Free The Wedding Challenge by Candace Camp

indeed, his smile, his face, his voice…all seemed both kind and understanding. Nor was there anything about him that bespoke the roué—no leer, no suggestive tone or improper suggestion.
    “Then you will not…tell anyone…?”
    “About coming upon you walking?” he finished. “Of course not. There is little to remark on in meeting a young lady who is taking a stroll, is there?”
    “No, there is not,” Callie agreed, swept with relief.
    “But, please, allow me to escort you back to your home.” He politely offered her his arm.
    “I am not going there. I am bound for Lady Haughston’s house.”
    He looked a bit puzzled, but to Callie’s relief he did not pursue the oddity of her deciding to take a stroll to Francesca’s house at this time of night, but merely said, “Then I shall be happy to escort you to Lady Haughston’s, if you will but show me the way. I am not, you may have guessed, well acquainted with London.”
    “I did not think that I had seen you before,” Callie admitted, taking his arm and starting once more down the street.
    “I have spent nearly all my time at my estate since coming into the title,” he told her. “I am sorry to say that it was in a rather sorry state of affairs. I have not had a great deal of time for…” He shrugged.
    “Frivolities?” she suggested.
    He smiled, glancing at her. “I do not mean to imply that a life spent here is frivolous.”
    Callie grinned. “I take no offense, I assure you. Indeed, I know that a great deal of it is frivolous.”
    “There is nothing wrong with a little frivolity.”
    There was something quite exhilarating about walking along this way with this man—even their rather ordinary words seemed tinged with a feeling of daring and excitement. It was extremely rare for her to be alone with a man other than her brother for any length of time. And to be alone with any man at this time of night on a dark street was simply unheard of. Callie had never before done anything that would so shock everyone she knew. Yet she could not find it in herself to regret it. She did not, she realized with a little bit of surprise, even feel guilty or wrong. What she felt was free and fizzing with excitement.
    Because she was a candid woman, she also knew that the way she felt inside did not come entirely from the adventure of being in this time and place. Indeed, most of the exhilaration bubbling up inside her had to do with this particular man.
    She stole a sideways glance at him, taking in the hard straight line of his jaw, the upward swoop of his cheekbone, the faint shadow of beard that colored his cheek this late at night. There was something hard and powerful about him, not just in the obvious physical strength of his wide shoulders and tall frame, but in the air of confidence and competence he exuded. She sensed that, even as he smiled and talked to her, he was alert and watchful, his gray eyes always searching, his muscles tensed and ready. He was, she thought, the sort of man to whom people naturally turned in a crisis. But, conversely, she suspected that he was also not a man whom it was advisable to cross.
    It occurred to her, with a little jolt, that in that way he was rather like her brother. Not as urbane as the duke and with a more roguish sort of charm. Still, she sensed that there was in him that same hard core that lay in Sinclair, a dark and immutable center that belied the aristocratic trappings and British gentility.
    As if he sensed her eyes on him, he glanced over at her, his own eyes shadowed and dark. He did not smile or say anything, just looked at her, but Callie felt a sizzle of intense attraction snake down through her.
    She looked away, afraid that her eyes would betray the sheer physicality of what she felt. Lord Bromwell unsettled her; she responded to him in a way she could not remember with any man. But the uncertainty, oddly, seemed to draw her rather than repel her. She wished that she knew what Sinclair disliked about