Page 64 of The Fortune Hunter’s Gamble

She stood so close he could smell her, that blend of warm spice and cool citrus that made him slightly mad. She had brought life and liveliness into his house. She had stopped him from being a figure of fun in the papers; not a single cartoon of him had been circulated since Sophronia came into town. And now, she had shown him how to deal with Giles.

She fit into his life in every possible way, and he could not make her see it.

“There must be more important things in life,” he growled, “than being practical.”

He only realized he had stepped toward her when she brought up a hand to place it on his chest. Her touch burned him like a brand.

“Rowden. I want nothing in the world but your happiness,” she said, her voice troubled, her eyes veiled. “Please believe that.”

She could give him happiness. She could be his happiness. She simply didn’t choose to.

“Bully for me,” Rowden answered, then walked into his room, shutting the door between them.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Iwant nothing in the world but your happiness, she had said to him.

It was true. She wished well for Rowden. She wanted him to succeed in every endeavor in his life. She wished him to always be surrounded by people who saw his strengths and his goodness and his fierce, loyal heart, and who understood his sense of humor and the uncompromising way he looked at the world. She wanted disaster not to touch him, never again, and she wanted him to know joy and ease and prosperity.

She also, Sophronia realized, wanted to be part of his life. She wanted to contribute to his happiness in an ongoing and significant fashion.

There was, of course, the fear that she would try and fail. She had tried for ten years to make Henry Hinton happy, and it turned out that Henry’s happiness depended very little on Sophronia herself. His happiness had more to do with the image he wanted to present to the world, that of the accomplished gentleman with the pretty, graceful gentleman’s daughter for a wife. She and Rowden had been firm friends in childhood, but that was no guarantee that they would deal well together as adults. People changed.

He had, significantly. She had time to consider this as she rode by herself through Green Park that next morning, Nate keeping pace behind her on one of the carriage horses. Rowden had never missed their morning ride before, and he had not sent her word not to expect him. Nate only said he had saddled Hercules early in the morning and Rowden had left on an errand, even earlier than Sophronia was accustomed to rise.

She had pushed Rowden away, and kept holding him at bay out of an impulse of self-protection. She saw that clearly. It was a child’s impulse to think she could avoid hurt, or having something taken away, by pretending not to want that thing in the first place.

The thing was, she wanted Rowden terribly. Her entire body ached with the longing, and not just to hold him and join with him in the way human creatures had sought one another throughout time. She wanted him in her life as they had been before, companions, friends, confidantes. She wanted this new rapport they had now as adults, where he still seemed to read her mind so easily, despite how she had changed and grown guarded, more cynical.

She wanted to ride with him in the mornings and attend afternoon entertainments at his side, hearing him remark on the performance or garden or display. She wanted to take her meals with him, conversing about their friends and relations, the news reported in the paper, the state of the larger world. She wanted to make plans with him for a future, and she wanted, at night, to retire with him to the privacy of their curtained bed and explore those feelings that arose when he kissed her.

Lying with him would be a way to bind them together, deeply and irrevocably, and only he held the remedy for this restless ache that plagued her, stealing the joy from her morning ride because all she could think of was touching Rowden, kissing Rowden, making Rowden laugh that delightful husky laugh of his that had once been the music of her childhood and which now she heard all too rarely. She wanted Rowden the friend, Rowden the lover, Rowden the accessory to all her enterprises, Rowden the partner and companion of her days.

She could have none of this if she kept turning away from him.

And that was the crux of it. She wanted, with a wild need, to throw herself into his arms and abandon herself to whatever happened.

And she wanted, with the raw ache she had known for the last dozen years, to shield herself from whatever pain she could. She had been honest when she told Rowden she was afraid of giving herself up again. It had been a struggle to keep the core of herself intact through years of Henry’s continual corrections, constant derision, and occasional outbursts of fury. If she lost herself in Rowden, she might never find herself again. She might be obliterated.

And if he wearied of her, as he had of Fanny Glass and all the other women who had been associated with him over the years…she would not survive that. She would not.

She turned Dulcinea’s head toward Piccadilly and felt a stab as she passed the Queen’s Library and remembered Rowden’s delight in sneaking her inside. The guilt of realizing she had hurt him terribly all those years ago when she had married Henry was a snake that coiled about her insides and squeezed. She’d hurt Rowden far more than she knew. He hadn’t simply grown up and moved away from her as she’d assumed; she had broken their friendship and driven him away by choosing someone else, at least in his eyes. She had broken them, not time, not inevitable fate.

Being with him again reminded her so acutely of all that she had lost. And there was so much to discover yet about the man he had become. He’d seen more of the world, as she longed to do; he had become a businessman and a property owner, something no one would have expected of him in his younger days. And he had become a man to stir longings in the breast of any woman.

All of which was to say, her emotions were already in a tangled knot when she returned to the house in Clarges Street and entered the breakfast parlor to find Giles beaming, a blushing Lily sitting beside him in a lovely round gown of embroidered muslin, and Rowden standing at the sideboard looking stunned. He held the toast tongs in his hand, but no toast.

He looked, Sophronia took a moment to mark, terribly appealing in his buckskin breeches, rust-red waistcoat, dark riding coat, and tall boots. He was the picture of masculine health and virility, while Giles, in comparison, looked wan and thin, but still beaming.

“Say that again,” Rowden instructed, staring at his cousin.

“Married!” Aunt Dobbs clasped her hands in joy. “Oh, I just knew she was the one. I knew it the moment she stepped through your door, all grown into a lovely young woman. The Colonel’s daughter to marry Denford’s heir! Won’t both your parents be so pleased?”

“Lily!” Sophronia cried. “Giles made his offer? And you did not tell me?” She gave her gloves and riding crop to the butler, who had appeared to take them, wearing the expression of faint disapproval that he always wore around Sophronia.

Lily smiled broadly, the apples of her cheeks rosy. “I did not intentionally keep anything from you, Soph—Mrs. Hinton. Giles only spoke to me this morning, and he already has my heart. We only need my father’s approval to seal my happiness.”

“He will give it, of course.” Aunt Dobbs said what Sophronia was thinking. Her transports of happiness aside, Aunt set herself to the business of cracking the lid off her soft-boiled egg. “He couldn’t wish for a better match for you, Lily.”