Page 47 of The Fortune Hunter’s Gamble

She didn’t know him anymore, not really. This man was too new, too strange. If she dallied with him, she stood to lose so much more than her self-respect. She could not set her foot down the wrong path, not again, even if her heart called for him to hold her, urged her to experience passion for once in her life. The cost would be too great.

It was safer to go home, to her quiet bed, to be wise and alone. So she left, abandoning Rowden to the shadows and the last flickering nub of the candle, even though every last tendril in her heart begged her to stay and be lost to him.

She would not lose herself to a man. Not again.

CHAPTER TEN

Sophronia Edmons had caused Rowden a sleepless night, and she wasn’t showing the slightest repentance for her discourteous behavior.

Moreover, she kept pretending not to notice the glares he was sending her across the crowded gallery of Somerset House, where they had come to view the exhibition hosted by the Royal Academy. It was a popular venue for fashionable display, as much as an evening promenade through the parks, and Rowden kept losing sight of her orange-gold hair as she strolled with Miss Westall and Aunt Dobbs through the knots of people studying the paintings and one another.

Sophronia had cost him sleep before, in the days of her first betrayal, but this was worse. This was his initial jilting all over again, now deepened by the confirmation of what he had suspected: that she had married Henry Hinton to make herself comfortable and secure.

Worse yet was the revelation of what he had not known, namely that the Felthams had been menacing her with threats to take away her family home, and this was the reason she rushed into marriage. She had chosen another protector instead of coming to him.

He steered around a courting couple, grinding his teeth at the man’s eager, animated expression as he spoke down into the flower-like face of the lady next to him. The lady glowed back up at him, rapt, or pretending to be. Happy couples merely fed Rowden’s ire.

Now that she was widowed and vulnerable again, it appeared the shrub of an heir was menacing Sophronia once more, and she had not turned to Rowden for assistance. It was as though she thought him utterly worthless.

A man she could kiss, but not give her heart to. Not a man she could love.

He growled low in his throat, and a man in military uniform, holding his cocked hat beneath his arm, stepped out of his way with a look of surprise. Rowden gnashed his teeth at his own stupidity.

He should not want her to love him. He did not want her to love him. She was false, she was self-serving, and she was calculating. Just look at the way she kept throwing Giles and Lily together until the boy had no choice but to fall prey to Miss Westall’s charms. Poor Giles had never had an opportunity to choose his own fate, not once Sophronia had decided for him.

And she’d told Fanny Glass that she had loved Rowden her whole life. He hadn’t been able to move for long moments, hearing that. He’d scarcely been able to breathe.

That she could say it so candidly, so openly, to a woman who was an utter stranger to her—that must mean she was not ashamed to admit her feelings. But then, when he held her in his arms—at last, at long last—she’d pulled away.

His arms and chest ached at the memory of the most brilliant, the most searing, the most devastating kiss of his life—Ro, in his arms, finally—and she didn’t share his feelings. Hadn’t felt devoured by the same towering wall of flame, an inferno that swept all before it.

She’d loved him once, perhaps, with the undiscerning, unconditional love of girlhood. But she didn’t love him now.

Love didn’t lead to marriage for Sophronia. She’d said as much to Fanny, and remembering those words, it was as though one of the sculptures in an anterior gallery had fallen on Rowden’s head, dealing him a heavy blow.

She hadn’t chosen him before, and she didn’t choose to be with him now. Even though they still went riding every morning and spent hours alone together, and spoke, when they were not arguing over Giles or his uncles or their aunts or her other meddling, as easily and frankly as they had always conversed with one another, sharing thoughts as effortless as breath.

She did want him in the carnal sense. He knew by now how to recognize a woman’s desire for him. The flushed cheek, the lingering glance, the little hitch of breath when he stepped close to her and let his breath fall on the back of her neck as he spoke. She wasn’t unaffected.

The way she kissed him said she was very much not unaffected. His head steamed as he recalled the taste of her, the incredible softness of her mouth, the scent of warm citrus on her skin. He’d meant to follow that scent as far as he could, over her cheek, along her jaw, down her neck to the beautiful, tantalizing swell of her bosom, the bosom that to him had represented the epitome of perfection ever since he’d first noticed it.

But desire was not the same as invitation, and she refused to permit him more than the dalliance of a kiss. It had felt like an amputation when she stepped away, broke contact, refused the offer to come to his bed, went home with Nate instead. It was chopping off a limb.

Rowden scowled as he skirted a bench filled with older women and a portly, bewigged man wearing the black robes of a barrister, all of whom watched him with some degree of alarm. He was making a fool of himself, a prime target for another cartoon, but Ro was once more in his sights. She stood chatting with a group of expensively dressed women, making introductions beneath the portrait of a doting mother holding her child.

Above that hung a Biblical scene of a woman in fine dress bearing a man’s head on a platter—Salome and John the Baptist, he supposed. Above that, leaning out from the top of the wall for better display, a classical scene of Medusa turning a man to stone. And above that, the curved window let in a light that illuminated the paintings and the gleam of Sophronia’s hair.

She was as much a deadly siren as the women in the paintings looming above her head, and while the young Sophronia had cut him deeply, this mature, self-possessed Sophronia had the power to utterly destroy him with her rejection.

An affair, Rowden decided. If he were good enough for a kiss, he could persuade her to indulge her desire. If she didn’t want him at her side, he would find a way to get her in his bed at least for a while. That would be enough to ease the craving and the wildness that rushed through his blood, biting the inside of his veins.

It would have to be enough.

“Rowden, you scoundrel. Haven’t seen much of you these days. Holed up in your club counting your pots of money, are you? Or aiming to venture abroad and win yourself another fortune to replace the last one?”

Rowden turned and despite himself, the engaging smile of the man before him tugged him out of his gloom.

“You’re the one with the reputation as a fortune hunter, Ned Delaval.”