Page 572 of From Rakes to Riches

Why else hadn’t he proposed marriage these last three days? He’d been given ample opportunity.

And still he hadn’t been able to bring himself to the point.

You deserve better than you’re allowing yourself.

What match would be better than an understanding duchess with a stable full of racehorses?

The small voice inside him opened its mouth to reply—it seemed to harbor notions of a different match—and he quashed it.

No good could come of that reply.

As if his thoughts had the power to conjure the woman, a figure appeared in the doorway.

Gemma, hesitating as she glanced around uncertainly, dressed in the new set of clothes he’d had delivered to her room today. Not a silk dress and satin slippers, as he’d been temptedto send, but a man’s ensemble, from black leather boots buffed to a mirror shine to gray trousers and matching coat to pure white silk cravat and moss-green waistcoat intended to pull the color from her eyes. Hair tied back into its customary queue at the nape of her neck, she looked quite dashing.

But what she didn’t look like was a man.

A cleaned-up Gem bore a striking resemblance to a Gemma.

Julian caught Rake’s gaze and lifted a single, inquiring eyebrow.

In fact, as Rake glanced around the table, he saw from the cant of everyone’s heads they’d all arrived at the same conclusion.

“Ah, Gem,” said Rake, “delighted you deigned to join us.”

That got a curious shift of everyone’s gazes toward Rake. No matter. This was between him and Gemma. He indicated the chair to his right. “For the guest of honor.”

She didn’t immediately take him up on his offer, looking poised to pivot on her heel and flee. Instead, she drew herself upright and entered the room as if she belonged here as much as the duke, duchess, marquess, daughter of a duke, and daughter of a marquess populating it.

If she’d been born on the correct side of the blanket, the fact was she would.

The table conversation moved on, but Rake paid no mind to it. His mind only had room for Gemma.

A footman pulled her chair from the table, and she slipped into it. Separated by no more than two feet, Rake imagined he could feel her heat.

Except it wasn’t her heat he felt. It was his own.

The reason?

Simply that the blood rushed faster in his veins when she was near.

Though the soup course had arrived, it was her scent that he caught. Clean and fresh from the lye washing she’d surely given herself. He wouldn’t think about the sight of her administering to such ablutions to herself, or he would give himself a cockstand here at the supper table.

Oh, blast it, he was already halfway there.

But she smelled of Gemma too—of woman and hay and faintly of horse.

She ever would smell faintly of horse.

He liked that about her.

From beneath her golden lashes, her gaze darted about the table, taking in the others and reaching her own conclusions about them all.

Nobs.

That would be her conclusion.

Lady Beatrix swallowed a sip of soup and directed a question at Celia. “Has the new Duke of Acaster yet been located?”

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