Chapter One #2
Her hair appeared darker pinned up in its elaborate coiffure. When they’d run along the shore together as children, it used to tumble down her back, glittering gold and copper. Like pennies in a fountain.
Ian silently pleaded to a pantheon of divinities that she would remain seated. The moment she stood and he took in the full depth of her in her wedding costume, she’d steal his last remaining breath.
Then again, she could wear a sackcloth, and she’d stun the hell out of him.
“Nefarious…flowers,” Ian intoned. His tongue dragged as if it were moored to the bottom of his mouth with treacle.
The maid wrung her hands. “White oleander with yellow roses!”
“You think someone tried to poison Miss Rives?”
“Only if they expected me to eat them.” In the mirror, Diana raised an elegant eyebrow, which Ian knew rationally was not a gesture of seduction.
His body didn’t understand the difference. A familiar tightness gathered south of his waist, and heat rose along his neck.
“In the language of flowers, this arrangement relays a message to beware of betrayal,” Miss Hunter offered rationally. “The card was addressed to Diana, but there was no signature.”
“It must be from some seedy journalist,” Diana said. “They love to manufacture a scandal.”
Ian swallowed a growl.
“We’ll get rid of them.” Miss Hunter nodded to the maid to retrieve the vase. “Be back in a moment.”
When the door had closed behind them, and Diana turned to him, a small frisson hit the room.
Neither of them acted surprised. It often happened in the rare circumstances they found themselves alone together. And being alone with Diana was something of a terror, because unlike the rest of their mutual acquaintances, Ian knew the danger she could render.
She radiated with a restrained feminine power, but when he regarded her sitting there alone, a slight pain bloomed beneath his ribs.
She’d no sisters, no aunts or female cousins to help with her preparations for the day that would transform her life.
Even her dearest childhood friend had been lost to a watery grave a week after the announcement of Diana’s engagement to Jared.
As she rose from the stool, Ian couldn’t resist staring at the way the silk folds of her dress hugged the curves of her body.
The journalists they despised would pay a fortune to see it; she was the most drawn woman in London.
She’d spent the last year in mourning for her father, but the scandal sheets couldn’t resist sketching her on the few occasions she’d ventured out in society.
They never quite captured the color of her eyes—green like a Chinese jade statue—nor could they depict the precise way her bow-shaped mouth dipped with her true smile.
His eyes clapped on the fortune of emeralds and diamonds resting on her collarbone and he was grateful for the sharp and necessary reminder of what was at stake if the wedding didn’t take place.
“Now that the threatening petals are gone, are you going to tell me why you’re here?” she asked.
“Jared is ill,” he said bluntly. “He overindulged last evening.”
“Given it was his stag party, I expected him to.”
“As did I. But I’ve never seen him so foxed.”
“That explains why it took so long to find him.” In a softer voice, she added, “You don’t have to hedge. I know he didn’t come home last night.”
Ian made specific plans to hunt down and fire every one of his brother’s traitorous, gossiping servants before the day was through. “Jared wasn’t where his friends said they were going.”
“You didn’t join them?” She seemed surprised he’d refrained from carousing with his brother.
He couldn’t decide if this flattered or insulted him. “No. I left early to attend to business.”
“Do you think he was…interfered with?”
She brushed her fingers against the necklace in a casual motion that agitated him. If she had an inkling about what they truly were, she wouldn’t handle them with such little care.
His father’s will had included an eccentric instruction to gift the necklace to “his son’s intended” to wear on their wedding day.
Diana wore it now out of respect for him, and the deathbed promise she’d made him to wed Jared.
If she had disliked the look of the thing, she could have bought a hundred other jeweled collars without putting a dent in her fortune.
It made Ian feel slightly guilty about his plans to steal it from her.
“We should come up with a plan. The guests will arrive in less than an hour,” Ian said. “Perhaps we’ll ask people to attend the breakfast first, until Jared recovers, and then do the ceremony?”
“You didn’t answer my question.” A small furrow surfaced between her lovely brows. Most of Diana’s admirers would have interpreted it as an adorable look of puzzlement, but Ian knew her face too well.
She was angry with him.
The trouble was, he liked her angry. She behaved unpleasantly when she was infuriated, and it was one of the few honest things he knew about her. It made him want to forget about all the lies between them.
“Was Jared interfered with?” Diana repeated.
The edge in her voice could have been the result of her frustration with him for withholding his answer. Or she was truly worried about her fiancé.
He hoped it was the former. “I don’t know.”
Her nod assuaged him.
Briefly.
“We must find out what happened.”
As she gathered her skirts and crossed the room, Ian was so distracted by the hypnotizing sway of her bustle that he was slow to process her words.
He scrambled to block her path. “You don’t need to do anything. I’ll take care of it.” Like he always did.
“Don’t be daft. We both know it will be hours before Jared wakes, and I can’t sit here.” She deftly dodged around his larger frame and headed toward the back of the room, where a small shade concealed the dumbwaiter.
Horror washed over him, along with a chilling sense of déjà vu. “Don’t try it.”
“That’s what you said last time I dared you to beat me down to the kitchen.” She lifted up the shade with a devious grin. “How old were we?”
He’d been twelve; she ten. “It was a foolish idea then. It’s a mad one now. The draw rope will snap and—” He couldn’t threaten that she’d plummet to her death out loud because his superstitious constitution would not allow him to speak the words he dreaded coming true.
“Nonsense. Do you know how much a silver service weighs?”
With characteristic grace, she tucked herself into the dumbwaiter.
And then, in a diabolically sweet voice, she asked, “Are you coming after me or not?”