Meet Me at Midnight Read Free

to tally the number of times an experienced rake had attempted to seduce her, and failed. She knew all the lines of that play, and yet with Lord Althorpe she hadn’t the least desire to exit. “You have further plans for me, my lord?”
    “I’d be a fool or three months dead if I didn’t have further plans for you, Lady Victoria.” His voice was almost a growl, sensuous and very sure of itself.
    Despite herself, a small shiver of anticipation ran down her spine. “You can’t shock me, you know.”
    Humor lit his amber gaze. “I’d wager that I probably could. Twirling is hardly the depth of scandalous behavior. And they don’t call me Sin for nothing.”
    She hadn’t been aware that he’d been present at the Franton ball for so long—and she felt like she shouldhave known. She should have sensed his heady, dangerous presence the moment he’d entered the room. “So shock me, Lord Althorpe.”
    His gaze lowered to her mouth. “We’ll start with kisses, then. Deep, slow ones that last forever, that melt you inside.”
    Heavens, he was good—but he wasn’t the only one who had wits. “Perhaps you should begin with why you want to kiss me, Lord Althorpe, considering that five minutes ago you were more interested in speaking with Marley than in dancing with me.”
    Abruptly she sensed that she had his full attention. Nothing changed; not his expression nor his hold on her nor his graceful steps, but she suddenly knew why he had caught her notice from all the way across Lady Franton’s ballroom. And why she hadn’t felt his presence before. He hadn’t wanted her to.
    “You must allow me to make amends for giving you the impression that I overlooked you, then,” he said in a low, intimate tone, and glanced around the crowded room. “Do you know of anywhere more…private where I might apologize to you?”
    She wasn’t about to flee at his implication and let him think he’d cowed Vixen Fontaine; no one had ever accomplished that. Besides, she wasn’t ready to allow him to escape just yet. “Undoubtedly Lady Franton has locked the doors to anywhere secluded.”
    “Damnation.” He cast a scowling glance toward her herd. “We’ll have to make do h—”
    “Except for her famous garden,” she finished. There. She’d called his bluff. Now he could be the one to back down from the challenge.
    Instead of conjuring an excuse to remain safely in public, though, he smiled—the least friendly, mostdangerous smile she’d ever seen. “The garden. Might I apologize to you in the garden, then, Lady Victoria?”
    Uh-oh . Declining now was out of the question, since she’d suggested it. “I don’t require an apology,” she returned airily, hoping she didn’t sound completely demented, “but you may render me an explanation there, if you wish.”
    They had already neared that side of the ballroom, and it was a simple matter to slip through one of the half-open windows lining the east wall. Lady Franton’s exotic garden had won prize ribbons for years, and if not for her familiarity with the grounds in daylight, Victoria would have been hopelessly lost twenty feet from the main house. A scattering of torches dimly lit the flagstone pathways that wound through the flora, rejoining into a circular path around the small pond at the garden’s center.
    Now that they had escaped the ballroom, she expected Althorpe to conjure a distraction. In all likelihood he’d never expected her to join him, and his flirtation had merely been a tease. One did not publicly remove earls’ daughters from a ballroom in order to seduce them.
    Part of her, though, wished that weren’t so. Her boredom had abruptly vanished; she wanted to sink into him, to have his touch envelop her as his words and his voice had enveloped her senses already.
    “Your explanation, my lord?” she prompted. If he intended on retreating, she wished he would get on with it and quit tantalizing her with his presence.
    “We’re not private enough