Mastered by Love (Bastion Club 8)

A spurt of irritation gave her strength enough to turn her head and narrow her eyes on his profile, until he, lips faintly curved, glanced her way.

She looked into his eyes, dark as sin and still far too molten, and discovered she had nothing to say. They’d reached a footbridge spanning the race, now a wider, burbling stream; drawing her arm from his, she reached for the railing and started across. She needed to put space between them.

“At the risk of sounding arrogantly smug, I got the impression you haven’t been accustomed to…life’s little subtleties.”

His tone made it clear to what he was referring; life’s little subtleties, indeed! “Of course not. I’ve been your mother’s confidante and your father’s chatelaine for the past eleven years. Why would I know of such things?”

She glanced his way, and saw a faintly puzzled, somewhat quizzical look on his face.

The same qualities resonated in his voice when he replied, “Strangely, those same criteria gave rise to my question.”

She looked ahead, felt his gaze on her face.

“I take it your past lovers weren’t…shall we say, imaginative?”

Her past lovers were nonexistent, but she wasn’t going to tell him that—he who had known more women than he could count. Literally.

That he, expert that he was, hadn’t detected her inexperience left her feeling faintly chuffed. She cast about in her mind for a suitable retort. As she stepped off the bridge and set off down the path, with every step closer to the castle feeling more like herself, she inclined her head in his direction. “I suspect few men are as imaginative as you.”

She felt certain that was nothing more than the truth, and if it caused him to preen and think he’d advanced his cause, so much the better.

After the afternoon’s debacle, she was going to have to give avoiding him much more serious thought. He thought she’d had lovers.

Then again, Variseys were sneaky, underhanded, and utterly untrustworthy when it came to something they wanted; he was quite capable of paying her a roundabout compliment like that in the hopes of further softening her brain.

Which, where he was concerned, was already soft enough.

Late that night, so late the moon was riding an inky sky over the Cheviots, casting a pearlescent sheen over every tree and rock, Minerva stood at her bedroom window and, arms folded, stared unseeing at the evocative landscape.

The door was locked; she suspected Royce could pick locks, so she’d left the key in the hole and turned it fully, then wedged a handkerchief around it, just to be sure.

She’d spent the evening with the other ladies, metaphorically clinging to their skirts. Although her bedroom was in the keep proper, opposite the duchess’s morning room, not all that far from the ducal apartments and Royce’s ducal bed, by steering the guests up the main keep stairs, she’d been able to tag along, stopping at her door while the ladies with rooms in the east wing walked on.

Royce had noticed her strategy, but other than an appreciative quirk to his lips, had made nothing of it.

She, however, was clearly going to have to take a stand against him.

The speculation the assembled ladies had indulged in after dinner, in the drawing room before the men had rejoined them, had underscored what she shouldn’t have needed to be reminded of; they were all waiting to learn who he’d chosen as his bride.

Any day now, they would hear.

And then where would she be?

“Damn all Variseys—especially him!” The muttered sentiment relieved a little of her ire, but the major part was self-directed. She’d known what he was like all along; what she hadn’t known, hadn’t realized, was that he could take her idiotic infatuation-obsession and with a few lustful kisses, a few illicit caresses, convert it into outright desire.

Flaming desire—the sort that burned.

She felt like she was smoldering, just waiting to ignite. If he touched her, kissed her, she would—and she knew where that would lead. He’d even told her—to his ducal bed.

“Humph!” Despite wanting—now, thanks to him and his expertise, wanting quite desperately—to experience in the flesh all that her fanciful imagination had ever dreamed, despite her smoldering desire to lie beneath him, there was one equally powerful consideration that, no matter that damning desire, had her holding adamantly, unwaveringly, to her original decision never to grace his bed.

If she did…would infatuation–obsession–smoldering desire convert to something more?

If it did…

If she ever did anything so foolish as to fall in love with a Varisey—and with him in particular—she would deserve every iota of the emotional devastation that was guaranteed to follow.

Variseys did not love. The entire ton knew that.