Charming Sir Charles (Dashing Widows 5)

Sadly the answer to that question, on most levels, was not a thing.

She was absolutely delightful. Clever. Funny. Vivid. Stylish. Good-hearted.

He could fill a deuced three-volume novel with praise of her qualities.

Her expressive face with its bright green eyes and pointed chin might fall short of classical standards of beauty. Her long, thin nose might be a little off-center. Her mouth might be a tad wide to fit her features, although it provided a pleasing hint of a passionate nature. A passionate nature he desperately hoped to discover before he reached his old age.

But he found the quirks in her appearance more appealing than mere prettiness could ever be.

And nobody could criticize her figure. Long and graceful and lissome. He spent feverish nights dreaming of what she looked like naked. He’d wager her legs were a work of art to rival anything in his famed collection of old masters.

Not, by God, that he knew.

Apart from a dance, or taking her hand to help her into or out of a carriage, he hadn’t touched her. Damn and blast it.

He’d known the minute he saw her across a crowded ballroom that she was the one for him. Nothing in his previous discreet liaisons had prepared him for this ferocious desire.

But even in the grip of this compulsion to have the lovely widow whatever it cost, he remained a perceptive man. He’d swiftly realized that beneath Sally’s air of confidence and good cheer, she was vulnerable. A pursuit too ardent was likely to frighten her away rather than win her.

So much against his masculine impulses, he reined in his immediate urge to claim and conquer. Instead of sweeping Sally off her feet and into his bed, and talking marriage once they’d assuaged their appetites, he’d launched a more conventional courtship.

By now, his patience should be reaping rewards. Yet despite his constant attendance, the woman still refused to respond to his overtures.

It was as if she didn’t even realize he was courting her. Worse, she treated him like a junior, when at most there must only be three or four years between them.

Sally seemed to suffer from a curious blindness when she looked at him. Even that revealing discussion, at times veering toward the combative, at the Pascal wedding hadn’t alerted her to how much Charles Kinglake wanted her.

When he’d been a whisker from ignoring their audience and snatching her up in his arms and kissing her until she saw only him.

Several times he’d verged on declaring himself, but Sally remained so unaware of him as a man—of herself as his future bride—that he’d held back. A rash declaration was likely to shatter the friendship they’d established. She might even decide to send him away.

Hell, he’d never been afraid of anything, but he was bloody terrified at the thought of not seeing her every day.

Because while she’d blithely disregarded his every effort to deepen the connection, he’d just fallen more in love with her. Now the idea of living without her was beyond bearing.

What an infernal mess.

A burst of applause crashed through his brooding. For the sake of appearances, he clapped, too.

“Thank you so much for inviting us, Sir Charles.” Sally turned to him, her eyes alight with pleasure. She looked particularly pretty tonight, in a stylish rose pink silk gown and with her dark blonde hair dressed with pearls. “Isn’t Strozzi marvelous?”

“Yes, marvelous,” he said, although he hadn’t heard a note. He stared deep into Sally’s eyes, seeking some sign, even the smallest spark, that mirrored the inferno devouring him.

A futile quest, damn it. It always was.

“I still don’t understand why they don’t speak English so a body knows what they’re caterwauling about,” Anthony Townsend, Earl of Kenwick, said in his thick Yorkshire accent from the chair behind Charles.

“You confessed last week you enjoyed the opera.” Kenwick’s delicate wife, Fenella, cast him a wry glance. “You’re laying the yokel act on a little too thick, my love. I can hear the thud of hobnail boots marching down the cobbles toward us.”

Kenwick was an imposing cove—Charles worried about the long-term health of the spindly chair he sat in—so his sheepish expression looked incongruous on his large, blunt features. “Well, aye, a bloke has a certain reputation to uphold.”

Everyone in London knew that the Kenwicks adored one another. Charles hoped—not with any great optimism, given his current progress—that he and Sally might one day be as happy.

“As a Philistine?” his wife asked sweetly.

“As a man’s man, my darling.”

Fenella barely contained a snort of disdain, while Charles turned to Meg. If he looked at Sally right now, he didn’t trust himself not to grab her. These opera boxes were deuced constricted when a man had to keep his hands to himself. “Are you enjoying the opera, Miss Ridgeway?”