Page 28 of Crying Wolfe
“Don’t.” Rosaline seized her hand and pulled, leveraging her help to stand. “Don’t make a scene. It’s just a bit of gossip.”
She wanted to feel as tranquil about it as she conveyed, but both her body and her mind were dizzy with a dervish of emotions and anxieties.
Though she’d known her husband all of a dozen days, and had interacted with him seldom in that time, the thought of him taking a mistress was untenable.
Especiallythem. Those women who had already guessed she was too much a mouse to please him.
Was it an opinion her husband shared?
“Rosaline…” Emma stepped down a stair and faced her, bringing them eye level as she was several inches taller and more regal. “Has anyone discussed the wedding night with you?”
“It’s generally thought among our family that this will be a marriage in name only.”
Emma’s steady eyes searched her own. “Is that what you truly want?”
Gulping, Rosaline shook her head. “I want what our sisters have. Affection, passion…but I don’t think Mr. Wolfe is the kind of man who—”
“Hang what kind of man he is,” Emma said with a quiet but fervent passion. “You are one of the loveliest women on this green earth. It was why Uncle Reginald hid you from everyone. It was why he was critical and malicious toward you over the rest of us, because he didn’t want you to realize your worth. Rosaline, he was going to sell you to a wealthy bidder to marry, and your revenge is that you ended up with one of the wealthiest men in the world, and he doesn’t get a penny.”
That brought a faint smile to Rosaline’s stiff features. She had more reason to hate Uncle Reginald than even her siblings realized.
“I kissed Mr. Wolfe,” she confided. “And he seemed to enjoy it. But then he…well, he hasn’t spoken to me since.”
“Then speak tohim, Ros,” Emma said with an eye roll. “Make him take notice. We women are expected to spend all our lives waiting for a man to tell us what to do next. To wait and be available at his pleasure. Well, I know I wasn’t born with male parts, but this is me giving you permission to stop hiding up high where no one can see you. Go to your husband. Let him look at you. He won’t be able to help but be impressed. Enamored, I dare say.”
“He hasn’t looked at me all day,” Rosaline lamented.
Emma regarded her as if she’d sprouted horns. “What nonsense are you talking? Granted, he’s been attempting to remain furtive, but when he looks at you, Rosaline, even my breath catches in my throat. I’ve seen starving men staring at a tenderloin with less longing.”
Rosaline’s eyes widened. “Truly?”
“Stop being a ninny andgo,” Emma urged with the sort of fond impatience only elder sisters seemed to employ.
Rosaline descended the stairs on unsteady feet, wishing she’d not insisted upon taller heels to make her seem less comically short beside her husband. The floor seemed extra slippery. The ground beneath her threatened to fall away at any moment.
Both literally and figuratively.
She paused in the entry to the ballroom to search for Eli, feeling a hundred or so sets of eyes upon her as well as a thousand pinpricks of trepidation.
There.
He was so easy to find, standing both taller and wider than most men.
As his back was to her, she took a moment to gaze at him. To watch the light streaming through the windows glance off the tamed mane of his dark hair. To appreciate the lines of him, breadth and depth and length all scrupulously tethered by toughened sinew and unimaginable strength.
His skin weathered by the elements and painted by even brief encounters with the uncompromising Nevada sun, he was positively swarthy, surrounded by her famously pallid countrymen.
A circle of gentlemen had gathered around him, their heads pressed close as they discussed something so intently, she was loath to interrupt.
“Congratulations again, dear sister,” Emmett said, kissing her cheek. “You make the most ravishing bride. Have you seen Emma?”
“Don’t you mean Lucy?”
His smile turned to ash, though he fought to cover it most valiantly. “I’ve danced with her thrice, now. Any more would be obscene.”
With a sympathetic squeeze of his arm, Rosaline directed him to the stairs and drifted through the crowd of strangers. Some added their well wishes, and others simply stared as if she were a Hydra sprouting more heads than was proper.
It didn’t matter.
