Splendorous.
Magical.
Wondrous.
Last evening, in Rhys’ arms, Alice had discovered that passion and desire were real… and more, that she was capable of feeling. That one stolen moment could never be enough. Now that she’d tasted the thrill of Rhys’ embrace, how could she ever be contented?
And yet…
That had also been the last she’d seen of him. When she’d arisen early as she always did, humming a joyful ditty under her breath, she’d rushed to the breakfast room to find it empty of anyone—except her former betrothed.
She’d suffered through the morning meal, casting eager glances at the doorway, anticipation coursing through her for the moment he arrived.
How was a woman to be around the man who’d awakened her to the beauty to be found in lovemaking?
Alas, after she’d quit the breakfast room and taken a morning walk, the answer proved elusive.
He was avoiding her.
There could be no other explanation for it.
“I suggested hanging the Brookfield gems from the edge… shall we…?”
Alice blinked slowly and glanced over to the young woman standing beside her.
Lettie held up a spectacularly garish bough, adorned in gold, crimson, and velvet ribbons. “Of all the wonders, she listens,” her friend drawled. “You’ve been distracted since we began. You’re woolgathering.”
Alice promptly grabbed for the forgotten soft blue ribbon she’d selected for her bough. “I am not… woolgathering,” she whispered. Liar! You’ve thought of no one and nothing except Rhys Brookfield since he discovered you in The Copse. Her fingers shaking, Alice devoted all her attention to tying the ribbon about the aromatic green.
“Pining, then,” Lettie put forward, persistent as she’d always been. Where she’d loved her friend for that determination that had steered Alice away from the doldrums many times, now that attribute was a blasted nuisance. With an exaggerated tip of her head that could never be considered discreet, her friend motioned to the opposite end of the room.
As one, they looked across the rectangular oak table.
Henry, standing beside his young, loquacious bride, stared back through the lenses of his spectacles. A frown hovered on his lips.
Alice and Lettie swiftly returned their attention to their boughs. “I am most certainly not pining,” she whispered furiously. Except, in a way, she had been. Just not for the gentleman her friend believed she’d been thinking of.
Lettie paused in tying yet another tiny ribbon to her greenery. “Alice,” she said gently in hushed tones that barely reached her ears. “You’ve done nothing but pine since the moment I met you.”
Yes, she had. She’d been the mournful, sad-eyed creature Rhys had called out for being that morning in the breakfast room. Only, these past days with Rhys, aside from her telling of the failed betrothal, she’d not given thought to Henry.
She faced her friend. “I am not pining for him,” she quietly assured. “Not anymore.” Never again.
Lettie puzzled her brow and, squinting, she peered at Alice. “Truly?” She continued before Alice could speak. “Because you kept looking to the door and I assumed you were plotting your escape but…” Her eyes flared wide as she glanced to the door and then back once more to Alice. “You are looking for someone,” she blurted.
“Hush!” Cheeks ablaze, Alice glanced around at the other guests assembled about the table. The ladies and the handful of gentlemen present remained fixed on their discussions and greenery projects.
Alas, there could be no quieting Lettie when she’d gotten something into her mind. “These past days, I believed you were sneaking off because you were hiding; after breakfast, then again after dinner, this morn… while all along you’re smitten with some gentleman.” With her ability to ferret out information, her friend would be better served in the Home Office.
“I am not,” Alice said weakly. For she wasn’t. They were largely strangers; two people who’d come to a mutually beneficial agreement last evening.
In his arms last night was not nothing. That voice at the back of her mind continued to needle. You came undone in his arms, shamelessly and with abandon, and wish to do it again.
She stole another furtive glance at the doorway—the still empty doorway.
From where she sat at the head of the table, the dowager marchioness glowered in Alice’s direction until Alice squirmed in her seat. The other woman couldn’t know that, even now, Alice searched for Rhys. Lady Guilford, seated beside the miserable harpie, gave Alice a reassuring smile.
“Don’t mind her,” Lettie said, gathering a string of gold beads and winding them around the bough. She paused in her efforts. “Mother, that is,” she clarified, resuming her work. “Not Philippa. She’s quite lovely. A loving sister-in-law and devoted mama…”
While her friend carried on, Alice picked up a thin fir branch and her mind wandered.
By Rhys’ conspicuous absence, the magic of that exchange had clearly meant far less to him than it had to Alice. She had, after all, been the one begging him like a shameless harlot; pleading for him to continue when he’d pulled away. Alice cringed, and all the breath stuck sharply in her breast. With her entreaty, she’d behaved in the same desperate manner she had after Henry had broken it off.
Lettie gasped, snapping Alice to the moment. “My God, you are still daydreaming.”
“I am certainly not daydreaming,” she gritted out, peeking about the room. Again, Henry watched them. Only this time, he made no effort to hide his open assessment.
Dismissing him outright, Alice attended her branch. No, she certainly hadn’t been daydreaming about Rhys. Rather, she’d been lamenting her own pathetic response to his rejection.
“You were looking at the entrance of the room,” her friend persisted.
Had she been? “I…” Alice’s words froze on her lips as Rhys filled the doorway. Clad in a navy wool tailcoat and buckskin trousers, he was a model of male elegance and… he is staring at me.
Rhys’ stare, however, was not the casual, indolent stare of a rogue. This was the hooded, hot, piercing gaze that belonged to a scoundrel, whose eyes made silent, scandalous promises that any respectable lady would gladly shred her reputation for.
His lips, those same ones that had been on her, all over her not even twelve hours earlier, curved up in a dangerous half-grin that set her heart to racing.
He inclined his head. “Lady Alice,” he silently mouthed, either uncaring or not noticing the room full of guests noticing him. But then, that was the unfettered way he moved through life. And amid the wild fluttering in her breast, there beat an appreciation for the gentleman who’d given Alice her first taste of passion. When nearly all members of the ton cared overly much about the opinions of others, Rhys had a go-to-hell attitude, and it was hard not to admire that confidence and strength.
Emboldened by that, she returned his soundless greeting. “Lord Rhys.”
He shoved from the doorjamb and strode slowly, with languid steps better suited to a panther stalking its prey.
“Oh. My. God. In. Heaven,” Lettie exhaled that blasphemy in a too-loud whisper. “It is… Rhys,” she squawked. “You…and…Rhys and…my God,” she repeated.
Alice wanted to tell her friend all. She wished to unveil the scheme crafted last evening by Rhys, so there could be no falsities surrounding Rhys’ intentions.
But the words would not come. For with every step that brought him closer, there was a realness to his hot steel-grey stare. No man could fake such a response.
Ultimately, it was the dowager marchioness who shattered that pull.
Dragging along her goddaughter, the stunning Miss Cunning, the dowager marchioness stepped into Rhys’ path, forcing him to a stop.
The branch she’d been holding snapped and the greenery dangled, two forlorn pieces, between her fingers.
Lettie swung her clever gaze between that trio and Alice. “Will you say something?” she hissed.
She couldn’t. Instead, Alice remained riveted on Rhys and Miss Cunning.
“And do not say I’m merely imagining… this,” she waved another garish gold bow in Rhys’ direction.
Cursing under her breath, Alice snatched her friend’s wrist and forced it back to the table. “Will you at least be discreet?” she implored.
Lettie merely folded her arms. “Well?”
In the end, Alice was saved from answering.
“My dearest sister,” Rhys boomed, dropping a reverent bow that sent those golden curls tumbling over his brow.
With an inelegant snort, dearest sister crossed her arms at her chest again. “You want something.”
He pressed a hand to his chest, staggering back. “I’m insulted.” Rhys grinned. “May I relieve you of your partner?”
With the gaze of every last guest present trained on them, Alice’s body burned with a blush that started in her toes and ran to the roots of her hair.
“Only if my partner wishes it.”
Brother and sister stared at Alice.
Oh, bloody hell. She shifted back and forth. For with that unspoken question on her friend’s part, she demanded an answer to her earlier query about Alice and Rhys.
Lifting a golden eyebrow, Rhys extended his elbow.
Alice hesitated a moment before placing her fingertips on his sleeve and allowing him to guide her down the length of the table, further away from Lettie and even further still from his mother and prospective bride.
Rhys brought them to a stop at the unoccupied station. Angling his shoulder, he shielded them from the stares trained on them. He placed his lips close to her ear, his breath stirring the sensitive skin. A giggle tumbled from her lips. “That is splendid, love,” he whispered.
Love.
It was just one word and, yet, spoken in his melodic baritone, it rolled off his tongue like an intimate caress.
“Mmm,” she murmured incoherently, swaying closer.
Raising her hand to his mouth, Rhys brushed a lingering kiss upon her knuckles and her skin burned from that slight contact. “A heated stare, a stolen interlude is all it takes for the world to see precisely what it is they are expected to see.” Those casual, too-matter-of-fact words brought reality crashing into her with all the force of a fast-moving carriage.
The agreement they’d struck.
Their pretend courtship.
Why, Rhys hadn’t come in here eying Alice as though she were the only woman in the world because he desired her. Rather, his entrance had been part of a scheme to thwart his mother’s plans for him.
Her heart sank to her belly and sat heavy there.
What did you expect? That any of this show was, indeed, real?
“Is he looking?”
Is he looking? What was he on about? She struggled through her miserable musings, trying to make sense of his query.
“The pup.”
Henry.
Her stomach churned. Why… he was speaking so casually of her former betrothed. And why shouldn’t he? The other end of their pact had involved Alice making Henry outrageously jealous and thwarting his efforts to see her.
She forced herself to dip her gaze around his shoulder.
An ashen-faced Henry didn’t even make an attempt to hide his scrutiny. His frank observation now was the only time in the course of their never-ending betrothal where he’d ever done anything as outrageous as to gawk.
Henry’s gaze locked with hers… and Alice felt… nothing.
There was no thrill of satisfaction at his upset. There was no regret for what had almost been with them. No, there was no victory in any of this. Rather, she was filled with a hollow emptiness for the game of pretend she’d entered in to with Rhys.
Which was madness, feeling any such wistfulness for a man she’d only just recently met.
“Tsk. Tsk. This will never do.”
Unblinkingly, she glanced up. “What?” she asked cautiously, more than half-afraid with his rogue’s intuition that he’d gathered the tumult he’d wrought in her.
“It won’t do for him to see you woebegone. It has all the markings of a broken heart.”
He’d come to the erroneous conclusion that her upset came from her pining after Henry. She gave silent thanks for that misunderstanding. “And you know so very much about broken hearts,” she muttered.
He fell uncharacteristically silent and she glanced up.
A shadow darkened his eyes. She drew in a silent breath.
Of course.
How had she failed to completely understand it before now? It was why he’d so easily recognized the product of Alice’s misery. She’d had an inkling of it before, but now she was sure. “You had your heart broken,” she quietly ventured.
His body stilled. “We aren’t talking about me. Smile,” Rhys urged in another tantalizing whisper.
It didn’t escape her notice how effortlessly he’d steered them from the intimate query she’d put to him. Alice drew in a shaky breath. Damn Rhys Brookfield and the effect of his nearness. And damn her for her own weakness. She forced her lips up, stretching them into a smile until her cheeks ached. “Are you happy?”
“I am.” He snorted. “But there can be no confusing your smile as anything more than an ill-concealed grimace.”
Her lips twitched.
“That is a slight improvement.” Rhys waggled his golden eyebrows. “Not a convincing I-love-you-and-only-you-Rhys-Brookfield smile, per se, but it will suffice.”
A sharp bark of laughter burst from her lips and her melancholy lifted. “You’re insufferable, Rhys Brookfield.”
“Oh, I’ve been told many times from my dear mama,” he shared, gathering a fir branch. Then, sifting through the decorations that had been set out by servants, Rhys collected a pale blue satin ribbon and a string of silver beads. He sat and proceeded to loop the ribbon around the branch.
Alice opened and closed her mouth several times. “What are you doing?” she blurted.
“I believe we were decorating boughs.”
“You decorate boughs?”
Pausing in his task, he dropped his elbows atop the table and looked up at her. “I join you wherever you are, madam.”
Again, his being here was a product of their pact.
The feeling of moroseness swiftly returned. Alice sat and began work on a bough of her own.
Rhys leaned down. “I may have some experience with decorating garland,” he confessed.
She snorted.
“My sisters enjoyed it. Each Christmastide season Lettie and Rosalind would challenge me to a snowball throwing contest. If they won, I would join them in creating decorations.”
How very different the relationship he painted with his sisters than the one she herself had known with Daniel. She’d been invisible. Forgotten. And then there had been brothers such as Rhys who allowed himself to be cajoled into child’s games. She hadn’t known there were brothers such as the one he’d been to Lettie and Rosalind. She hadn’t known there were any men such as him. “And if you won?” she asked, her curiosity piqued.
Rhys tied his ribbon off at the end of the garland. “Why, I never won, of course.”
Her pulse tripped several beats. “You let them win,” she breathed. Despite the end result meaning he’d be forced to join two younger girls in decorating the sprawling household, he’d ceded those victories.
He winked and resumed knotting another ribbon to his strand of garland.
And as they shared a secretive smile, a little sliver of her heart fell for Rhys Brookfield.