Page 35 of Loving a Beast of a Marquess
“And yet you match him at every turn.”
“Why not speak to your friend if you are so much disturbed by it?”
He clenched his jaw and looked away. Evangeline did the same to find the crowd watching them closely. Had anyone heard their conversation? Emily, at least, was happily talking to Mr. Trimly. If Evangeline could just encourage him to propose, she would stop having to concern herself with her sister.
The dance came to an end without Evangeline or the Marquess exchanging another word. As he bowed over her hand—a little stiffly, she thought—a brief frisson of regret coursed through her. He didn’t need to be so demanding, so heavy-handed, so insistent, but perhaps neither did she. Perhaps they were different sides of the same coin, both wanting the same things.
If only one of them would step forward and say they wanted it.
* * *
Zachary retreated from the drawing room shortly after his dance with Evangeline. The card room appealed, but he forced himself to walk past, a glass of port in his hand.
Of course, she wouldn’t give up the Earl at his request. He’d been foolish to think she ever might have done. He’d given her no provocation save his own, foolish jealousy.
He’d kept the strange lady’s shawl, and he retrieved it now, staring at the material and remembering what it had been to kiss her in a burst of utter drunken confidence. She’d listened to him without judgment, and her advice had led him here. But now he felt untethered.
He finished his drink and set the glass on the side. Really, he should have disposed of the shawl long ago, but it represented something to him he wasn’t sure he could ever get back. A sense of determination and purpose.
Downstairs, the music started for yet another dance. Percy and his mother would chastise him for leaving the ball before it had finished, but he was a guest, not a host in this house—as Lady Pevton never failed to remind him.
He was a fool. A hopeless, lost fool. The shawl wouldn’t give him guidance; the only person left who could do that was the Duke, and he showed no imminent signs of returning. Zachary had stayed here believing it would be a matter of days—a fortnight at most—but the Duke had yet to arrive, and he was trapped here in limbo. Waiting. Watching as Evangeline dangled before him like the forbidden fruit.
He groaned and fell back on his bed, covering his face with his hands. He shouldn’t want her the way he did, but every time she was close, it was as though his self-control frayed a little further. She was everything—grace and beauty, charm and wit, and that spark of something more that drew her to him with the inevitability of a moth to a flame.
Frustrated, he gathered the shawl into his arms and escaped from his bedchamber where all the memories of Evangeline lingered on his sheets—though they had been changed since their encounter. She was everywhere inside the house, but it was worst inside his bedchamber where he still fancied, he could smell her.
The library was dark at this time of night as it was at the opposite end of the house from the drawing room and so away from the garish lights and chatter from the ballroom. Here, the darkness cradled him, and he was half tempted to blow out his lamp. Instead, he set it on the table and sat on what had become his usual seat. He still held the shawl.
A terrible idea, really. He wasn’t sure what had become of him to be clinging to such things. The last object that represented hope in a world that had become increasingly bleak.
The door opened quietly, and someone advanced into the room. “Oh,” he heard her say. Evangeline. Of course, of everyone he was likely to encounter here, it would be Evangeline.
“Wait,” he said, coming out of the darkness where he sat. “If you’re looking to be alone, I can leave.”
“Zachary.” He should never have asked her to say his name, but the fact that she did—and the fact she had last uttered it when she was lying half-naked in his bed—made him harden almost instantly.
“Evangeline,” he responded.
“Why are you always where I want to be?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
Her gaze dropped to the shawl he held in his hands, and her eyes widened. “What do you think you are doing with that?”
This did look especially bizarre, especially because he had been sitting with it alone in the library. “This may look odd, but—”
“Did you go into my room?” she asked, advancing, a martial light in her eye. “Have you been going through my things?”
“Unlike you,” he said stiffly, “that is not something I have ever done.”
“Then why are you holding my shawl?”
“What do you mean your shawl?”
She grabbed it, fully intending to take it from him, but he used the opportunity to pull her closer. The craving that roared in his blood would not be denied. And if it was indeed her shawl—
He shut the thought away as she collided with him, and he caught her around the waist. Half of him thought she might break away from him or flee, or perhaps slap him across the face, but when he bent and kissed her, she kissed him back with just as much enthusiasm.
