“I told you, I don’t intend to skulk in the shadows,” Jack contended as he moved to stand before her.
“Well, you cannot court me in public. My father would be livid. And in any case, you don’t want to marry me.”
“Actually, I believe I might.”
She looked startled. Her lush mouth parted as she stared up at him in shock.
In truth, Jack had surprised himself by joining the lists for her hand. His reasons for pursuing Sophie were innate and intuitive rather than overtly comprehensible, but it felt right.
“You have a vexing habit of rendering me speechless,” she muttered after a moment. “I still think you are up to no good.”
“I assure you my motives are entirely pure,” Jack retorted. “I wouldn’t think of wooing you if you actually loved Dunmore. It wouldn’t be honorable.”
“Oh, now you are concerned with honor?”
He grinned. “Occasionally the concept crosses my mind.”
He took a step closer to Sophie. “Can you deny wanting to know if we are a match?”
Her lengthy hesitation spoke volumes. “No … but my father would never permit me to marry you.”
The prospect of betraying her parents troubled her greatly, Jack knew. “Then I will have to woo your father as well as you. Attending your aunt’s gathering will give me time to soften his animosity. And who knows? Perhaps we can even find a way to end the squabble between our families.”
Sophie frowned. “It is hardly a squabble. I told you how much the title means to him.”
“So you did,” Jack said more soberly.
“Then why won’t you abandon this futile quest?”
Reaching up, he pressed his fingers to her lips. “Because the stakes are too high. I am asking you to trust me, Sophie.… Will you do that much?”
The look that crossed her lovely features was one of hope, of wistful yearning. Then as she gazed up at him, sexual awareness suddenly joined the other expressive emotions in her beautiful eyes.
As his thumb stroked her lower lip, Sophie went still. Jack stepped even closer, breathing in her sweet scent, feeling the heat of arousal rising inside him. She could feel it too, he knew.
Desire shimmered between them, alive and palpable. And yet there was more to it than simple physical hunger. It was as if a powerful rush of need linked them together. A bond, a connection, of tenderness, of intimacy.
A visible shiver ran down her spine, and Sophie shut her eyes for a moment, as if fighting herself.
Jack was fighting against the same craving. He badly wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her final resistance away. Even so, this was not the time or place. He would have his chance in two more days, he promised himself.
Reluctantly, he exhaled the breath that had caught in his lungs and lowered his hand from her mouth. “I will see you on Tuesday at your aunt’s country home in Berkshire. For now I must have a word with Skye and arrange for my cousin Traherne to handle some of my affairs while I am away.”
Then Jack stepped back and turned away, taking a measure of comfort in the disappointment he’d seen in Sophie’s eyes.
It had become a Wilde family tradition to gather for Sunday dinner as often as possible, a custom initially started the summer following the tragic loss of their parents. Lord Cornelius had hoped to drum civilized manners into the five hooligan youngsters, and they had complied in order to please their long-suffering, much-loved uncle. Over the years, however, the dinners had evolved into a way to remain involved in one anothers’ lives.
At the end of that long-ago summer, the cousins had gone their separate ways—Ash and Quinn to university, the girls to a boarding academy, while then-seventeen-year-old Jack had remained behind at Beauvoir with Uncle Cornelius for another year. But the bonds of love and family had never been broken, as Jack thought they might be. In fact, their ties had actually been made stronger, for their separation had only made them cherish one another more.
Normally Jack relished their clan gatherings—except when he was the prime focus of attention, as he knew he would be now. Thus, he’d delayed arriving at the Beaufort mansion in Grosvenor Square until the last minute. When he finally sauntered into the drawing room, he found three Wilde ladies assembled there, sipping sherry, along with his elderly, bespectacled uncle.
Of course Ash and his new wife Maura were absent, having retired to the Beaufort family seat in Kent in search of privacy as a blissfully wedded couple. Quinn was missing as well—no doubt off somewhere applying his brilliant mind to his latest scientific inventions. A boon, Jack decided, since cool-headed, cynical Quinn would rag him unmercifully about being bear-led by the girls and surrendering to their romanticism.
But the rest of the family was there. Skye looked fresh as a rose, her pale-blond fairness a contrast to the darker coloring of the others. Kate was an auburn-haired beauty who at four-and-twenty had attracted countless beaus, but who had never found the true love she’d sought since coming out of short skirts. Hence, her obsession with matchmaking for her kin.
Their aunt by marriage, Lady Isabella Wilde, had raven hair like Jack, the result of her Latin heritage. The daughter of a Spanish nobleman and an Englishwoman, Isabella had taken Cornelius’s younger brother Henry for her third husband. Now widowed once more, she was as vivacious as any of the Wildes, although she was in her middle forties—nearly the same age as the Duke of Dunmore, as it happened.
Aunt Bella divided her time between her homes in London, Cornwall, and the Isle of Cyrene in the Mediterranean, but had returned to London last month at Ash’s request to aid him in his courtship of Maura.