Tears threatened as she heaved great, cloudy breaths in the fading light from the ballroom, as she wondered what would come next. Leaning back against a large oak, she stared up at the stars, wondering how she had come to be here, in this place, in this dress, with this man. She took a deep breath and hurried down the steps from the stone colonnade to the dark gardens of Leighton House, disappearing into the landscape, thanking Heaven for the shadows. What she could not combat was his warmth. She wrapped her arms tight across her chest, telling herself she’d been colder and worse off. I t was bitterly cold, and she wished she’d thought to fetch her cloak before escaping the stifling ballroom, but she couldn’t very well head back inside. His fingers slid over her silk-clad wrist even as she pulled away from him, already in smooth, graceful motion. Knowing only that he wanted to touch her. He reached for her, her name soft on his lips, not knowing what came next. It did not matter how they had come to be here. She had lived twelve years in the darkness.Ĭhrist. And she was no longer afraid of the darkness beyond. Another moment that had revealed too much of Mara Lowe. She was frozen, all long limbs and grace, poised at the edge of the ballroom, staring at the doors, leading into blackness, and the metaphor was not lost on him. She’d chosen a life in the unknown over a life with a man who might well have been her father’s second.
“I didn’t know that,” she said softly, the words filled with regret. He would have hated his father for having her. He would have protected her from the moment he met her. “I would never have let him hurt you,” he said. A man who counted her bastard of a father among his closest friends.Ī man whose son was an inveterate womanizer, even at eighteen. A man whose last three wives had met unfortunate fates. She’d been sixteen, and set to marry a man three times her age. The words came like a blow, quick and in his blind spot, the kind that made a man see wild stars.
“Because I was afraid your father was like mine.”
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