“My inquiries have yielded some information about the gentleman, Miss Talbot.” Though he’d succeeded in hiding his amusement over her gaffe, Mr. Hutt could not conceal his satisfaction over his own quick work. “I thought you’d want to know straightaway.”
Tessa’s fortune hunter!
Claire spun around again, her gaze combing the room in search of him.
Behind her, Obadiah Hutt began to rattle off his report in an eager voice. “I have discovered the gentleman’s name, miss. And I’ve discovered he is not an American, as Lady Lydiard supposed.”
Not an American. No.
From across the ballroom his voice drifted, mellow and musical, with the distinctive lilting burr of the Highland glens. Claire steeled herself to resist its enchantment, but failed.
When Mr. Hutt began to speak again, she held up her hand for silence.
“But, miss, don’t you want to hear the gentleman’s name?”
Across the ballroom, Ewan Geddes glanced up and caught her watching him. For an instant, puzzlement knit his full dark brows together.
Then it cleared.
His bow mouth stretched into a wide, devilish grin, and he winked at her.
“I know his name, Mr. Hutt.” The hand Claire had held aloft balled into a tight fist, as did the one by her side. “Furthermore, I know he is no gentleman.”
Chapter Two
A good job he was at a ball with an orchestra playing, Ewan Geddes thought. It gave him an excuse for dancing around the room without looking like a daft fool!
For ten years he’d worked and struggled to get where he was now—with Miss Tessa Talbot in his arms and no man having the power to take her away from him. Surely Fate had wanted them together, no matter how unlikely a match they once might have seemed. Considering how far he’d risen in the world, Ewan knew nothing was impossible for a man who had faith in himself, and the boldness to act decisively when an opportunity arose.
The music stopped, but he continued to twirl Tessa around the floor, narrowly avoiding several other couples who had paused to wait for the orchestra to begin again.
“Ewan!” Tessa squealed. “What are you doing? We can’t dance without music!”
“Ah, but there’s music in my heart, lass.” As he gazed down into her enormous turquoise eyes, the years fell away and he was eighteen again—an ardent lad in love for the first and only time. “Can ye not hear it? It’s been playing a wild, sweet melody ever since I laid eyes on ye again.”
Tessa lowered her gaze demurely, catching her full lower lip between her teeth.
That look made Ewan ache to kiss her, but he would not do it until she had promised to be his wife. And she could not make that promise until she’d withdrawn from her present betrothal.
She glanced back up at him suddenly, her eyes brimming with a reflection of his own giddy delight. “Ever since I saw you again, I’ve found myself humming a little tune day and night.”
“Ye hum in yer sleep?” Ewan teased, holding her closer and slowing their music-less waltz until it was little more than an excuse to embrace in public.
“Of course not, silly!” Her laughter set the cluster of golden ringlets piled high on her head into a quivering dance of their own. “But the melody runs through my dreams.”
“I know what ye mean.” Ewan caressed her face with his gaze. “The sound of yer voice and yer laugh have run through my dreams for years.”
And the way she’d felt in his arms that last night.
Fortunately for Ewan, the dance music began again—a lush Strauss waltz that perfectly expressed the buoyant, heady feelings within him. Otherwise, he might have broken his promise to himself and caused a twittering scandal among London society, by kissing another man’s fiancée in the middle of the Fortescues’ ballroom.
Tessa gave a breathless sigh. “It’s so romantic that you thought of me all those years you were off in America, working so hard to make something of yourself.”
It hadn’t seemed very romantic when he’d first arrived in Pennsylvania, a lad of eighteen, raw from the Highlands, without a penny in his pocket. But he’d had a fire in his belly, stoked by injustice and true love denied. That fire had fueled his rapid rise in the world.
“It was all for ye, Tessa Talbot. To make myself worthy of yer notice and yer company.”
Well, almost all, Ewan insisted to his bothersome conscience. True, in those early years he’d been at least as eager to take some revenge against her father, who had sacked him without a character reference. In time, however, he’d come to enjoy the challenge of making his fortune for its own sake. Once he’d had the resources to carry out his original plan, he’d assumed Tessa must have been long since married to someone else.
Then a copy of the London Times had fallen into his hands. Ewan vowed to have that blessed paper gilded and mounted. For it had informed him that the Honorable Miss Tessa Talbot, daughter of Lady Lydiard and her late husband, was engaged to be married.
Only engaged!
All his old fallow feelings for her had burst back into bloom, and Ewan had booked passage on the fastest steamer that would get him across the Atlantic.
“Worthy? What nonsense!” Tessa gave him a token slap with the hand that rested on his shoulder. “You know I’ve always thought more of real people who work for a living than I ever have of useless aristocrats.”
Her fervent declaration should have pleased him no end, but for reasons that eluded Ewan, it made him strangely uneasy. He told himself not to be so foolish. He had everything he’d ever wanted within his grasp. Nothing and no one would stop him now. Least of all some vague foreboding he could not even put into words.
It was like the feeling he used to get when stalking game in the hills above Strathandrew. When he’d slowly turn, to discover a pair of wild, wary eyes fixed on him. Try as he might, Ewan could not shake it.
When the final notes of the waltz died away, he bowed to Tessa. “Shall we get something to drink, then find a quiet spot where we can sit and talk?”
While he waited for her answer, his gaze roved over the Fortescues’ ballroom.
There! Near the orchestra dais. A tall, elegant-looking woman was watching him.
The color of her hair, her willowy grace of figure and her long, delicate features all put him in mind of a doe. But the relentless intensity of her gaze better suited a wildcat defending her young.
Did he know the woman? Ewan reckoned he might. But from where?
Then it came to him.
The elder Miss Talbot. What was her name? Catherine? Charlotte?
Whatever she called herself, no wonder she was looking daggers
