There! She had reached the button and pulled it free. Just a few more to go.
Knock, knock, knock.
She gasped and froze as she realized someone was at her bedroom door. Good heavens, it wasn’t her brother, was it? Had she been too loud, issuing those oaths? What if he had heard her? What a fool she was.
“Minx?”
The low voice on the other side of the door permeated her wildly whirling thoughts.
Richford.
Her feet started moving, carrying her across the chamber before her mind was even cognizant that she was going to him. Halfway there, her state ofdishabilleoccurred to her.
“Oh well,” she murmured to herself, thinking she could blame it on the champagne.
There had to be a reason he had come to her.
Didn’t there?
She opened the door, and there he was, unfailingly handsome in that way only he had. Rhiannon wondered if he rose every day effortlessly beautiful. Even his tousled hair that morning had seemed artfully intentional, the way it had fallen over his brow in a rakish manner.
“Richford,” she said, hoping he could sense none of her thoughts. “What are you doing here?”
His green eyes were blazing, his countenance alight with intensity. “Did you mean it?”
She faltered. “Did I…”
Her words trailed off.
“Let me in before you answer.”
She stepped back and opened the door, granting him entrance. He stalked into the room, and she shut the portal at his back. Richford turned to her.
“Did you mean what you said in the ballroom before our dance ended?” he asked.
There was a studied concentration in his gaze, in his handsome face, that made her tell him the truth, despite all the stern admonishments of her pride.
“Yes, of course I meant it, Richford,” she admitted. “Why else would I have said it?”
“What you asked of me is wrong,” he said, his voice almost harsh.
He was impossibly beautiful in his evening finery.
She struggled to keep her face impassive, an expressionless mask. “I don’t care.”
Richford moved toward her. One step. Her breath caught in her lungs.
Then another.
“You want to give yourself to a man before your boring, proper marriage to Carnis,” he said, as if the words were hateful to him.
Rhiannon held his burning blue gaze. “Yes.”
“Then I’ll be that man.”
Liquid heat went straight to her core. “You will?”
Another step, and he was standing directly before her. “It can’t be anyone else.”
