Forever Betrothed, Never the Bride (Scandalous Seasons #1)(18)

Guiding her graceful form through the steps of the waltz, he came to find he shared a special connection with Emmaline. Though she’d been born a female, Emmaline’s life had not been very different from his. They were, in a way, kindred spirits.

It didn’t escape his notice that she’d failed to answer his earlier question.

“So then tell me, Emmaline. What do you wish for?” Her name slipped from his lips as easily as the next breath he took.

Emmaline’s gaze dropped to the simple folds of his snowy white cravat. “I want to be loved. I want a family of my own.” The words emerged haltingly.

“You want to be loved?” He couldn’t hold back the derisive question. The word love was so foreign to Society that there was something crass and vulgar in simply thinking it to oneself, let alone speaking it aloud.

Her body stiffened beneath his touch. A dull flush stained her cheeks. “Yes, my lord. I want to be loved.”

Drake’s lips twitched. “Ours is hardly a love match.”

Based on the hurt little expression she wore, he thought she might have preferred his laughter.

“Though we’d hardly know if it could be a love match,” she pointed out.

“If it is love and flowery poems you seek, my lady, be forewarned, you will not find it from me.”

She blinked several times. “You don’t believe in love?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t say that.”

“So, you do believe in love?”

Drake arched a brow. The lady was persistent. “Though never the recipient of such an insipid emotion, I understand my parents were in love. So I do believe some people capable of it.”

Everyone in Society knew the history of Lord Drake’s mother. The Duchess of Hawkridge had died giving birth to her son. He’d never known his mother. Drake wondered if perhaps the absence of a maternal figure in his life had resulted in the jaded man he’d become. That, and the hellish things he’d done on the battlefield, of course.

A liveried servant at the edge of the dance-floor stumbled. His lofty tray of champagne flutes tilted, sending the crystal glasses tumbling to the floor. There were gasps of horror and shrieks of surprise as the guests on the sides were sprayed with tiny bits of glass and French vintage champagne.

“Fire towards the ground,” Drake commanded. The 31st Regiment of Foot was low on artillery and had to improvise their canister shot with nails and scrap iron.

The lieutenant loaded the canister into the cannon and prepared to fire at the relentless French army on foot.

The canon failed.

The canister shot did not. The closed cylindrical metal canister intended for the advancing enemy troops skipped a path, twenty-five, thirty-yards, across the ground.

Then an explosion rent the world around them. Shrapnel flew. Men were screaming. His men were screaming…

“But you are not capable of it?” Emmaline’s question interrupted his momentary lapse in sanity.

Drake swallowed convulsively. He would never escape the war. His mind would forever remain on the bloody fields of battle.

“My lord?” she asked, confused eyes studying the lines of his face.

Drake forced himself to relax his tightly clenched jaw. Emmaline clearly couldn’t detect the hell that gripped him. Nor for that matter did she seem aware of the drama at the edge of the dance-floor.

“My lady, I’m not certain I’m capable of marriage.”

Emmaline blinked several times. “Well, of course you’ll marry. You have to marry me,” she blurted. Her cheeks turned a bright shade of pink. “Uh, that is, I mean—” She dropped her gaze to his cravat.

Drake grinned. “Do I?” he teased. He applied a subtle pressure to where his hand gripped her waist, encouraging her look at him. He found something soothing in her brown eyes. They reminded him of deep, rich Belgian chocolate warmed in the hot summer sun.

“So we’ve been told,” she muttered.

A bark of laughter escaped him. It came out rusty from ill use, and appeared to startle her.

She glanced up, their stares locked, and held.

Then she began to study his face. He knew the moment she noted the faint scar that started at his temple and traversed a parallel path to his jaw. Many of the women he’d bedded had assessed the mark with a kind of fascinated horror.

Emmaline reached up a hand as if to touch it, and then seemed to remember where they were. She drew her hand back but her gaze did not leave his scar.

Her interest triggered a vulnerability he’d thought dead. The sight of her; unsullied and pure and him brutal and vile made him feel like the devil dancing in church. She’d been untouched by hands of evil, when his had wrought death and destruction.

He waited for her to ask the blunt question most ladies of his acquaintance asked. A kind of perverted glee that they’d dared to touch a blood-thirsty warrior.

Except she didn’t ask the question, didn’t beg to know how he’d come by the mark.

She was different than any other woman he’d ever known…and it scared the hell out of him.

Damn her for making him feel things he didn’t want to feel. A little too forcefully, he angled her body close to his—closer than was fashionably appropriate.

“Do you look at all gentlemen like this?” he asked, his voice hard. His vulnerability robbed him of both reason and the more than twenty-eight years of gentlemanly behavior that had been ingrained into him.