This woman… What a revelation she was.
She shrugged a shoulder. “Anyway, that’s what I think, and not too many folk give a sod about that.” She laughed.
But Rhys didn’t find himself laughing along with her. “I care what you think.”
And he found it wasn’t just words.
It was the truth.
Opaque emotion passed behind her eyes, clouding their clear blue. “I think…” she began, “I think if you knew anything about me, you wouldn’t.”
The servers arrived to lay the table and serve tea, so Rhys settled back in his chair and gave them room—and considered Miss Birdwell.
I think if you knew anything about me, you wouldn’t.
She had a past.
That was what she was saying.
She was also saying she wouldn’t be sharing it with him.
Well, if she didn’t want to talk about her past, then the present would have to do. He waited for the servers to clear out before he said, “You’re quite skilled at your work, it appears.”
She dropped a lump of sugar into her tea, followed by a dollop of cream. “Oh, it’s hardly work when you’re good at something and love it.”
A sudden chord of envy struck through Rhys. What she was describing… He’d never felt that once in his life. He couldn’t even say he loved being a wastrel rake. He’d been good at it, certainly, but it had been more compulsion than love that drove it.
Especially as the years passed and began bleeding into one another.
“I was good at being a wastrel rake.”
She finished stirring her tea, then canted her head, a little mischievous smile playing about her mouth. “You speak like you aren’t still a wastrel rake.”
Touché, he supposed.
After all, she did first meet him at a card table at a masquerade ball.
But there was something he needed to say, aloud to another person, rather than only to himself. “I’m not a wastrel rake.” He added, “Anymore, that is.”
“How’s that?”
“When I lost the ring to Sir Felix a year ago, that was my low point. I had to change my ways.”
“That’s why you were at the masquerade, then.”
He nodded. “To expose Sir Felix and get Papa’s ring back.”
Her mouth formed an O as she blew across the surface of her tea, and Rhys found his eyes lingering a beat too long on those lovely plump lips of hers. Her throat cleared, and his gaze startled up to meets hers, watching him.
He’d been caught out staring—and didn’t mind one bit.
That rake yet took up residence inside him, didn’t he?
“But you didn’t count on me.” Her eyes sparkled like blue topazes and her mouth curved into that mischievous smile never too far away and she laughed.
That night, the moment she’d won the ring had been one of the worst of his life. Yet now, he found his mouth smiling along with hers and a laugh of his own joining hers, too.
Strangely, the more he laughed…the more he laughed. As if an avalanche of laughter had been unleashed inside him that felt nothing less than soul-clearing.
