Free Moth to the Flame by Maxine Barry

smiled. ‘Thank you. We like it.’ Rupert and Neville Norman gave each other a long, thoughtful look. A look of recognition. Of joined forces . . .
    Alicia, trapped between them, felt herself struggling to breathe. Rupert Greyling-Simms was looking at her with such open admiration she knew she should be flattered. But she wasn’t. For some reason, she felt scared. Which was ridiculous of course. What was there to be scared of?
    Oh, if only Jared would look at her like that, as if she was an answer to his prayer.
    Jared was looking at her, but he was also watching the mutual admiration society being forged between the two men. And he, too, felt a frisson of foreboding.
    Neville Norman, however, was too happily contemplating what a perfect prospective Countess his beautiful sister would make for Warrington Manor to think about anything else.
    Rupert Greyling-Simms simply continued to stare intently at Alicia.

CHAPTER SIX
    Gareth Lacey walked to the long sets of French windows that led into Hall and glanced inside. Long red velvet curtains hung at the windows and portraits lined the walls. His eyes, however, went straight towards High Table. Dinner seemed to be the only time he could nail her down nowadays. But that beautiful face with its wide green eyes was conspicuous by its absence.
    He felt his heart sink. It was a full-fledged physical sensation, and he knew he should be alarmed at just how deeply involved with her he was becoming. But he couldn’t bring himself to be sorry. In just two weeks, he’d found himself hooked, and he was glad. He would glance out of the window during the middle of a tutorial in the hopes of spotting the golden-haired siren, who seemed to want to have nothing to do with him. He found himself practically living in the SCR, just in the hopes that she might come in for a sherry and a blistering attack on Shakespeare’s sonnets. She was not, he had discovered to everyone’s horror, a Shakespeare fan.
    When he thought of the intimate closeness of their first meeting, one part of him suspected her of blowing hot and cold in order to disorientate him. Of playing with him, like a cat played with a mouse. The thought made him feel giddy with desire. He was a man who had written books on the love affair between Lady Caroline Lamb and the ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ Lord Byron. A man who admired a woman’s femininity, her capriciousness, her claws, her passions, her cunning. A man who understood Romance as a living, breathing, life-fulfilling concept. Being stalked by Davina Granger was wonderful. It was bliss. It was making him feel alive, completely alive, for the first time in years. But another part of him wondered whether he’d totally misread the signs. Whether that first, spine-tingling conversation of theirs had been merely run-of-the-mill to her. It terrified him to think that she really might be as disinterested in him as she seemed now to pretend. Having tasted the heady delights of being close to her, probing her delightfully convoluted psyche, bathing in the sights and sounds and scents of her, he wanted more. Much more.
    He saw one or two of his students glance at him curiously, and headed back for the stairs.
    *          *          *
    Davina paused outside Gareth’s door and glanced around. With everyone in Hall, the silence was eerie. She knew she’d have to be quick, and taking a deep breath she timidly knocked on the door, and then resolutely pushed it open. Nobody locked their doors in St Bede’s, it seemed. As she switched on the light, she could see, to her relief, that the room was empty. Inside, with the door closed, her heart beat fast. Ridiculous to be so nervous, of course. She’d been at St Bede’s long enough to have studied Gareth’s every move.
    She was just obviously not cut out to be a housebreaker.
    Here, in his rooms, she could feel his