Talk of the Ton (Free Fellows League 5)

Montgomery easily fell into step with her. “I have considered nothing but my heart, and how I long for you to hold it, Mrs. Becket,” he said, grinning. “But alas, you think me a rogue, a roué, when I only seek the favor of your smile.”

“Come now, my lord. Is that all you seek?” she asked, watching him coyly from the corner of her eye.

He sighed with exaggerated frustration. Kate smiled at his square jaw, his thick lashes, the full lips she remembered so keenly. It was almost as if that illicit kiss had happened only yesterday, the very same kiss that had burned in her memory these last two and a half years, making her sick with guilt and heady with imagination.

“There you are, you’ve caught me red-handed,” he said, shaking his head, and smiling down at her as they reached Mr. Heather’s stoop. “I should never be content with a mere smile, no matter how beautiful it is. I’d want more. I’d want all.”

The look in his eyes was scorching, and Kate slowly drew a breath, awkwardly took the basket of fruit from his hand, and held it tightly against her chest. He was smiling, but his eyes . . . there was something else in his eyes, something that made her believe he spoke true.

Thankfully, the sound of her father’s cart rattling up behind them snapped her out her trance. “I beg your pardon sir, but Mr. Heather will be wanting his fruit. Please excuse me.” She curtsied and stepped away from him.

With a grin that made her heart sink, Montgomery stepped back, swept his hat off a head of thick gold hair, and bowed with a flourish. “I shall indeed leave you to your good works, knowing that I may now go to my grave a happy man, for having titillated the fair Widow Becket.” With that, he straightened, put the hat back on his head. His eyes were full of mirth again; the deep-water look had gone.

“Ah, a roué, indeed!” Kate said and laughed as she reluctantly put one foot on the steps leading to Mr. Heather’s door. “I pity the poor young ladies who will be titillated by you and fall prey to your wicked ways, sir.”

“Pity them? Or envy them?” he asked with a subtle wink.

“You’re incorrigible!”

“Thank you! I am endeavoring very hard to be.”

Kate laughed as her father rolled to a mere crawl to keep from joining their private conversation. “Thank you for walking with me, sir. Good day!” she said cheerfully.

Montgomery chuckled and touched his hand to the brim of his hat. “Good day, Mrs. Becket,” he said, and turned smartly to her father. “Good day to you, Mr. Crowley.”

“My lord.”

With a jaunty wave, Lord Montgomery started back the direction he’d come, striding long and whistling a cheerful little tune.

Kate was still swimming in a pool of desire, and with a smile that would not possibly fade, she walked up the steps to knock on Mr. Heather’s door.

He adored her. He wanted her for his very own, and no one else would do.

As Darien walked down that street, he thought that now she had at last divested herself of those wretched widow’s weeds (and hadn’t she looked exceedingly lovely today in that brilliant gold?), he could feel his desire more keenly—it could not be avoided or evaded.

How he had come to this state of wanting, he could not really say. For years, he’d been content to be the man about town, flirting with debutantes, engaging in trysts with ladies who’d married money rather than husbands, and frequenting the gentlemen’s clubs where all sorts of lecherous games might be arranged. He had enjoyed his reputation of being a wealthy, incorrigible bachelor.

But then his sister Anne had married, and Darien found himself thinking about life.

The more he thought on it, the more he began to realize how weary he was growing of the ton’s clubs and salons, how the sameness of elite society was weighing on him. Nothing ever seemed to change—the endless round of parties and routs, the endless talk of who was having an adulterous affair with whom, or who was just out, or who had gained a fortune, and who had lost one.

Darien crossed the street, his stride determined. He wanted more.

He had, in the last two or three years, since passing the age of thirty, begun to feel a persistent urge to settle down with a woman, to start a family. Anne seemed quite happy with the state of matrimony and was already expecting her second child. Darien wanted what Anne had, that happiness that comes without thought or effort, that just seems to naturally occur when one’s heart is held by another.

Unfortunately, he was not very impressed with the current crop of debutantes and other marriageable women of the ton. As a group, they were uninteresting. They seemed to know nothing of the world outside their salons, and worse, did not seem to care.

But Kate Becket . . . now there was a woman who had snatched his imagination and run

away with it from almost the moment she had first appeared in Mayfair. She was very pretty and her ripe figure far more attractive to him than the slender and pale debutantes. She was articulate and possessed an uncommon wit. Their banter and exchanges at Sunday services and on the street never failed to intrigue him. He would invariably walk away from those encounters with the intense feeling that there was a living, breathing woman full of passion beneath all that black bombazine, and the man in him ached to touch her.

Certainly that long-ago Christmas kiss had fanned his imagination on that front—he’d never been able to forget it, and many was the night he’d lain in bed, reliving it, feeling her body in his arms, pressed against him, her lips, softly yielding, beneath his.

But while Kate Becket might have suffered a lapse in judgment that night, aided by a gin-soaked punch, she was not, as a whole, the sort of woman to be drawn in by the usual, empty flirtations men used to seduce. On the contrary, she was far too clever for it. She had pegged him a roué, and a roué he was—he’d not deny it. But a roué, a rake, could be reformed, could direct all of his attentions on the one woman he might love.

That meant, of course, that Darien would have to redouble his efforts to woo her, for she was a tough nut—too resilient to his usual charms, and frankly, deserving of something far better than a mere smile and a crook of the finger.

Fortunately, Darien thought, as he strode down the street to his waiting carriage, he relished the challenge.