Some women wanted diamonds and rubies.
Others, lavish furs.
But for Rosemary, Sterling’s unwitting admission that he’d actually listened–and retained–what she had told him about Sir Reginald was the most wonderful gift she could have ever hoped to receive.
“What’s happeningnow?” he asked in alarm when she impulsively leapt off the bench and looped her arms around his neck.
“I am giving you a hug.” A gold button pressed into her cheek as she laid the side of her face flat upon his coat. “Because you’re not nearly as horrible as you think you are.”
She felt him stiffen. Then after a long moment, during which neither spoke, he began to relax. Like a hard ball of clay being worked by the skilled hands of a sculptor, it didn’t happen all at once, but rather in degrees. First he let out the breath he’d been holding. The tightness in his shoulders unraveled next, followed by a subtle release in his ribcage. At last, he reached behind her to pull her snug against his chest, not in a manner that was provocative or sensual, but tender and endearing, which somehow made it even more intimate than the kiss they’d just shared.
“Your Grace?” she whispered, lifting her chin to gaze at him under a thick sweep of mahogany lashes.
“Aye,” he murmured, brushing a curl behind her ear. “What is it?” For once, his voice wasn’t derisive and mocking. Instead there was a note of vulnerability in it that she’d never heard before. A chord of fragileness that delved far below the surface of his charming exterior to whatever traces of goodness and humanity that still lingered beneath.
“Could you…that is to say…might you be able to retrieve Sir Reginald for me?”
Chapter Eight
And that washow Sterling found himself climbing a tree at the Marigold Ball.
In the dark.
Wearing his formal attire.
While a wallflower waited anxiously below yelling instructions that were less than helpful.
“Have you spotted him yet?” she said. “Try clucking your tongue!”
“I’m not going to cluck my tongue at asquirrel.”
“I’ve a few cranberries in my pocket. Sir Reginald loves cranberries.”
Grabbing on to the lowest hanging branch, Sterling managed to wrap his legs around the base and, from there, pivot–after much grunting and cursing–into a crouching position. Squinting, he shoved a collection of leaves out of his face as he tried to locate the whereabouts of Rosemary’s runaway pet. “Sir Reginald is going to end up on the end of a stick roasting over an open fire if he doesn’t get his arse down here this bloody second,” he muttered sourly.
“What was that?” she called out.
“I said throw me a damned cranberry.”
The first bounced off the branch above him, but he managed to catch the second. As he plopped it into the middle of his palm and extended his arm while clucking his tongue, Sterling wondered how he’d gotten here.
There was only one answer.
Rosemary.
A glance into those beguiling eyes of hers and how could henotgive her whatever it was that she desired? Had she asked him to walk to Istanbul and steal a crown from the Ottoman sultan he’d have done it. Hell, at least there would have been Turkish wine there.
But no.
Not his Rosemary.
HisRosemary didn’t want crowns or jewels or pretty trinkets.
She wanted a rat with a furry tail.
Because of course she did.
“Do you see him yet?” Hands clutched beneath her chin, she peered up at him, her eyes twin pools of shimmering blue fog set in a face pale with worry. “Are you clucking?”
