And he knew it. He knew that she was the one. He stood frozen, transfixed. The air didn’t rush from his body; rather, it seemed to slowly escape until there was nothing left, and he just stood there, hollow, and aching for more.
He couldn’t see her face, not even her profile. There was just her back, just the breathtakingly perfect curve of her neck, one lock of blond hair swirling against her shoulder.
And all he could think was—I am wrecked.
For all other women, he was wrecked. This intensity, this fire, this overwhelming sense of rightness—he had never felt anything like it.
Maybe it was silly. Maybe it was mad. It was probably both those things. But he’d been waiting. For this moment, for so long, he’d been waiting. And it suddenly became clear—why he hadn’t joined the military or the clergy, or taken his brother up on one of his frequent offers to manage a smaller Bridgerton estate.
He’d been waiting. That’s all it was. Hell, he hadn’t even realized how much he’d been doing nothing but waiting for this moment.
And here it was.
There she was.
And he knew.
He knew.
He moved slowly across the lawn, food and Kate forgotten. He managed to murmur his greetings to the one or two people he passed on his way, still keeping his pace. He had to reach her. He had to see her face, breathe her scent, know the sound of her voice.
And then he was there, standing mere feet away. He was breathless, awed, somehow fulfilled merely to stand in her presence.
She was speaking with another young lady, with enough animation to mark them as good friends. He stood there for a moment, just watching them until they slowly turned and realized he was there.
He smiled. Softly, just a little bit. And he said . . .
“How do you do?”
Lucinda Abernathy, better known to, well, everyone who knew her, as Lucy, stifled a groan as she turned to the gentleman who had crept up on her, presumably to make calf eyes at Hermione, as did, well, everyone who met Hermione.
It was an occupational hazard of being friends with Hermione Watson. She collected broken hearts the way the old vicar down by the Abbey collected butterflies.
The only difference, being, of course, that Hermione didn’t jab her collection with nasty little pins. In all fairness, Hermione didn’t wish to win the hearts of gentlemen, and she certainly never set out to break any of them. It just . . . happened. Lucy was used to it by now. Hermione was Hermione, with pale blond hair the color of butter, a heart-shaped face, and huge, wide-set eyes of the most startling shade of green.
Lucy, on the other hand, was . . . Well, she wasn’t Hermione, that much was clear. She was simply herself, and most of the time, that was enough.
Lucy was, in almost every visible way, just a little bit less than Hermione. A little less blond. A little less slender. A little less tall. Her eyes were a little less vivid in color—bluish-gray, actually, quite attractive when compared with anyone other than Hermione, but that did her little good, as she never went anywhere without Hermione.
She had come to this stunning conclusion one day while not paying attention to her lessons on English Composition and Literature at Miss Moss’s School for Exceptional Young Ladies, where she and Hermione had been students for three years.
Lucy was a little bit less. Or perhaps, if one wanted to put a nicer sheen on it, she was simply not quite.
She was, she supposed, reasonably attractive, in that healthy, traditional, English rose sort of manner, but men were rarely (oh, very well, never) struck dumb in her presence.
Hermione, however . . . well, it was a good thing she was such a nice person. She would have been impossible to be friends with, otherwise.
Well, that and the fact that she simply could not dance. Waltz, quadrille, minuet—it really didn’t matter. If it involved music and movement, Hermione couldn’t do it.
And it was lovely.
Lucy didn’t think herself a particularly shallow person, and she would have insisted, had anyone asked, that she would freely throw herself in front of a carriage for her dearest friend, but there was a sort of satisfying fairness in the fact that the most beautiful girl in England had two left feet, at least one of them club.
Metaphorically speaking.
And now here was another one. Man, of course, not foot. Handsome, too. Tall, although not overly so, with warm brown hair and a rather pleasing smile. And a twinkle in his eyes as well, the color of which she couldn’t quite determine in the dim night air.
Not to mention that she couldn’t actually see his eyes, as he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Hermione, as men always did.