It hadn’t been an easy road. However, she had already traveled the difficult sections and had finally reached the finish. One more wee little seduction of a heartless rakehell, and she could retire to her cozy little town house with her pot of tea and her well-read library with her cat on her knees. She need never think about men—especially Reuben Medford—ever again.
In fact, she’d grown tired of tonight’s dancing already. This provincial assembly room was nothing at all like the delightfully debauched soirées lords of the ton attended in search of their next mistresses.
The hour was late. Or early, depending on how one wished to look at it. Two a.m. In London, a proper party would rage at least until dawn, but out here in Hampshire, the crowd was already dwindling.
Gladys ought to return to her suite. She was restless, and wouldn’t be able to fall asleep for hours, which meant she might finally reach the end of the novel she was rereading whilst she awaited its sequel.
But first, she couldn’t resist a quick turn outside the ballroom. To revisit the scene of the crime, as it were.
She paused at the doorway leading to the statue garden. It was ajar, just as it had been the fateful night she’d wandered out-of-doors for a breath of fresh air and ended up disheveled and discarded instead.
Her hand was steady as she closed her fingers about the handle and pulled open the door.
Cold night air washed over her. Crisp, dry, but chilly enough to require a shawl if one intended to be out for more than a few minutes.
She stepped outside, pulling the door almost, but not quite, closed behind her.
There was the walking path, just as she remembered it. The same statues, with new spatters of bird droppings. The same hedgerows, six feet tall and as dangerous as anything one might find in Vauxhall’s Dark Paths.
But it didn’t look as sordid as she recalled. If anything, it looked a little cheap. A bit plain. As though her memory had built this tiny strip of the garden into the cursed labyrinth of legendary King Minos, complete with a terrible minotaur lurking in the shadows, eager to trample any lost soul that dared to traipse past.
Gladys dared. She was not the shy, flinching creature she once was. And, though she hated herself for it, there might be a tiny spark of girlish wistfulness driving her to step off the stone walking path and across the springy grass to the shadows where she’d received her first kiss.
She’d been so surprised. So flattered. So hopeful.
Fool. Of course the handsome rake hadn’t fallen in love with her at first sight. Of all the men she’d lain with over the years, not one held any interest in her beyond a series of temporary, transactional encounters.
Happily ever after didn’t happen to girls like Gladys. It wasn’t that lightning didn’t strike twice. It would never touch her at all.
She turned away from the hedgerow without fully rounding the corner to glimpse the old stone bench, if it still stood where she remembered it. That way lay madness. There was no sense revisiting old mistakes when she had a new—
A hand closed around her wrist. She yelped as she was yanked against a tall, hard wall of man. Before she could catch her breath or her balance, his arms were around her and his mouth claimed hers.
Gladys reacted in kind out of habit—and also out of nostalgia, and hope, and surprise—until she gathered her wits enough to splay her hands on the mystery man’s chest and push him far enough away to catch a moonlit glimpse of his face.
Reuben Medford.
Again.
“You,” she gasped, and slammed the side of her fist against his broad chest.
He let her go in equal surprise. “You!”
“Who did you think I was?” she snapped.
“For a moment, I thought you were… Someone I… Never mind.” The shifting shadows made it look as though the rake was blushing. “Forgive me my mistake. I wasn’t waiting for anyone. I had intended to be alone.”
“Then why did you… Ugh.” Gladys turned away without waiting for an answer. She didn’t need one. He’d told her himself: he wasn’t waiting on anyone in particular.
This wasn’t a romantic nook. This was Medford’s hunting ground. Five years ago, a little lost wallflower had believed their kiss to be a special moment. Had even believed, if only for a moment, that she was special. Instead, she was nothing more than the latest victim of a rakehell’s signature lustful maneuver.
Gladys wanted a fairy tale? She was in one. And they didn’t all end happily. The sculpture garden was the deep, dark forest. Medford was the iron trap, his metal jaws gaping and deadly, awaiting his prey. Any prey. It didn’t matter. And she was the fluffy, innocent bunny whose gamboling pink paw happened to fall right in his path.
“You sicken me,” she informed him through clenched teeth.
That wasn’t the plan. She’d meant to flirt, to reel him in, to make him fall in love, and then to destroy him.
He smiled. “It didn’t feel like I sickened you when you were kissing me back.”
