Free Julie Anne Long by The Runaway Duke

Connor hoisted himself aboard. Then with a snap of the reins, the gray trotted briskly out of the stable yard.
    Edelston was watching a fat bee hovering above one of the fluffy damask roses that lined the front garden of Tremaine House. He gifted it with a dreamily benevolent smile.
I am as the bee
, he thought,
and my sweet Rebecca is as the rose. The bee seeks to drink the nectar from the fragrant petals of the rose, and the . . .
    He interrupted himself midthought and shifted on the stone bench, turning his thoughts to a more immediate concern, one that had very little to do with propriety and much to do with his recently discovered sense of honor. In light of the hastiness of the proceedings, he had invited but one guest to the wedding, and the clattering of hooves in the courtyard announced that she had arrived, in a carriage bearing the Dunbrooke arms. Edelston stood, hat doffed, and watched as Cordelia Blackburn, Duchess of Dunbrooke, was helped from her carriage by a brace of eager Tremaine footmen.
    She was wearing some restrained confection of a hat, straw with a bit of blue feather fluttering from it. He smiled. It was almost cruel, the way Cordelia always skillfully highlighted her extraordinary features with a tassel here, a bit of lace there. It was one of her weapons, and not the least of them by far. Edelston watched as Cordelia gave some instructions to her maidservant and the dark, bent little manservant who always seemed to hover near her. Finally the clutch of servants dispersed into the house, staggering under trunks.
    Then she turned and saw Edelston waiting for her in the front garden, just as they had agreed, and moved toward him.
    Cordelia did not so much walk as
shimmer,
her movement a seeming product of the meeting of sunshine and air. Her face bloomed like a lily atop the delicate stem of her neck, and one gleaming blue-black curl caressed the slope of her cheekbone, as deliberate as the final note of a symphony. But just like everything else about Cordelia, Edelston knew her ethereal air was an illusion. Cordelia Blackburn could clamp her silky thighs around a man’s waist like a vise, and he had more than once heard her howl like a banshee in the throes of . . .
    He was beginning to feel warm.
    “Tony,” she said in that song of a voice, and extended a hand encased in blue kid.
    Edelston grasped her proffered fingers and bent over them.
    “Cordelia. You are . . . a vision. You steal my breath, as always.”
    She laughed, a sound like tiny bells spilling out onto the lawn.
    “I see your silver tongue has not been tarnished by your prolonged stay in the damp country air, Tony. Once again I am at its mercy.”
    Cordelia did not appear to be at the mercy of anyone at all, Edelston noted. She cast her eyes up at him from beneath the brim of her snug little straw hat. Those eyes were another of her weapons: a limpid sapphire encircled by a rim of midnight blue, enormous with just the hint of a tilt to them. The expression in them rarely changed. There was always some degree of ironic amusement, cool detachment, or subtle challenge reflected there. Edelston had once considered this the height of sophistication, her control of every situation a breathtaking thing. Now he found he preferred unpredictability, specifically the unpredictability of a particular redhead.
    “I have indeed been spared tarnish, Cordelia. But do you perhaps detect a . . . patina of happiness?”
    “A patina of happiness,” Cordelia repeated slowly, incredulously, as she withdrew her fingers from his. “Oh, dear.”
    “Yes, it’s true, Cordelia,” Edelston said solemnly as he led her to the bench and sat down at her side, “I am in love. For the first time in my life.”
    It had apparently never occurred to Edelston that someone whose name he had more than once shouted in the throes of passion might wince upon hearing such a confession. But if Cordelia was wounded she did not show it; her eyes merely widened and the