Different in a subtle way. A year ago, she would only have seen the handsome gentlemen who showed a fine leg as they bowed through the moves of the country dances. Or the occasional lady whose dress Marissa coveted. She'd see the charming smiles and elegant hands. She'd mark the most beautiful couples and count them the luckiest.
But tonight, she saw the underpinnings of it all, like the sketch marks left under a watercolor painting, not meant to be seen, but caught with a close look.
There, to the right, a handsome young man danced with perfect grace, but he looked over the head of his beaming partner, not interested in her round, Hushed face. A common enough scene, but made more tragic by the fact that they were newly married in a match necessitated by debts. The bride was happy. The groom made no bones about his dissatisfaction. He wanted everyone to know.
To the right, an elegant couple danced in matching misery. Their marriage had been heralded as the perfect match four years before, but he was now rumored to be frustrated with the lack of children. Apparently their beauty could not alleviate that disappointment. They were lovely, but they were not happy.
Farther away, toward the middle of the crowd, a man and woman who were both unfortunately short and boxy were engaged in a less elegant waltz, but their smiles radiated delight as he whispered things into her ear that made her blush and giggle. They'd been married nearly twenty years, Marissa knew, because their oldest daughter had just come out.
Ridiculous observations, easily visible even to a child, she suspected, but Marissa saw these truths for the very first time. Elegance did not make for a good husband any more than it made for a good bed partner. As a matter of fact, it was so inconsequential as to be meaningless in the face of a few years together.
Then again, couldn't she end up miserable with Jude as easily as she could with some handsome young buck?
Jude came into view again, and her heart pitched sharply down. He was an adequate dancer, not as fluid as some of the other gentleman, vet Marissa wanted to be in his arms. No one else's. She wanted to ogle his legs, knowing she would see them stripped of wool cloth later in the evening. She wanted to pet his chest again, and kiss it, and this time she would lick him, as well, to see if that made him purr like a pleased beast.
That woman, that stranger, she probably already knew the answer to that. Instead of fury, Marissa felt despair, because she suspected this realization had come too late.
Jude looked up, face happy over something the woman had said, but when he met Marissa's eyes, his smile fell away in a slow wash, as if the sight of her was pulling it down.
And in that sad moment, Marissa realized that she loved him.
Chapter 20
The nearby trees created a constant storm of dried and dying leaves rustling and scraping in the wind. Jude could hear no footsteps or breathing, but there was no missing the jet-black figure that slipped up to the artistically piled rocks of the Greek folly.
Jude was surprised by the surge of fury he felt at the sight. He wanted this done and behind him, and it was only the smallness of the figure that kept him from knocking it to the ground with a brutal blow. Instead of throwing his fist at the shadow, he slipped a hand over its mouth and snatched the specter off its feet. A quick squeal snuck past his hand before he cut it off, but Jude wasn't surprised by the high pitch, nor by the softness of the body as it pressed into his. He'd known it was a woman right away, despite the dark cloak and deep night, and he felt a stark relief that it wasn't Harry.
The sack of money fell and bounced off Jude's foot as the woman struggled in his hold. She was a tiny thing, though, and he had no trouble pinning
her arms clown and reaching for the bag. She twisted harder its he pulled her into the trees. "Quiet. You're caught, and there's nothing to be done for it."
She cried out behind his hand and bucked against him.
"Come, woman. You'll only hurt yourself."
After a few more minutes of straining and wriggling, she finally gave in and slumped against him. Jude stopped to give his heart a moment to recover. He'd only settled into his witch five minutes before, and the shock of seeing a dark figure sneak toward the rocks had sent his pulse racing. The surprise of realizing it was a woman still confounded him. Was it possible Patience had lied?
The cloak had bunched up on her head, so he couldn't even glimpse the color of her hair in the faint light of the half-moon. It could be Patience. She was a slender woman.
Christ, what a mess this was.
Jude slowly cased his hand down, and the forest filled with echoing pants as the woman pulled in breath after panicked breath. She was sobbing by the time he reached into his pocket for a rope to tie her hands. He lugged her arms behind her back and began to wind the rope around.
"Please, sir!" she whimpered.
Not Patience, thank God.
