But I knew he was aware because of that hold on me, tight and comforting, as if he knew I felt safer shackled than I did free.
“Did you see him?” a woman I’d met countless time whose name I could never remember expressed excitedly at one point two hours after my arrival. “Did you see the Earl of Thornton?”
I stiffened, a gazelle downwind of a predator.
Jenson calmly patted my arm. “I did.”
The woman touched her blond updo self-consciously as she looked over our shoulders, presumably at the man in question. “Isn’t he the most handsome man you ever saw?”
Somehow, instinctively, my charm arose to save the day. “My brother would take umbrage with that. He’s awfully vain, but I have to admit, he has good reason to be.”
Jenson and the other man we were with laughed.
“He is ridiculously good looking,” my friend and artistic director agreed. “It irks me to no end that he refuses to campaign with you for St. Aubyn.”
I shrugged a shoulder because we’d had this conversation before. “He doesn’t like standing still if he doesn’t have to. Acting is more his gig.”
“Gig.” Jenson shook his head at me, but his small smile was fond. “You’re becoming more American every day. I wish I could lure you back to England.”
Never, I thought fiercely even though a secret voice I tried to mute whispered, Maybe one day.
I was hyper aware of Alexander’s placement in the room. Unwittingly, I found myself angling my body and shifting my feet to keep him in my orbit, to feel the gravitational pull he exuded to its maximum effect.
Just being in the same room as him made me ache for the feel of the hard marble of the ballroom floor beneath my knees.
“Who is the woman he’s with?”
My throat closed up as I waited for the answer.
“Apparently, that’s Agatha Howard, of Castle Howard and the Earl of Suffolk Howards,” one of the women helpfully pointed out. “She’s been one of Britain’s most eligible catches since she came of age. It was rumored she was supposed to marry the younger Prince Alasdair, but who can blame her for choosing Lord Thornton instead, hmm?”
No one. No one could blame her because while Prince Alasdair was a freaking prince, and at twenty-five, already handsome enough to be an international heartthrob, Alexander was, well, like a god. Someone so viscerally powerful and unflappably cool that he incited the urge to kneel and prostrate oneself before him on the off chance he would bestow you with a cutting look from those quicksilver eyes.
“He’s one of the most powerful men in the nation,” Jensen pitched in. “His influence, if he chose to use it, would be unparalleled, but he doesn’t take part in politics.”
“Why not?” I asked before I could help myself.
I was weak. There were Google alerts set up for Alexander Davenport, Earl of Thornton, heir to the Duke of Greythorn on my computer. I knew he owned the largest media company in England, Davenport Media Holdings, that consisted of a large radio network, news station, and popular culture magazine. He focused on work, he rarely dated, though he was seen out with a variety of upper-class women, and he donated regularly to a rotation of charities.
Six months ago, he’d appeared in an article in The Guardian because he’d donated two million pounds to STOP THE TRAFFIK, a United Kingdom-based charity to help victims of sex trafficking.
I didn’t know how he got that one past the Order, or if they all thought it was amusing he’d donated so hypocritically.
Despite my righteous anger at his duplicity, reading that article had given me a brief flare of hope.
Maybe he cared.
Maybe he regretted the awful things he had done to me and put me through, enough to scour the globe for me in order to beg for my forgiveness.
“Not a political type of bloke, I think.” The man shrugged. “Though I must say I’m surprised you haven’t met him. He likes to keep his finger deep in all his pies.”
Jensen shot him a disgusted look at the metaphor. “He specifically asked not to be involved with St. Aubyn anymore, beyond the obvious financial obligations.”
A chill started in my toes and worked its way like creeping ice across a pane of glass over my entire body.
“What?” I breathed.
“Davenport,” the man, I thought his name might have been Franklin, clarified. “He owns the House of St. Aubyn. His great-grandmother started it in the 1920s and most recently, his mother ran it before…before her untimely death.”
Alexander owned St. Aubyn.
Dread pooled in my stomach as everything clicked together.
He’d been outside my auditions for the brand when I’d first met him, when I’d unwittingly saved his life and basically thrust myself into his clutches.
The scent. The one I’d been made to wear the entire time I was at Pearl Hall, the one that seemed to smell like me but amplified, the one I’d discovered was a recent, highly popular debut of the company’s first signature fragrance.