Page 7 of Bad Luck Bride

It’s not possible, he told himself, his fingers clenching around the dripping stem in his hand, his guts tightening with dismay.I’m imagining things.

That rather desperate thought had barely crossed his mind before the owner of the voice came around the trellis, and as she stopped a few feet away, the sight of her shredded any optimistic notion that he’d been imagining things.

Standing amid buckets and bouquets, her flaming hair a vivid contrast to the pink flowers and greenery all around her, was the woman it had taken him many long, hard years and the kisses of many other women to forget.

Kay.

There was no mistaking those bright curls peeking out fromunder a wide-brimmed hat of pale yellow straw, or those strangely beautiful silvery-green eyes surrounded by dark red lashes, or that pale, porcelain skin. And there was definitely no mistaking the freckles spattered across her nose and cheeks that always made her look as if a mischievous fairy had come along in the night and dusted her face with brown sugar.

She didn’t look exactly the same, however. She was thinner than the girl he remembered, he realized as he glanced down over a fashionably slim figure in blue wool.

What a pity.

She probably wouldn’t agree with him there. Kay had always hated her curves. Why that was so, he’d never understood, but then, most women had ridiculous ideas about what constituted feminine beauty. Torching their hair with hot curling tongs, picking at their food like finicky little birds, squeezing and pinching their waistlines with corsets until they looked like wasps, bleaching away their pretty freckles with lemon juice.

For Kay, of course, using hot tongs had never been necessary. Her hair had always been a mass of unruly corkscrew curls. And using lemon juice would have been a futile endeavor, for her freckles were everywhere. Her shoulders, her arms, cresting the tops of her breasts—

Memories assailed him, of brushing brilliant copper tresses back from her shoulders, of tracing star constellations across the golden-brown dots along her clavicle above the edge of her white chemise, kissing the ones scattered across her shoulders. With those memories came an onslaught of other emotions, emotions he hadn’t felt for years, emotions he thought he’d conquered and killed long ago.

Desire, anger, frustration, pain—they caught him unawares,like a knife in the dark, slipped between his ribs, piercing his lungs, robbing him of the ability to think or even breathe.

He looked up, watching her big sage-colored eyes narrow to slits, demonstrating that he wasn’t the only one thinking of the past, though if her face was anything to go by, the biggest thing it made her feel was contempt. The lips of her wide, generous mouth were pressed together in a tight, unforgiving line. Her pert freckled nose was wrinkled up as if she’d caught a bad smell. One auburn eyebrow arched upward in unmistakable disdain.

Damn it all, he thought, the knife twisting deep inside his chest.Damn it all to hell.

2

She ought to have known, she supposed, that this moment would come one day.

After all, in a city populated by a mere six million people, of course she’d be bound to stumble upon the only man she’d ever loved, the man who’d left her flat, broken her heart, and ruined her life. Yes, indeed. Her luck was just that good.

But she hadn’t known. He’d taken her father’s bribe and gone off in that craven way for Africa, and after more than two years with no word from him, after watching helplessly as the rumors of their botched elopement had spread far and wide, destroying her reputation and her future, after over a decade with no indication that he ever intended to return to England, she’d been lulled into the heavenly belief that she’d never see the contemptible cad again.

So now, as Kay stared into Devlin Sharpe’s face, she felt all the shock, all the pain, all the humiliation of the past come rushing back in a flood. Heat rose in her cheeks, rage burned like fire in her chest, and she could only stare at him, paralyzed into immobility.

In appearance, he looked different somehow from the man she remembered. His eyes were still that extraordinary shade ofturquoise blue, but in a face bronzed by the African sun, their color seemed more vibrant, more startling than ever. Beneath the brim of his hat, his hair was still the color of a moonless midnight, but at his temples, there were a few faint strands of silver amid the black, marking the passage of time.

His face was still lean and angular, the planes of his cheekbones as sharply chiseled as ever, but there were faint smile lines at the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth that made him seem mellower somehow, less hard, less rebellious and defiant than the man she’d known so long ago. His once-straight Roman nose was ever so faintly out of place, showing that it had been broken at some point, probably by a hard right hook he no doubt richly deserved.

His face wasn’t the only thing that had changed, she realized, her gaze sliding down. He still topped her five-foot, four-inch frame by a good ten inches, and he still had the same wide shoulders and mile-long legs, but during the past fourteen years, the gangly, whipcord thinness of his youth had filled out, transforming his body to a more powerful, muscular one than that of the younger man she remembered.

His gray wool suit and gray homburg hat were commonplace attire for an upper-class Englishman, and yet, somehow, his appearance reflected not the isle of his birth but the continent from which he’d just come. He looked strong, primitive, and almost laughably out of place in the civilized confines of a London florist’s shop.

One thing about him, however, had not changed at all, Kay noted in chagrin as she lifted her gaze again to his face. He was still the best-looking man she’d ever seen.

How nauseating.

“You,” she said with soul-deep loathing.

“Well, well,” he drawled, tipping his hat to her with a bow, “if it isn’t Lady Kay.”

The contemptuous way her name rolled off his tongue shredded any notion she might have had that he had mellowed with time. It also flicked her on the raw. What grudge was he nursing, in heaven’s name? She’d been the injured party all those years ago, not him.

She scowled. “What in blazes are you doing here?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He gestured to their surroundings, and her shock deepened as she realized what he meant.

“You mean…” She paused, appalled by the implications. “You don’t mean you’re staying here at the Savoy?”

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