Tempted By the Night Read Free

wagers.”
    Right she was, but he wasn’t about to explain himself to anyone. Hell, how could he explain it to her when he wasn’t quite sure of the reasons himself. “I will tell you if you can tell me what you are doing here amongst all these dullards, Mary?”
    “If you kept to proper society, you would know I am out this Season.”
    She couldn’t have said anything that would have shocked him more. “Out?”
    “Rockhurst, I would like to get married. Before it is too late even to consider the possibility.”
    Quite frankly, he didn’t know what to say. He’d never considered that his bluestocking cousin would even want a husband.
    She continued on, “And I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t point out the impracticality of such a notion like Father or…or others have.”
    Yet there was one point he could argue, glancing around the room one more time and suppressing the shudder that threatened to run up his spine. “Why here?”
    “Aunt Routledge,” she confessed.
    “Bullied you into it, didn’t she?”
    Mary cringed, then nodded.
    He leaned over. “You need to spend more of your days away from your library and out in the world—where our aunt can’t find you.”
    “I haven’t the Dials to hide in, as you do,” she commented. Then she glanced over at him, taking a measuring glance if ever there was one.
    A skill she’d no doubt inherited from their aforementioned aunt.
    “You’ve looked drawn of late,” she said. “I take that to mean that your other responsibilities have become more pressing than usual.”
    “In a manner of speaking.”
    She lowered her voice, and asked, “You haven’t found the hole yet?”
    He shook his head, but said nothing more given the curious and close company surrounding them. Mary wouldn’t pry further—at least not until she had him alone where she could pepper him with questions. Nothing like a true bluestocking to want every detail of a matter.
    If anything, perhaps his troubles of late were exactly the reason he was here. At Almack’s.
    He glanced around at the bevy of young beauties and heiresses and those who’d just arrived in the world with all the necessary pedigree and nothing else to recommend them, and he shuddered.
    No, for a brief second of late, he thought he’d found a lady who was different. Miss Charlotte Wilmont. But it hadn’t taken him long to realize the lady had eyes only for another.
    But in those few hours in her company, he’d discovered something he hadn’t thought possible. A spark of something that he’d never found before. Perhaps it had only been a brief enigma. A happenstance of fate.
    Yet here he was, at Almack’s, surveying the ladies of the ton, in search of…someone.
    His musings were interrupted by a sharp fan into his ribs, and his cousin saying, “Rockhurst, stop measuring the guests as if they were horses at Tatt’s. It is unbecoming.”
    “Would you prefer this?” he asked, then feigned a loud laugh as if she’d just said something terribly witty, then winked at a passing matron, finishing off his performance with an elegant bow to a knot of giggling debutantes, whose mirth disappeared almost immediately as their mouths fell open at such a favor.
    Mary groaned and tugged him past the foolish nits. It wasn’t long before they’d arrived at the punch table, and Rockhurst surveyed the tepid lemonade and poor fare with a skeptical tip of his brows. “Whyever does one come here?”
    “Because it is entirely respectable.”
    He shuddered. “Now I know why my Wednesday nights have been occupied elsewhere all these years.”
    “Which is well and good, for you’ve got every matron in the room speculating that you’ve come here seeking a bride.”
    He glanced around the room. “I hardly think one night under this hallowed, sacred roof—”
    “Harrumph!” Mary blustered, sounding exactly like their Aunt Routledge.
    But being a gentleman, Rockhurst decided not to point out the obvious.
    “You haven’t been