Free Reckless Viscount by Amy Sandas Page B

he was watching her with faint amusement in his changeable eyes, anticipation began to mingle with the trepidation already firmly seated in her consciousness.
    “I thought I told you not to approach me.”
    He smiled and her toes curled in her dancing slippers.
    “You had to know I wouldn’t listen.”
    She had hoped. “Did you follow me?”
    “Maybe you followed me,” he shot back. The curl at the corner of his mouth betrayed the humor he tried to hold back.
    She gave a tiny harrumph and narrowed her eyes.
    His irrepressible grin broke free in response to her irritation.
    “Why are you here, Irish?”
    She scowled, but before she could reply he lifted his large hand from where it rested on his abdomen and gave a negligent wave. “I don’t mean here in this quaint little corner of tranquility. It’s easy to guess why you might claim a moment of solitude from all of that.” He gestured again toward the ballroom just beyond the encompassing foliage. “I mean, why are you in London parading yourself though the marriage market?”
    She put on the weary demeanor of a governess trying to instill an important lesson into the thick head of a resistant child.
    “I am here, Lord Riley, parading myself as you so elegantly put it, in the hope that I might receive an offer of marriage from a worthy man.”
    His grin twisted into something more of a grimace.
    “I had thought you to be more sensible.”
    “Than to seek a proper marriage?”
    She tried to maintain a posture of modest decorum, a problematic task when the rich warmth in his eyes, cast so intimately up at her, threatened to crumble her firm resolve.
    “Than to seek fulfillment in such a conventional manner,” he answered glibly. “There are many more satisfying ways to involve yourself with a man than to marry him.”
    “More scandalous, you mean.”
    He smiled. Unrepentantly.
    Her heart skipped. Wildly.
    “Tell me there’s still time to alter your course. None of those bumbling blokes have made an offer yet, have they?”
    Abbigael glanced away from his teasing face, recalling the reason she had fled the ballroom.
    “No. They haven’t.”
    Lord Riley rolled to his side, curving his upper body in an intimate arc. He propped himself up on his elbow until his face became level with hers and only inches away. She watched him warily but did not scoot away or stand. His expression was surprisingly earnest.
    “What troubles you, Irish?”
    She should have denied any distress. She should have waved off his question with a flippant remark, but there was something comforting in the warmth of his body that curled around her. Close but not touching. She had no idea how it was possible to feel the instinctive urging to trust a man who by all rationalization was not worthy of such a sentiment. But she did trust him just then. As someone who was constantly judged unfavorably himself, perhaps he would not be too harsh in his judgment of her.
    Her answer, when she spoke, was very quiet though she didn’t fear being overheard.
    “A gentleman, someone I once knew in Dublin.”
    Riley arched a tawny eyebrow. “An old suitor?”
    She hesitated, pressing her fingertips to her temple and bowing her head.
    What difference did it make what she told this man? Her past could not be changed. There was no shame in the truth. She lifted her chin and met his curious gaze.
    “He showed some interest at first, but then he discovered something about me, about my past. I suppose it was due to an irrational sense of betrayal that he felt justified in spreading the tidbits of information, with a few dramatic embellishments of course, to every ear that would listen. He effectively ruined my chances of receiving an honorable offer in Ireland.”
    She finished her explanation and waited for him to respond, preparing herself for inquiries into just what the man had discovered about her.
    He remained silent far longer than she expected as he studied her face with those changeable eyes. The