Page 29 of The Soul of a Rogue

Rune pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. “I thought you said the marquess hates people.”

“He does.”

“So why does he host a gala?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the retreating castle. “He does it because his wife made him promise he would throw the gala every year after she died. So he does it for her memory. He does it because she’s still in that castle—she talks to him all the time and he talks to her.”

His eyebrows cocked. “He talks to her?”

“Sometimes in front of me.”

“You don’t find that—him—addled? Usually speaking to dead people will find you in an asylum fairly quickly.”

She waved her hand in the air. “I find him perfectly fine just as he is—if his wife is there, then she’s there. Just because I cannot see her, who am I to question it?”

His mouth opened as though he was about to retort, but then he shook his head.

“What?”

“You truly want people to be who you think they are, don’t you?” He looked directly at her. “You don’t want to know the truth of the soul underneath.”

“Are you calling me naïve?”

“I’m calling you…optimistic.”

“And that is bad?”

He shrugged. “It isn’t very realistic.”

“Yet I wouldn’t be on this current adventure if I questioned everything around me. If I questioned that box and the power it has.”

He inclined his head to her and then looked forward. “No, I don’t suppose you would be.”

Her eyes narrowed as she stared at his profile. “To that matter, you seem to have set aside solid logic as well to accompany me on this journey.”

“I’ve learned that the box is the one thing that logic doesn’t apply to.” He took a deep breath before his stare shifted to her. “Though I’m beginning to believe logic doesn’t necessarily apply where you are concerned as well.”

While he looked dangerous earlier, his eyes, his current countenance was utterly sinful.

She’d promised herself, promised him, no entanglements, and she’d meant it.

But if he kept looking at her like he wanted to devour her, inch by inch, and make her enjoy it as he did it, she might just find herself wavering on that vow.

She had to be careful around this one, or she’d find her promise dissolving to dust in the storm.

{ Chapter 10 }

Something was different.

Elle chewed on a bite of her roasted grouse with sweetened pea sauce, staring at the table and the full spread of food on her plate—grouse, apricots, asparagus, Oxford pudding—that Cook had made that day to celebrate her return. Cook always said she looked too skinny when she returned to the island.

Her gaze shifted past the candelabrum centering the smaller, intimate table she usually had set in her dining room to look at Rune.

What was it?

Her look dipped back down to her plate and then to Rune’s plate of food. His plate was still half full. They’d been eating for five minutes now, and he wasn’t done.

He was actually eating at a somewhat normal pace.

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