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Eventually she drew away. Slowly, reluctantly, but definitively.
“No . . .” He gave no thought to pride.
“I must go,” she said in a broken voice. Instead of turning away, she raised her hand to his face and she searched his features with a searing, intense look that made his heart contract with agonized yearning.
“Then go,” he said hoarsely, sliding his hands from her body.
This was unbearable. Laughable to think he’d imagined kissing her might gain him some advantage. He felt like a dog kicked in the ribs by its master.
“Good-bye, Nicholas,” she whispered, and started to turn away.
“No, not yet.” He grabbed her arm.
By God, he wasn’t letting her go like this. No man with blood in his veins would. He’d haul her back to his house and lock her away until she admitted she wanted him as much as he wanted her.
The dazed passion in her expression faded and he caught a flash of fear in her eyes. “It’s getting late.”
“Kiss me again,” he said, although he knew she was set on going. He’d never met a woman with such will. He cursed it to Hades even as he reluctantly admired it.
“You know when you kiss me, I can’t think. I have to . . .”
“Antonia?”
The man’s voice emerged from another world, so bound up was Ranelaw in this battle.
“What the devil?” He wrenched around to face the familiar figure.
Under his hand, Antonia stood as if turned to marble.
Ranelaw had kept her too long. Or he shouldn’t have let her leave his house. She’d been safe there. Here he could do nothing to protect her. The urge to grab his lover and flee across the dew-laden grass was overwhelming.
The interloper didn’t glance at Ranelaw. Instead he stared at Antonia as if she were a ghost. The man’s voice was strangled. “Antonia, they told me you were dead.”
Slowly, as if she approached the block for her beheading, Antonia looked past Ranelaw to the man accosting her.
“Johnny,” she said flatly.
Chapter Twenty-five
A decade since she’d left Johnny Benton, and Antonia recognized him immediately. He wasn’t the pe
rfect Adonis of her youth but he was still breathtakingly handsome. He made her heart race, although not with excitement. No, her heart pounded with horror. And a futile anger that after all her stratagems, he found her so easily.
“Antonia . . .”
Johnny couldn’t move beyond repeating her name. He stared at her as if he didn’t believe his eyes. He hardly seemed to notice she was in the company of one of the kingdom’s most notorious rakes or that she’d obviously spent the night rolling around Nicholas’s bed.
The possibility flitted through her numbed mind that she could claim to be a stranger. Johnny hadn’t seen her for ten years and he had it on good authority that she was dead.
One glance at his distraught face and she knew the ruse wouldn’t serve. Just like him, she hadn’t changed much. Especially this morning when he caught her undisguised. She thought with futile longing of her unbecoming wardrobe and her lace cap and above all, her tinted spectacles, abandoned in her bedroom.
She felt trapped in some horrible fantasy. Her fraught parting from Nicholas split her in two. Now she confronted the man who had ruined her.
Johnny still seemed in a trance. His theatricality was so ingrained, she knew his bewilderment was sincere. At seventeen, she’d imagined his dramatic behavior promised a larger life than the conventional one her father planned. Now it just irritated.
He burst into speech. “I saw your brother when I went to Blaydon Park to find you. Lord Aveson said you’d died in France. When I heard that, I thought my life was over. I’ve spent ten years wanting you back, desperate to make reparations. And when at last I braved a return to my native land, it was too late.” He drew an audible breath and spoke with a wonder that made Antonia flinch. “Now here you are, stepping into the dawn like Eos herself.”
Johnny’s fondness for mythology clearly hadn’t waned. She tried to summon words to placate her former lover, to convince him to keep her secret. If he alerted the world that Lady Antonia Hilliard hadn’t died scandal-free across the Channel but was alive in London, the damage would spread to the Demarests, then even further to her brother, Henry.
