Chapter Seven
You’re three and twenty, Isabella Alstone, and far too old to hide in the dark. You should stay in the ballroom and pretend to be happy, not creep out here as if you’re planning to steal the silver.
Isabella was tired of being the perfect lady, though, so she stripped off her gloves and waved them in front of her overheated face, ignoring the voice of her conscience. It was hot even outside on this sultry late summer night and she wasn’t going back until she was cooler, calmer and more resigned... No, not more resigned, more collected. Yet promises so logical and right when voiced to a friend seemed strange and wrong now and how could she be calm about that?
‘Now, why is a lady of quality lurking in the shadows with the likes of me? Better go back to being belle of the ball instead of getting caught out here in bad company.’
The voice from the shadows startled Isabella from her reverie. The sound of his velvet-and-darkness voice told her he was right, but she was in the mood to be reckless.
‘Why?’ she demanded, peering into the gloom to try to see through the shadows.
His gruffly masculine voice had a pleasing hint of danger along the edge of it she shouldn’t want to know more about, but she had left safe, respectable Isabella inside and it was wonderful to be a different person altogether for a few stolen moments. She could be the sort of female who’d dive into wild encounters in the dark, as if she was put on this earth to be foolish and bold with the first rake she stumbled on in the shadows. Her fantasy of being a brash and sophisticated lady who took what she wanted from life and laughed at the future, as if it wasn’t heading towards her at the speed of a runaway horse, was too alluring to turn her back on just yet.
‘Because I’m here,’ the mysterious voice explained, as if that was all she needed to know to send her running. She stayed exactly where she was, refusing to scuttle inside like a scared rabbit, and heard him sigh, as if he couldn’t believe how stupid she was not to listen and do as she was bid.
‘You’re no debutante, so the Bond Street Beaux must have told you how beautiful you are by now and that will make everything worse if we’re caught in the moonlight together.’
He stepped forward so the light from the few hundred wax candles could illuminate his face and form and show her how right he was. With a face too much his to match any ideal of classical perfection, he wasn’t the most handsome man Isabella had seen. He wasn’t the tallest or broadest or most obviously powerful male she had ever met either. Of course, he was leanly fit and quietly muscular as well as deeply, darkly intense. And uniquely formed to make her shiver in her dancing slippers with an unexpected and delicious anticipation of something she’d hardly dared think about until now and usually shuddered away from when she saw that feral light in other men’s eyes. Only seconds ago she’d been hot and weary and now she felt so alive there could be air and stardust under her feet instead of solid York stone. If this was how being irresponsible felt, it certainly topped being her usual sensible and reasoned self.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea who you are, so if you’re trying to scare me, it’s not working. Although you’re right about one thing,’ she said as lightly as she could when the world seemed to have stopped and they were the only two people left moving. ‘I have been out for a long time now and know false flattery when I hear it.’
‘I don’t flatter, Mrs...’ he shot a steely gaze at her ring finger ‘...apologies, Miss, and there’s no need to pretend to be middle-aged,’ he said with a wry smile that did hot and disturbing things to her insides. ‘We’ll both be old soon enough.’
‘We will?’ she echoed in a breathy whisper that must have given him doubts about that maturity, but she did feel like a giddy girl when he took her gently by the arm and urged her further into darkness and away from the pool of golden candlelight spilling out of a ballroom that now seemed almost as remote from her as the Arctic.
‘Will someone come dashing out to find you any moment now, ready to usher you away?’ he asked with a smile, but she felt a tension in his sleekly powerful body that made her frown briefly.
‘No,’ she told him like a silly debutante desperate to be ruined by a rogue. ‘My family trusts me to behave,’ she added with a late tilt at sophistication and a flutter in her heartbeat that suggested they shouldn’t tonight.
‘They don’t consider the basic needs of the human heart often enough, then, or, in my case, even baser masculine ones you’re better not to know about until you really are a Mrs Belle,’ he replied with a cynical thread in his voice that made her frown for another sensible, bone-jarring moment before the darkness and scent from some exotic hothouse flower nearby wafted it clean away.
‘So you’re not to be trusted?’ she heard herself ask like the fledgling idiot she’d never allowed herself to be in polite society.
Nobody was ever going to lure her in with showy good looks, false promises of love and passion, and heady nights like this one. She remembered her eldest sister, Miranda, falling for evil, charming Nevin Braxton at seventeen and all the horror her elopement and ruin had brought down on her family’s lives too well for that. Isabella had shuddered away from rakes as if their kisses would poison her ever since. This man hadn’t flattered and flirted and fawned on her, though. He seemed to see beyond her golden looks, exquisitely fashioned gown and neat figure and was speaking to the real Isabella.
And
