His mouth touched her and she froze. There was nothing simple about the touch. Nothing that she could pretend was innocent or misread. When his hot breath steamed over her flesh and his dark eyes held hers in challenge, she recognized something her innocent brain ought not to have known: this was seduction.
She should have stepped away from it. From him and his dangerous beauty and charm. From his slightly drunken state. It obviously lowered whatever inhibitions a man like this normally held when it came to ladies.
Only she didn’t. She stayed where she was, hand in his, staring as he lowered their clasped fingers but did not release her. If anything, he got bigger, stepped closer in the moonlight.
“Your uncle is the Viscount Montague, isn’t he?”
She nodded, stricken mute by the odd encounter and all the strange feelings it inspired.
“And this is your second Season,” he continued.
“You know a great deal for a man who couldn’t recall my name a moment ago,” she whispered, her voice shaking.
“I remember information and faces,” he said. “Especially when I am being pursued.”
She blinked. “I was not pursuing you.”
The corner of his lips quirked up, but his eyes grew hard as he said, “Every eligible lady in Society is pursuing me, no matter what I do to discourage their chaperones.”
She lifted both her brows. “Is that what all your wild behavior is about, Your Grace? Discouraging the chaperones?”
He gaze held hers evenly for a beat, then another. Something in the air between them shifted, subtle but oh, so powerful, and Katherine forgot to breathe for a moment. Roseford edged forward a tiny bit more and suddenly his body brushed hers. His breath stirred her face as he leaned in. His free hand, the one that wasn’t still scandalously holding hers, trailed up to trace the line of her jaw with his fingertips.
“Not all of it,” he whispered, and then he was moving closer.
Katherine realized, in a second that seemed to take a lifetime, that this man was about to kiss her. She also recognized, without shame or judgment, that she desperately wanted him to. This dangerous, shocking man of ill-repute didn’t frighten her. He drew her in, and she wanted whatever he offered with a power that made her shake.
She tilted her face up, offering her mouth, and just before their lips touched, she heard something on the wind. Something horrible.
“Katherine!”
She realized through her fog that it was the sharpness of her father’s voice. The shame and judgment she hadn’t felt a moment ago rushed to her as his steely hand closed around her upper arm and he ripped her away from Roseford.
“You’re coming with me,” her father snapped, glaring at the duke before he hauled Katherine off the terrace, through the ball with everyone watching, and to their carriage around front. His fingers dug into her bare skin, he yanked hard enough that it felt like her shoulder was being separated from her body, and when he hurtled her into the vehicle, she staggered and slammed her knee against the seat edge. Tears leapt to her eyes.
As the carriage began to move, she hauled herself into a more dignified place and dared to look at him. She flinched. His round face was almost purple with anger, his arms were folded and his jaw was set.
“Whore!” he shouted, and she turned her face. That was his favorite slur to hurtle. And it would soon be followed by his second favorite. “Whore’s daughter.”
She bent her head as the tears of physical pain became tears of rage and emotional destruction. “I didn’t do anything,” she protested softly.
“We both know what you were about to do,” he snapped. “And if you were so willing to give such a man as the Duke of Roseford your mouth, what else would have you given him? What elsehaveyou given? You think I do not know your mind?”
“You don’t!” Katherine protested, lifting her hands in pleading. “Youdon’tknow. I did not go out onto the terrace to find the duke. I didn’t even know he was there. We were only talking. Perhaps things escalated, but it wasinnocent, Papa, I swear to you. I would not have gone so far.”
Except that didn’t feel true as she said those words. Not when she thought of the fuzzy image of Roseford’s handsome face swinging in toward hers. His mouth tantalizingly close.
That darkness he was bringing with him, it was exactly the kind her father feared, and she had been willing to walk right into it.
Montague stared at her and his eyes glazed. “You truly are just like your mother,” he murmured.
Katherine flinched. She hardly remembered her mother, though the fleeting images she had were nothing but kind and soft. Yet her father railed against the dead woman near daily. To be compared to her was the lowest of insults, at least in his mind.
“I’m not,” Katherine whispered. “I’m not like what you say she was.”
His gaze held on her, and then he nodded. “Perhaps it isn’t too late. What you need is a stabilizing influence. What youneedis a firm hand that can guide you or punish you as needed.”
Katherine shook her head swiftly. This was, yet again, another conversation she’d had with her father a dozen times or more. Since her coming out the year before, it had been a topic he had worn into the ground.
