“I am sorry, empress,” he said into the silence when she did not speak.
Her lips tightened. “What a silly thing to call me. I’m no one’s empress. Least of all empress of this place. Couldn’t even see what was plain as the beak on my face.”
He moved nearer, closing the distance. Unable to help himself. The scent of her hovered on the air, and he felt inexplicably like he was coming home. Delicious, fragrant blossoms and Genevieve Winter. Was it her soap? He found it difficult to believe a woman such as she would trouble herself with perfume. Besides, he knew without doubt she smelled that sweetlyeverywhere.
“There is nothing about you that is plain,” he told her softly.
She was wearing the same stricken expression which had been dominating her pretty features ever since she had discovered the truth about Peter. “That is where you’re wrong, Marquess. Look at me. Then have a peek at yourself in the shiner.”
She was speaking cant again, calling a looking glass ashiner. Gen was even more upset over this than she was allowing him to see. He knew her well enough to decipher her. At least, he thought he did.
He hoped he did.
He’d like to have the opportunity to know her even better.
Forever, whispered that voice in his head. The one he had been trying to ignore, the one that reached for more than he could have.
He gave in to the urge that would not be denied and touched her. Just a graze of his fingertips along her jaw. His hands were bare, and without a barrier between them, the heat of her seared him all the way to his elbow, and then beyond. There was an undeniable rightness. Her eyes widened, the blue deepening to the color of the sky at sunset.
“I do not need a looking glass to tell me you are the most glorious woman I have ever beheld,” he told her earnestly. “And that neither I, nor anyone else, could hold a candle to you.”
Polite society had a word for her. Incomparable. Gen Winter was the true meaning of that appellation, far more than any simpering debutante ever could be.
“I was wrong,” she said, startling him with her admission. “Not just about Peter. About you. I am the one who should be sorry, Max. Not you. Never you.”
It was more than he had expected of her. Far more.
He swallowed against a rush of emotion. “I should not have gone so easily. I should have seen what was happening. But it was not until I was at a bloody ball this evening, mid dance, that it hit me.”
“You were at a ball?” Her query was wistful.
“Yes.”
Now that he had started touching her, he could not stop. His fingers were on her throat, toying with the silken skin on display above her snowy cravat. Her pulse was racing.Good.She was not unaffected by him.
“Did you dance with the ladies?”
Her question took him by surprise. He answered her honestly. “I did.”
But none of them were you.
He kept that bit to himself.
She nodded. “I don’t suppose any of them stepped on your toes or tripped you.”
God, how he loved this woman. The force of his emotion should frighten him, yet somehow, it did not. More fool, he.
“Not one.” He tried to summon a smile, but even he knew it was a sad attempt at best. “Terribly uninspiring, the lot of them.”
That won a laugh from her.
Hard-won laugh.
He wished he could capture it and keep it, place the mellifluous sound of her amusement in a box so that he might unleash it now and again over the years, when their lives took them far apart.
And then he wished their lives would never see them parted.
“You are as charming as ever, Blunderbury,” she said teasingly.
