She’d done what she’d promised her sister, Penny, she would over a year ago and withdrawn from working with the Brazen Belle. Two seasons—nearly eighteenmonths—of joyless performance as a compliant debutante. Fawning overtitles she hadn’t the slightest interest in and the pudding-heads attached for centuries to them. Deadly dull conversations without a hint of controversy. (Except that time in a baron’s shockingly pink parlor and the disagreement over women’s rights, when, wouldn’t you know it, the Earl of Merevale was in attendance, slumped sleepily in a dark corner but listening, damn him.)
This evening was, in fact, the first time in ages she’d roamed where she shouldn’t.
If not for her clandestine embroidery endeavor, enough to vex her family if they knew of it but not enough to ruin her, she would be lost.
It brought Isabella back to the desperate belief that this—parties, husband hunts, polite suffocation—was not all there was to life. She would have given up everything to have a purpose. A profession. A student. Shopkeeper. Modiste.Something.
When all that was ever suggested to her waswife.
She had just finished her champagne and was considering another when the hairs at her nape lifted. She tilted her head and, through the corner of her eye, watched Percival Trentham close in.
He lingered by the refreshment table his staff had thoughtfully placed on a level fragment of the lawn, selected a grape, popped it into his mouth, and chewed slowly. Except for a nondescript mask a shade darker than his disheveled ebony strands, he’d not bothered to don a costume. He was, as always, save for the dangling cravat, attired head to toe in black. There would have been no hiding him in any case. Few men in London possessed such height. Nor was the stubborn cut of his jaw—usually tilted in censure when he fixed his gaze on her—a feature she’d ever miss. She would never lie to anyone, including herself, and claim he wasn’t attractive. Perhapstoo much so.
But what was another gorgeous wastrel in a sea of them?
She didn’t want her mother’s reality to become her own. A man who overindulged to this extent would never,everbe for her.
The moon sank notch by unhurried notch as Merevale nibbled and conversed playfully with a friar, two naval officers, and a huntsman. When the area cleared, leaving only the two of them, he turned to her with a suddenness that suggested he’d been waiting for solitude all along.
Selecting another grape, he chewed, glanced over his shoulder, then back. “My carriage is in the alley on the south side of the residence. Take the pebbled garden path and it will lead you right there. My man, Brick, will assist you. Wait for me inside the vehicle, shades drawn. I’ll settle things here, then escort you home.” His mulish jaw hardened, a muscle flexing beneath his ear. “I’m assuming there isn’t a chaperone to include in this delightful invitation. On that assumption, I’ve directed a maid to accompany us. Should you be worried, which I’d be staggered if you were, we won’t be alone.”
Her lips parted, and for the first time in her life, Isabella was speechless.
Had he ordered her to?—
How dare he think he had the right to?—
Words and fury tangled in her throat, and this is what came out: “Do you even know who Iam?”
His lips flattened into an unappealing slant. It was a crime the grimace didn’t do a thing to ruin his good looks. “Allow me to be blunt. If you’d like, instead of helping you sneak into your residence through the domestics’ entrance, I can pound on the front door and include Weston in the discussion of where I found you. I’m happy to go that route. Your brother-in-law and I are acquainted, unfortunately for you. Perhaps your sister will be up and drawn into the conversation. More the merrier, am I right?”
Isabella brought her flute to her lips and polished off the contents, the taste turning flat as she realized her adventure was over. She was many things, but a girl who fought against overwhelming odds wasn’t one of them.
Dewy grass dampened her slippers as she headed in the direction Merevale had suggested. As she passed him, Isabella paused and thrust her flute at him. “Do you have the time?”
Without options, he grabbed her glass, then slipped his pocket watch from his waistcoat fob, bobbling both. “Ten of midnight,” he said, tilting the timepiece into the moonlight.
“You won’t be long then, will you, Merevale? I must get back.”
Won’t be long, he mouthed, a tiny pleat settling between his arched brows.
Though she knew she should, Isabella didn’t drop her gaze; she wasn’t going to accept anything more than a humiliating ride home from him. The night stilled as they drew invisible battle lines, the air around them swelling like an indrawn breath.
The imagined exhalation was an interesting moment.
In the calm, she noticed that although Merevale reeked of brandy, an underlying scent of sandalwood and starched linen clung to him. A clean, steady fragrance, arresting, much like his emerald gaze, nothing tipsy or pickled about it. This close, he was even taller than she’d imagined, intimidating—should she permit it, which she did not—his shoulders filling his superfine coat without an ounce of padding. Long lashes and a plump bottom lip the shade of raspberries. A fairly fresh scar running along that rock-hard jaw. His fingers, slim and elegant, tensed twice around the cut crystal as a quick breath escaped him. A few delicate, almost unnoticeable, streaks of gray at his temple.
Desire sparked inside her, perhaps for the first time, as she imagined those hands cupping her cheeks and liftingher lips to his. She pressed hers together to contain the memory of her previous kisses, three, to be exact, each one proving that men didn’t know what shewanted.
Because she’d never felt a warm glow with any of them.
Before or after contact.
Perhaps she should have accepted when he asked her to dance months ago. Other than believing Merevale too old for her, or that he’d asked on a lark, his smirk firmly in place, she couldn’t recall why she’d said no.
“Are you done?” he finally asked, without revealing whether he’d had to shake himself from his own reverie or simply grown bored to the point of exasperation.
“Quite,” she replied, and continued down the path, praying he couldn’t hear the hammering of her heart. Or see the trembling of her hands. Confusion she wasn’t accustomed to.
