Page 35 of To Bed the Bride
Would she hurt herself badly if she fainted from this height?
She’d only come close to fainting once in her life and that was during her first season. Aunt Deborah had insisted on her corset being pulled an inch tighter than it normally was and she hadn’t been able to breathe correctly the whole night.
One of her hands fluttered to her chest. No, she was breathing well. Yet her heart felt as if it stopped and started not once but several times. During all of it, she’d been unable to move her feet.
She couldn’t move. Her feet would not work.
He was staring at her.
Logan McKnight was staring at her.
She tried, she really did, to look away, but his gaze pinned her there, feet immobile, breathing fast, heart erratic.
What was Logan McKnight doing here? Was he the member of Parliament who was a rabble-rouser? She could almost imagine it of him. He would question everyone the same way he had her, no doubt.
He’d kissed her. He’d kissed her and she hadn’t run screaming from the cottage. Nor had she slapped him. She hadn’t said a word to him, merely left. That’s all she’d done.
What was he going to say? She could just imagine the collective reaction if he divulged that she’d called upon him without a maid. Even worse, she’d taken tea with him, sitting for nearly half an hour alone in a cottage with him.
She should take him aside, as soon as possible, and plead with him to remain silent. It was entirely possible that he wouldn’t agree, just to be contrary.
What was she going to do?
“And my fiancée,” Michael was saying.
Now Logan would say something like,“I’ve already met Miss Craig before. In fact, we have had an intimate conversation, the two of us. I ended up kissing her.”
“Miss Eleanor Craig,” Michael finished.
Suddenly her feet were freed from that invisible grip. She descended the rest of the steps, her gaze on her footing, not the man she was about to confront. Finally, she stood in front of him.
She said something, words that she had uttered hundreds of times before, thankfully. They were instinctive, effortless courtesy extended to a stranger. None of the words she spoke meant anything to her. Nor did they divulge a hint of what she was feeling.
He bowed slightly, then looked back at Michael.
Thankfully, he didn’t say anything about having met her before. Blessedly, he didn’t go into the details of their conversation.
“It’s a pleasure, Miss Craig,” he said.
Had his voice always been that low, sounding of Scotland? Or had she previously been so annoyed by what he’d said that she hadn’t paid any attention to how he’d spoken?
He wasn’t as handsome as Michael, but there was something about him that was different from the other men in the room. A sense of power, perhaps, that even Hamilton didn’t possess. Or perhaps it was determination. You immediately got the impression that this was a man who said what he meant, meant what he said, and was determined to achieve whatever he set out to do.
He suddenly terrified her, but not in a way that made any sense.
She knew, with a strange and unwelcome certainty, that he might lure her to do unspeakable acts, to ruin herself, to say the most outlandish things. He might even say to her,“Eleanor, let yourself be free. Be as you are in Scotland. Let me see that woman again.”
She felt feverish. Her cheeks had to be red. How odd that her hands and feet were cold.
He turned from her to answer a question someone had asked him. She felt immediately released as if she’d sprung back into the London Eleanor, silent and utterly proper.
She moved closer to Michael.
“You’re looking lovely,” Michael said. “I approve of your new gown.”
She didn’t bother asking how he realized it was new. Michael kept a tally on the oddest things. He noticed when she had new earrings. Or when she’d nearly worn through a favorite pair of shoes. Details were important to him, but sometimes she wondered if he saw the minutiae but never the larger picture.
He knew what she wore to social events, but never understood how much she detested them.
