Page 56 of Bookshop Cinderella

As Max left the ballroom, raw physical need pulsed through his body, and only one coherent thought pounded through his brain.

He was an idiot.

For the second time in his life, he was in the throes of an uncontrollable passion for a woman who was completely wrong for him.

He thought he’d learned his lesson. Arrogantly, he’d presumed that his longing for Rebecca had been a singular happening, a ghastly mistake bornof young lust and foolish romantic ideals that would never happen again, but Evie Harlow had just shredded those presumptions and proved to him that he’d learned nothing at all.

A galling thing for a man to admit.

What the hell was wrong with him? he wondered in exasperation as he left the house and strode up Green Street toward the nearest cab stand. Even a child learned after being burned on a hot stove not to touch it again. What flaw inside him, what stupid perversity, impelled him to desire women who did not belong in his world and had no reverence for the life he lived?

The lines of a letter came back to him, a letter he’d received from his mother while he was in New York preparing for his wedding, a letter that had begged him not to do something he would regret. He’d read the epistle only once, then he’d angrily torn it in half and tossed it into the nearest wastepaper basket. Yet, despite the fact that it had been written over a decade ago, he could recall one line of that letter as if he’d first read it only yesterday.

A fish and a bird can fall in love. But they can never make a home together.

He and Rebecca had tried to prove her wrong, and they had failed. Though his mother had died before seeing the results of his intransigence, those results had been tragic for all concerned.

There was a hansom by the Marble Arch, and the driver straightened up on the box as he approached. “Where to, guv’nor?” he asked, gathering the reins in his fists.

“It’s not for me.” Max jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Turn onto Green Street and wait there by the first doorway. A woman will be coming out, and when she does, I want you to take her to the Savoy Hotel.”

He handed over the shilling required for the fare, the driver snapped the reins, and the cab jerked into motion, rolling away down Park Lane.

Max turned to follow the vehicle, retracing his steps slowly, for he did not want to see Evie again, not with this insatiable need for her still thrumming through his body. Even now, even as he reproached himself for his conduct and berated his obvious stupidity, he wasn’t entirely sure he could refrain from jumping into the hansom beside her and kissing her senseless all the way back to the hotel.

Damn it all, he had a plan for his life. He had already chosen the perfect girl, a girl who would embrace the role of duchess, who would shoulder all its responsibilities willingly. Helen would never be intimidated by dancing with the Prince of Wales or hosting a house party for fifty guests. Helen would never seat the wrong people together at dinner or blurt out blunt derisions of the aristocracy to the prime minister over dessert. Helen would never have to endure the pain of being shunned and ridiculed, and he would never have to endure the pain of watching it happen with no way to stop it.

Evie wasn’t raised for any of that, and expecting it of her would have been like expecting a bird to live underwater. Like Rebecca, she’d be suffocated by the rigid rules of the ton. Like Rebecca, she thought those rules were pointless and silly, and given that, how could she ever successfully play the game?

Wanting her could only end in tragedy, not only for him, but also for her. She had moved in his world, however briefly, once before, and the results had been disastrous, inflicting wounds that still hurt her to this day. He could not be responsible for giving her more of the same pain.

He turned the corner onto Green Street and came to an abrupt halt, for the cab was still there, waiting for Evie. She came out before he had time to step out of sight, but fortunately, she crossed the pavement to the hansom without even glancing in his direction.

Max watched, riveted, his fingers curling tight around the granite cornerstone of his home to keep him where he was as she stepped carefully into the cab, arranged the skirts of her gown around her, and pulled the hansom’s wooden doors down over her lap.

The cab once again jerked into motion, and as it rolled away, Max relaxed his grip and let his hand fall, but even after the hansom had turned safely onto South Audley Street, he felt no relief.

Stepping back onto Park Lane, he stared up at the elegant facade of Westbourne House, and Evie’s words of a week ago came back to him.

Your house is terribly grand, isn’t it? I had to toss a coin to decide which door to use.

To him, it had never been grand. It was merely his home, just as Idyll Hour was his home, and if Evie thought Westbourne House so grand, he couldn’t imagine what she’d make of the hundreds of rooms and thousands of acres of his ducal seat.

To Rebecca, raised in the mining towns of Colorado, it had never been home. Could it be any different for a girl raised in a tiny flat above a bookshop?

Max thought of Evie, of the way she’d been snubbed and mistreated by the upper classes as a girl, and he knew the answer to that was probably not.

He had a duty to be the best duke he could be, for the sake of his family and his tenants and the hundreds of people whose lives and livelihoods depended on him. He had to marry someone who could help him fulfill the many duties of that position. He could not afford to give in to a passion he wasn’t sure could deepen into love for a girl who had no desire to share the life he led and who might very well be relentlessly mocked if she dared to try. He was not willing to take a chance like that, not again.

Max reentered Westbourne House and set about removing any signs that Evie Harlow had ever been there. He put away the gramophone records, packed up the remains of their picnic, and tidied the kitchen, trying to ignore the heavy weight inside his chest as he accepted the fact that he would never dance with her again.

***

Through sheer force of will, Max managed to drive any lustful thoughts about Evie out of his mind, put his priorities back in order, and regain his equilibrium, but he knew his feelings on the matter were not the only ones to consider.

In kissing her, he had taken an unpardonable liberty and broken his word that she was safe in his company. Making matters worse, Evie’s unrestrained response to his kiss had clearly been one of inexperience, and she might be thinking love, not lust, had inspired his action. She might even be falling in love with him. If any of that was true, he owed it to her to extinguish such romantic notions before they could deepen and cause her to be hurt.

It took him three days to compose what he felt was a proper apology, complete with a vow that it would never happen again, a gentle letdown in case she was harboring false hopes, and the reassurance that with Delia arriving any day now, she’d soon have plenty more suitable men dancing attendance and she’d surely forget all about him.

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