And Then She Fell (The Cynster Sisters Duo 1)

Mary once the receiving line had been reached. Louise noted the necklace around Mary’s throat, hesitated, but then said, “But off you go and enjoy yourself.” With one hand, she made a shooing motion. “Just behave.”

“Yes, Mama!” Delighted—with the evening, with life in general—Mary was only too ready to obey. Her first task was to quarter the room, to see who was there and note the new arrivals as they streamed into the fabulous white, pale green, and gilt ballroom.

Very soon, the room was pleasantly crowded. Then more guests arrived, and the event became a certified crush.

Mary tacked through the groups, stopping to chat as the mood and the company took her; as a Cynster young lady raised very much in the bosom of the ton, such an event held no terrors. She’d cut her eyeteeth on the correct way of doing things, and knew every possible way around any social situation. Even the grandes dames, after observing her over the past four years, had accepted that she was entirely at home in this sphere and unlikely to put her dainty foot wrong, even while stubbornly following her own path.

Tonight, however, there was no advance to be made on her already defined way forward; the name of the gentleman she’d set her sights upon had not appeared on the guest list. Consequently, she had no particular aim beyond obeying her mother and enjoying herself.

Then the violins started playing the engagement waltz, and James and Henrietta circled the floor, so lost in each other’s eyes, with James so blatantly proud and Henrietta positively glowing with joy, that the company was held spellbound. When the affianced couple completed their circuit and other couples started to join them on the floor, Charlie Hastings, with whom Mary had been conversing, solicited her hand, which she happily granted.

Waltzing with Charlie was pleasant; Mary viewed him as an older brother. He had his eye on Miss Worthington, a young lady Mary was acquainted with, and she was pleased to encourage him by telling him all she knew.

But as the evening wore on, she drifted closer and closer to the wall. While she could chatter and converse with the best of them, and usually, when she had some end in view, she found the exercise stimulating, now, when she knew there was no point—when there was nothing she could or wished to gain from any conversation—she found her interest flagging.

She couldn’t, she decided, risk slipping out of the ballroom. Even though it had happened years ago, her cousin Eliza had been kidnapped from this very house during her sister Heather’s engagement ball. If Mary appeared to have vanished from Henrietta’s engagement ball . . . that was the sort of error Mary did not make.

But there were two alcoves, one at either end of the long room, both housing large nude statues and consequently, for the evening, screened by large palms. She elected to make for the alcove between the pair of double doors, the one less likely to have been appropriated by anyone else.

She was nearing that end of the room, several yards short of her goal, when, abruptly, she was brought to a quivering halt, nose to lower folds of an exquisitely tied cravat. To either side of the cravat stretched a wall of black-clad male chest.

“Good evening, Mary.”

She recognized the deep, drawling, sinfully seductive voice. She looked up—up—all the way up to Ryder Cavanaugh’s ridiculously handsome face. She’d decided years ago that such godlike male perfection was patently ridiculous, certainly in the effect it had on the female half of the ton. No, make that the female half of the species; she’d never met a woman of any class whom Ryder Cavanaugh did not affect.

In exactly that ridiculous way.

She’d made it a point never to allow even the smallest hint that she was aware of his charisma—the attraction that all but literally fell from him in waves—to show.

His late father’s heir, and now the Marquess of Raventhorne, he was considerably older than she was, somewhere over thirty years to her twenty-two, but she’d known him all her life. Nevertheless, she’d been surprised to see his broad shoulders moving about the drawing room before dinner, and to later see him seated a little way along the dinner table on the opposite side, but then she’d learned that he was a connection of the Glossups’ and had attended the dinner as the senior male of his line.

Ignoring the distraction of his gold-streaked, tawny-brown hair, a crowning glory too many ladies had compared to a lion’s mane, not least because it held the same tactile fascination, a temptation to touch, to pet, to run one’s fingers through the thick, soft locks, that had to be constantly guarded against, she fixed her eyes on his, a changeable medley of greens and golds framed by lush brown lashes, and baldly asked, “What is it, Ryder?”

From beneath his heavy hooded lids, his eyes looked down into hers. One tawny eyebrow slowly arched. He let the moment stretch, but she was too wise to let that tactic bother her; she held her pose, and let faint boredom seep into her expression.

“Actually,” he eventually murmured—and how he managed to make his voice evoke the image of a bed was a mystery she’d never solved—“I wondered where you were making for so very doggedly.”

She realized that with his significant height—Ryder would vie with Angelica’s husband, Dominic, for the title of tallest man in the room—he might well have been able to see her making her way through the crowd.

But why had he been watching her?

Most likely he was bored, and her determined progress had captured his peripatetic attention. She’d heard matrons uncounted bemoan the fact that Ryder grew bored very quickly. She’d also heard him described as “big, blond, and definitely no good,” except for his performance in the bedroom, which, by all accounts, was not just satisfactory but exemplary beyond belief.

Yet she’d always recognized the steel behind the languid lion’s mask, and knew he could be as dogged as she if he decided he wanted something—for instance to enliven an otherwise boring evening by toying with her.

Which, she had to admit, held a certain attraction. He was rapier-witted, and his silver tongue held a lethally honed edge, and he was utterly unshockable, yet there was a . . . she’d never been sure quite how to describe it, but . . . a deepness of strength in Ryder that, his ridiculous beauty aside, had always made her shy away from him.

She’d always thought that if ever he was moved to actually pounce and seize, even she would find it impossible to escape.

And she entertained no illusions about Ryder; she might be one of the strongest of ton females, even among the Cynster clan, yet not even she could ever hope to manage Ryder Cavanaugh.

Unmanageable was his middle name.

Given the point along her path at which she was presently poised, having Ryder Cavanaugh, of all the gentlemen in the ton, take any interest whatever in her—no matter how mild and, relatively speaking, innocent—was not just unnecessary but also could prove distinctly counterproductive, and might possibly give rise to unexpected hurdles.

For her, not him.

Given that she’d finally got her hands on the necklace and could now move forward along her path apace, she was even more adamantly disinclined to offer herself up as Ryder’s amusement for the evening.