Page 117 of To Win a Wicked Lord

Besides, those young ladies, the Misses Bretagne and Radclyffe, hadn’t noticed. They had long since grown accustomed to notorious displays of affection from the adults in their lives. Miss Bretagne was simply counting the number of beats until she could finagle her cousin Hugh, the young Earl of Avendon, into taking her for a spin atop mahogany. Miss Radclyffe was counting the number of beats before she could slip away and avoid that exact same occurrence.

Across the ballroom floor buffed to high mirror shine stood the family of the bride. Don Ariel Galante, the bride’s father, struck a rather dashing and elegant form for a man of advancing years, and his Spanish accent could send a susceptible lady into a swoon, if one wasn’t properly prepared. The look of love in his gaze as he watched his daughter swirl around the dancing floor in the arms of her beloved, well, it rendered him all the more attractive. The Duchess had half a mind to set her dear friend, and spinster, Miss Dunfrey, upon him.

As for the bride’s sister, Mrs. Eva Gardiner, she kept one eye upon the happy couple—one might even detect a wistful sheen in that eye—and the other upon shy Nell, who sat unobtrusively against a back wall and thought she would die if anyone addressed her, and saucy Tilly, who cast her roving gaze across the proceedings and drank deeply from her champagne glass. Champagne was the sole luxury she missed from her past life at Number 9.

It was an unusual arrangement—hosting servants as guests at a duke’s ball—but the bride had requested their presence and one didn’t nay-say a bride. Mrs. Gardiner felt glad of it. Becoming part of the English aristocracy hadn’t, and wouldn’t, change Isabel. Though life would lead them in different directions, they would ever be sisters.

Only a few measures of the waltz remained, and the bride and groom had been left to their own devices far too long. Lord Percival gazed upon his wife with an affection that most of the assembled silently agreed was too private, toointimate, to observe directly.

Most, that was, save one: his bride, whose ardor mirrored her groom’s. The hand that had rested chastely upon his shoulder stole up to caress the nape of his neck. An aghastton—well, an aghast Lady Bertrand—watched on, equal parts shocked and transfixed by the heat that sparked off them. They were combustible. Lady Percival chafed that her hand was gloved, and therefore unable to touch her skin directly to his.

Later.

In truth, she’d already had so much of this man—sovery much—yet she was always left wanting more. The newly wed, a guest might mutter with an indulgent shake of the head, but Isabel knew in her heart that her wanting was different. It would forever hunger . . . forhim.

The music crescendoed into an exhilarating finish, but not the buzzing in Isabel’s body, soul, and heart. The man in her arms gazing upon her with the world in his eyes would continue to devastate her all the days of her life, she knew it. Every set of eyes gazing upon them in hushed silence shone with the same knowledge.

Isabel rose to the tips of her toes and pressed her lips to the cup of his ear. “Why is everyone so quiet?”

A knowing smile curled at one corner of Percy’s mouth, and a dark, sinuous shiver glittered through Isabel. “They are waiting,” he murmured, low and velvet.

“Waiting?For what?”

“Forthis.”

He angled his face and drew her into a kiss that might have started chaste but deepened into a ravishment quite suddenly and unexpectedly. A few shocked titters may have raced through the crowd, but so, too, did a few hearty claps and a girlish groan of shame that very possibly emerged from Miss Bretagne.

For her part, Isabel paid them no mind. For here, in her arms, was love and safety and . . .

Forever.