The air was crisp, but Max would keep her warm. The night was their blanket. A sliver of moon and a smattering of stars more than enough light for his lips to find hers.
They barely made their way down a gravel path to a secluded stone bench before he pulled her back into his arms. Bryony kissed him with all her love. Kissed him with all her fears. Kissed him with all her hopes, and dreams, and fantasies.
His mouth was hot and dangerous, his hands possessive.
This was no chaste kiss, but a claiming.
He lifted her from the bench to his lap and ran his hands over her form. Memorizing her body. She sank her fingers into his hair, careful not to disturb his mask but mindless of everything else.
Nothing mattered but his kisses.
When his fingers cupped her bosom, she gasped with pleasure and arched into his touch. His hands made her body come alive. Every inch of her tingled. An insatiable pulsation kindled in her core. She wanted more.
Panting, he wrenched his hands from her body and broke the kiss.
When she reached up to pull his lips back to hers, he lifted her from his lap and pulled them both to their feet.
“The orchestra is starting again,” he said gruffly.
So it was.
She tried to smile. Dancing came a distant second to kissing in a moonlit garden.
Well, for Bryony. She did not know if Max had stopped the romantic interlude because he was being responsible and gentlemanly or because he did not care to continue.
Perhaps even masks were not enough freedom.
Chapter 19
“You certain this is the right place?” the hackney driver asked.
Max wasn’t sure at all.
He stared out the sooty window of the dilapidated hack at the pristine brick façade of Heath Grenville’s townhouse.
This was madness.
When Max had first been invited to the “small family gathering,” he had been certain he would not attend. Presenting himself as an equal on the most fashionable street in Mayfair defied all logic.
Even the hack driver knew it. The man had picked Max up at his apartment. He knew what kind of home Max had come from.
“It’s the right place,” Max said as he forced himself out from the safety of the shadows and into the brilliant light of day.
Never had sunlight seemed so ominous.
Dusk wouldn’t fall until closer to ten, and the supper invitation was for eight o’clock. Max scowled. He was to arrive in broad daylight, unmasked and exposed. Present himself not to the familiar comfort of a rookery, but to a pristine neighborhood of obvious wealth where each manicured garden was identical to the next.
This was nothing like home.
Street sweepers populated every corner, brushing away the tiniest specks of filth from impeccably clean cobblestones so that elegant passersby should not dirty their hems. For their trouble, the sweepers were rewarded with a coin likely larger than Max had paid his hackney driver.
But money was not the problem.
Nor was he concerned about the chance of gathering dust on his boots as he strode up the tidy walk to the ornate front door. His fingers clenched because he knew not what was on the other side.
Grenvilles, to be sure.
Ideally, only the ones he had met the other day. Yet they had said family and friends. Their friends, not Max’s.
