Free How to Marry a Rake by Deb Marlowe

while he spoke, with those incredible, alarming eyes, and, because it was Mae, he allowed his intensity and passion to show. The words came slowly at first. But she listened without commentand he tried to relate at least some of the blood, sweat and tears that he had poured into the project, and a great deal of the respect and obligation he felt for the people who had worked alongside him.
    He told her of his idea to use Pratchett’s notoriety to add to Fincote’s. Above all, he wanted her to see all of the hope and excitement that he’d brought with him to Newmarket.
    She idly tossed bits of bread to the waiting birds, but her gaze remained on him. Silently she studied him. He had the peculiar sense that she was trying to reconcile what she knew with what she saw. He could understand her confusion. It felt at once old hat to be sharing intimacies with her again, and yet it felt somehow … new, as well.
    ‘Do you find it all difficult to believe?’ he asked with a self-deprecating laugh. ‘The last time we saw each other, I was still pulling pranks and chasing skirts about town.’ He chuckled again. ‘Life is certainly different now.’
    ‘I think we’ve both had a chance to grow up,’ she said simply.
    ‘Sometimes I wake up and I forget. For a moment I’m still that same attention-starved boy—willing to do anything to get a rise or a laugh out of my brothers and sisters. Or my parents.’ He grinned, reminded of their old camaraderie. Except that never before had he been tempted to reach out and test the softness of the curls at her nape, or ease the tension in her frame with a quick caress. ‘Or you.’ His smile died away. ‘And sometimes the feeling lingers and I know it’s the truth. I am still the same.’
    She frowned. The chunks of bread she tossed were too big now. They scattered the birds at their feet like grenades. ‘Of course you are not.’
    ‘It’s all of a piece, I think sometimes.’ He focused on the squabbling birds for a long moment. ‘Brenner helped me to see, both myself and others, more clearly.’ He spoke of Viscount Brenner, who had married his half-sister, Justine. ‘He is so different from my father. Father was formidable, of course. But Brenner is so solid. Not at all like the fast crowd that used to hang about Welbourne.’ He cast another grin in her direction. ‘He gave me a view down a different path.’
    ‘I think perhaps I know what you mean. He’s well known and well liked and absolutely respected.’
    ‘Exactly. I got a taste of that, building Fincote. Heady stuff. I don’t wish to lose their respect.’ He sighed. ‘That’s what worries me.’
    She nodded. ‘It was a good plan. The best you could have come up with, I think, given all the circumstances.’ She cocked her head at him. ‘But what will you do now? Now that Pratchett is gone?’
    Stephen’s breath caught. His muscles tensed. Every instinct cried out for him to stop, to turn away before he could make the mistake of leaving himself open and vulnerable.
    ‘I want to find Pratchett,’ he said, throwing himself on the mercy he hoped to find in those blue eyes. ‘I want to be the one to return that thoroughbred to Ryeton, to create a spectacle that will capture the hearts and minds of the racing community and that will leave the earl obligated to race his horse at my course.’ He swallowed, then took her hand in his. ‘And I want you to help me.’
    * * *
     
    Mae was so occupied keeping rein on her traitorous body that it took several minutes for the impact of that last statement to sink in.
    Stephen sat close, too close, and, despite their past, her resolve and her head’s desperate pleas for caution, she had to fight to keep the rest of her from quivering at his nearness. Outwardly, her fingers beat out the only sign of her agitation, drumming on the remains of the thick loaf in her hands as if the rhythm would soothe the butterflies cavorting in her belly.
    But inwardly it was another