One Dangerous Desire (Accidental Heirs) (12 page)

“Right now I’m wishing I was alone in this room.”

“Too late, I’m afraid.” His voice dropped lower as he drew near. “Here I am.”

His scent was winning. The odor of peonies faded.

“It’s a small room, Mr. Leighton. A few steps would take you back out again.”

He took a few steps, but they weren’t toward the door. They were toward her. He loomed directly behind her. “I prefer this room to the other. It’s smaller, quiet, and smells good.”

“That’s the peonies.”

He lowered himself onto the settee, his weight dipping her lower into the upholstery. She moved away from him, but he leaned close, his heat warming the side of her body. “It’s you, May. You’re always what draws me.”

When she turned to face him, he leaned forward and reached a hand up to her face.

“W-what are you doing?”

After drawing a feather-light touch across her cheek, he drew back to show her his wet fingertip. “You’re crying.”

“I’m not crying.” May lifted a hand and swiped at her cheeks, stunned to find dampness on both.

“Then it’s worse than I feared.” One of his lopsided grins made her stomach tumble. “It seems you’re leaking from the corner of each eye.”

“Don’t tease me.” Pushing lightly against his shirtfront to create a bit of space between them, May found her palm crushed against the solid plane of his chest.

He clasped her hand in place with his own. “Feel that?”

“I . . . ” Her mind failed her. Her tongue tangled in her mouth. Sensation was all she could manage, absorbing the jump of his heartbeat against her skin.

“No feigning. No tease. That is what you do to me.”

She’d felt like this before. Tipping, her heart in her throat, her head in the clouds. Toppling, faster and further, into a love that would swallow her up if she let herself go.

“I’m not the girl I was six years ago.”

He wrapped his arm around her, nudging her closer, lowering his head as if he’d take her lips. “I know who you are, May. I’ve never forgotten.”

“I’m not the same.” The years had changed her. Made her long for something more than the match her parents had raised her to seek. She’d discovered her passion for art and design, begun to nurture a desire for a business of her own. When she’d met Reginald Cross, she’d been naive and less certain of herself. He was her first certainty—that she desired him, needed him, loved him.

He caressed her cheek, his large hand impossibly gentle as he stroked ribbons of sensation across her skin. When he placed a kiss at the corner of her mouth, his lips were as tender as his touch. “You taste just as tempting.”

“And you still know just what to say.” She hadn’t intended the derision in her tone.

Rex sat back stiffly against the settee as if she’d cursed him. “I am not lying to you.” He looked frightfully grim. “My feelings for you were never a lie.”

“So you told the truth.” May smoothed her fingertip along the frown marring his brow. “When you said you wanted me?”

“Yes.” He gripped her round the waist and pulled her so close she was almost in his lap.

May went into his arms, settled her chest against his, twined her hands around his neck. “And when you said you loved me?” She pressed her mouth against his before he could speak, fearing his answer as much as she needed to hear it.

His kisses melted her while his roving hands drew circles over her back, gripped her hips, and pulled her closer. “Yes,” he rasped against her mouth.

“Yes,” she breathed. The sentiment slipped from her lips as it hummed through her body.

She may have changed, but her feelings for Rex hadn’t. Along with that certainty came another. Whatever the consequences, however disappointed others might be, she couldn’t marry Devenham. She couldn’t imagine loving or giving herself to any man, except the one in her arms.

Chapter Thirteen

T
HE NEXT DAY
, she could still hear Rex’s voice in her head.

He said yes.

Such a simple little word. Three letters. A single sibilant breath. Yet there was power in it. Perhaps enough, May thought, to take her future and reshape it entirely. Could it overturn the plan upon which her life had been shaped? Marriage to a nobleman. Acquisition of a title that could never be earned, an honorific as impressive as the wealth her father had accumulated through tenacity and financial wiles.

Emily gripped her arm and pulled May from her tangled thoughts—of
yes
and Rex and the conundrum of what to do with her irrepressible, inconvenient feelings for him.

“Thank you for accepting my invitation. I can’t tell you how mortified I am about last evening’s unpleasantness.” Emily’s tone took on an irritatingly reedy quality when she was feeling guilty.

And there was no need for it. As far as May was concerned, the awkwardness with Devenham was the least memorable part of the evening. She tapped two fingers against the art exhibition brochure in her hand and considered how best to convince her friend that more apologies were unnecessary.

“Let’s put it aside, Em. I bear no grudge against you. How could I? Based on what I heard through the doorway, you took my side in the matter and intended to tell me all of it if Henry would not.”

“But it’s dreadful that you had to hear it that way. What a shock it must have been.”

“Honestly, it wasn’t.” A shock to learn the earl wished to marry her for the million-dollar dowry her father had been touting since their arrival in London? Not at all. Henry’s love for another didn’t even nick her pride. Not truly. He’d feigned interest in her, and she’d barely encouraged him. But now, in the cold light of day, May couldn’t say she hadn’t sensed the truth between them all along. She’d never imagined marriage to the Earl of Devenham would be a love match.

“You spoke to me a few weeks ago about practicality, Em. I know the Devenham estate is in need of funds, and Henry’s and Caroline’s marriages are meant to shore up the family coffers. How can I blame them for a situation they didn’t choose?”

“Perhaps I’m not as practical as I thought I was.” Emily twisted her gloves in her bare hands as they progressed through two halls at Burlington House set aside for a Royal Academy exhibition. Though the exhibit was not yet open to the public, a small group of academy patrons had been invited to an early viewing. “It bothers me to speak of money so plainly.”

Wealth and the lack of it were never easy to discuss, in May’s experience. Her parents had retreated behind closed doors whenever financial matters arose, keeping any mention of dollars spent or earned hidden like family secrets. Which only made May doubly curious to learn what all the fuss was about.

She knew Rex had struggled through desperate times after losing his mother, but he’d revealed little about the years between entering an orphanage at ten and the afternoon May met him in the glassware shop.

Memories of that day were still sharp. He’d looked like some undercover warrior masquerading as a shop clerk, with a cut just above his dark brows and the shadow of a bruise on his left cheek. His muscular arms and shoulders had strained against the confines of his clerk’s uniform. Starched cotton and heavy wool could do nothing to conceal the energy coiled beneath.

Thinking of him brought the previous evening to mind. Much of it was a blur. She’d sat through the meal and after-dinner conversation, warm and dazed from his kisses.

“Let’s discuss something else, my dear. I can’t leave today without purchasing a few paintings. Help me decide.” Emily hooked her arm through May’s. “Choose some for Ashworth House, and I’ll convince Papa to hang them wherever you say.”

The last person to clasp her arm had been Rex, and she couldn’t shake the memory of it. There had been no promises, no offers, but he admitted that he’d loved her once. Did he still? Her need to find out obliterated any possibility of continuing the pretense of finding an aristocratic husband.

“I haven’t won the wager, Em.” Nor did she any longer have a desire to win. Did Rex? Would he continue his pursuit of a blue-blooded bride? He’d avoided Lady Caroline during the dinner party, despite her attempts to insert herself by his side.

“Papa was wrongheaded to suggest it. As practical as I may be, even I know finer feelings must inform any decision to marry.”

No part of the reaction Rex sparked in May was as mundane as
fine.

“I hated the notion of you rushing into an engagement,” Emily continued. “Or Mr. Leighton, for that matter. No one should enter a union as important as marriage just to satisfy my father’s predilection for wagers.”

“But Mr. Leighton requires your father’s investment in his hotel.” May wanted to know more about Rex’s hotel, but every time they were together, circumstances or duty drew them in opposite directions. “Will the duke still give his support if we forfeit the wager?”

“Oh, I think he will. Papa rarely mixes wagers with business. I’ve no idea what possessed him this time.” Emily patted May’s arm comfortingly. “Leave it to me. I’ll convince him to assist Mr. Leighton
and
allow you to give us beautiful red walls in the library.”

“Thank you, Em.”

“Don’t you dare thank me. I owe you gratitude for allowing Henry to remain for dinner last evening.”

“Throwing him out would have embarrassed us both.” Among their social circle, rows were generally short-lived and amends made quickly, even if it required pasting a phony smile on one’s face for the remainder of an awkward evening. “But I can’t marry him.” On that point, she needed to be absolutely clear.

They stopped to ponder a striking painting of a man in Tudor-style clothing. He stared back at them with haughty impatience, as if he hadn’t time to be captured in oils and hanging about in a gilded frame.

“I understand.” Emily sighed. Casting a sideways glance at May, she asked, “Does Mr. Leighton have anything to do with your decision?”

“Yes.” Ah, that powerful little word again. Such relief to say it, to admit what she’d spent years denying to her father and herself. “I . . . ”
Love him.
Why was that bit more difficult? The truth, even when it was about to burst her heart at the seams, was shockingly hard to get out.

“Oh no.” Emily’s exhibition brochure slipped through her fingers, and May bent to catch it.

“What is it?” May stood up to find Emily was no longer standing beside her. She’d begun striding toward the front of the hall to confront Henry.

The man looked as if he’d just tumbled down a hill. His neck cloth hung askew; his hat was missing; one glove encased his hand, and he clenched its soiled mate in his other hand. His blond locks were disheveled in a way that might have made him look dashing, if his skin wasn’t sallow and his eyes ringed with bluish half circles.

“Don’t do this, Henry.” Emily placed a hand on his arm as if to hold him back, but the minute his gaze locked with May’s, he lunged forward.

“Miss Sedgwick.” His gait lengthened as he moved past two other couples browsing paintings in the hall. “Please accept my apology for last night.”

May stepped back as he drew near, far past the polite boundary gentlemen usually respected. “All is forgiven, Lord Devenham, I assure you.”

He held out his hand. When she refused to take it, he dropped down on one knee and began digging in his upper coat pocket.

Emily rushed up behind him. “Not here, cousin. Not like this.”

“Miss Sedgwick. May. Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?” He looked miserable as he lifted a dazzling ring toward her. His breath reeked of liquor, and his red-rimmed eyes were those of a man who’d probably missed out on anything like rest the previous evening. “Been in the family for years, this ring. Some ancestor brought the sapphire back from Byzantium during the Crusades, or so the story goes.” He turned his hand so he could look down at the bauble. “No idea where we got the diamonds.”

“The ring is lovely, but . . . ” But she was a terrible woman, because all she could think was how the blue shade reminded her of Rex’s eyes.

“It’s yours, May. If you’ll be mine.”

“My lord—”

“Henry,” he insisted in a warm, earnest tone, reaching for her hand again.

She grasped his fingers, and he latched onto her palm, locking her in a firm, clammy grip.

“Please stand, my lord. You shouldn’t be down there on the floor.”

“If I do, you’ll give me your answer?”

“I will.”

He pushed off with his back leg and started to rise, but he lost his balance somewhere on the way up.

May reached out with her free hand to steady him, but he leaned into her, over her, tipping her backward. She tried bracing herself against his weight and felt him grasping for purchase, an arm around her shoulders, another stuck out to stop his fall.

Emily shrieked as Devenham thudded to the ground, pulling May along with him, nearly on top of him.

Her elbow scraped the wall, the skirt of her gown tore with a resounding rip, and amid the gasps and whispers of two couples watching the whole debacle May heard a metallic ping. Devenham’s Byzantine gem glinted at her from its resting place across the hall.

“Henry.” Emily bent to scoop up the ring. “How could you muck this up so completely?”

May pushed herself off of his leg and sat against the wall beside the earl, catching her breath and trying to stifle a tickle of awkward laughter at the back of her throat.

“That”—Devenham got to his feet far more gracefully than he’d fallen and held a hand out to May—“didn’t go at all as I’d planned.”

“No, I suspected as much.” May dusted off her gown, assessed the tear, which wasn’t nearly as bad as it had sounded, and lifted her gaze to his.

“Are you all right?” The tumble seemed to have roused him. His eyes regained their usual sparkle, and a dimple twitched in and out of existence at the corner of his unshaven cheek.

“I’m in one piece, my lord.”

“I take it your answer is no.” He finally let the dimple bloom and offered her a full-on grin.

“Yes. I mean, no. My answer is no.” May grinned too, hoping to soften whatever disappointment she caused. “Save that ring for a lady who deserves it.”

She certainly didn’t deserve the Devenham jewels when her thoughts and heart were full of Rex. The pastor’s daughter Emily had mentioned weighed on May’s mind. If the young lady had his heart, shouldn’t she have Henry’s ring?

“That’s not the way of it, Miss Sedgwick.” As his voice dipped to a raw tremor, his expression hardened. “I will marry for money, and you will marry for a title. Our fate is to do what we should. Not what we wish.” His words echoed in the high-ceilinged hall.

May’s heart, which had been so full of
yes
and possibilities, ached now. And her head was as full of denial as it had been a moment before of hope.

What good was her million-dollar dowry if it couldn’t even secure her a future of her own choosing?

R
EX WAS GETTING
used to the dull gray walls in the Duke of Ashworth’s library, but familiarity didn’t make being in the man’s house any more comfortable. Especially when he’d come with every intention of disappointing the powerful aristocrat.

Agreeing to the duke’s wager had been rash. In commercial dealings, competitiveness had become second nature, and he’d been blinded by the prospect of winning before considering any of the consequences. From the start, wedding Lady Emily, even if that was the quickest route to Ashworth’s patronage, had been out of the question. Now nothing in him could fathom marriage to Lady Caroline either.

May had changed that, even if she hadn’t intended to. Even if she regretted the moments she’d let him hold and kiss her. Those moments had solidified his resolve, and he sure as hell wouldn’t allow her to marry the Earl of Devenham to win a ridiculous wager.

He hated that after telling Ashworth as much, he wasn’t certain of his next step. Since coming to London, his life had been carefully plotted, every goal focused in his crosshairs, every step based on strategy. Now he knew only what he wanted. Achieving it was another matter altogether.

May.
Sullivan, with his damnably accurate insight, might have been right. Every success, every additional column in his bank ledger, only mattered if he could have her. Hell, he’d even designed the Pinnacle with her in mind, envisioning the walls in colors she admired. Planning a ballroom in shades of blue that reminded him of her eyes.

“You’re unexpected, Leighton, but welcome. What brings you to my door today?”

In his flighty, jittery way, Ashworth sidestepped into the room, almost as if he’d just exited a ballroom and was still completing the steps of a dance. The duke’s flushed face and perspiration dotting his forehead added to the impression that he’d just exerted himself. Something certainly had the man on edge.

“I’ve come about the wager, Your Grace.”

Ashworth actually was doing a little jig, feet moving back and forth in a repetitive pattern. “Excellent! You must have the powers of a psychic medium, Mr. Leighton. I wish to speak to you on precisely the same matter.” He flicked his hands out in front of him as if shaking off water. “Please, sir, precede me. Tell me what you’ve come to say, and then I’ll share my news.”

The duke had struck Rex as strange from their very first encounter, but Ashworth had never been quite this jumpy.

“I decline the wager, Your Grace. I should never have accepted. Perhaps I enjoy competition too much.” He did. Far too much, and it bit at his pride to admit it. “My choice of a bride is my own, as is the timing of a proposal.” He cleared his throat before delving into the heart of it. “Most of all, I do not wish to exert any undue pressure on Miss Sedgwick to marry.”

Ashworth began to snicker and lifted a hand to cover his mouth. Then he dropped his other hand to his belly and pealed with laughter.

“Forgive me, Leighton.”

The man seemed to be on the verge of hysteria. A flash of memory struck Rex of the way orphanage staff had dealt with children given to fits of laughter or tears. Though he didn’t think a bucket of iced water over the head would be acceptable for a duke.