Page 3 of The Forsaken

And he didn’t deny it, but he should.

Instead, the surly one tasked with helping them to the wedding stood looking at her like she’d sprung several heads, and he’d discovered them all empty.

Ah, yes. Men and their pride. How could she forget they needed to be stoked? How could she when they gave women so many reminders?

“I am grateful for your aid, sir.” She sank into a graceful curtsy…but forgot she was in up four inches in snow, and lost her balance.

The gentleman fastened his fingers about her upper right arm. His hold was hard and punishing and yet gentle all at once, as if his reflex said, I will save you, but resent doing so.

“You may release me.”

“And risk your falling into a bank and freezing to death? I’d never…” get so lucky.

Andromena narrowed her eyes. No gentleman of her family’s acquaintance would dare speak thusly. Her brothers, Campbell and Brone, yes, and only teasingly. Oleander certainly, and with teeth when he and Andromena had a spat.

“I heard that.”

“Your ears work then, even if there’s nothing between them. Out here, running around in the middle of a storm, screeching your head off—” He continued over her gasp. “to attract any number of villains.”

The lady sucked in a sharp breath. “The only villain I see is the one insulting me, sir.” She succeeded in tearing her arm from his grip.

The pins that held Andromena’s Apollo top-knot, and six full-red roses and vibrant combs threaded throughout her tresses failed her. Her coiffure tumbled from its creation, filling her mouth and eyes with tight ringlets and littering the hard earth with some of her newest hair accessories. Off they went: pink topaz, rose quartz, and blush coral, disappearing with little plinks into the snow, a treasure for some eventual passersby.

“Blast!” She shoved her curls out of her face but her gaze came only as high as his chest bone and that bloody enraged her. No lady liked being made to feel like a tiny slip of a thing. “Look at what you’ve made me do-ooh?” that syllable dissolved like one of her breaths in the air.

“I am. Such…spirit.” With eyes as dark as the Devil’s own, he raked his gaze over her from her tumbled curls to her—previously—shivering toes. Toes that strangely felt no cold. “For nature made her what she is, and never made another…”

And there with the snow building all around her, and the winter winds howling, under the heat of his eyes and the whisperings of Scotland’s own Robert Burn’s, she melted.

Everything about his look oozed, ‘I’ll devour you like a dollop of sweet cream and we’ll both enjoy the feast I make of you’.

Andromena shivered.

“I d-do not re-require help, sir.” But her retort held neither the sting of before, or any conviction, at all.

“Ah, but receive it you shall, Andromena. Forgive me, For my part, I may speak it to my shame, I have a truant been to chivalry…”

He breathed her name into the frost, stripping away the safety of his anonymity, making his seduction intensely personal. That voice she recognized. It harkened to a warm, candlelit dinner table.

“…I daresay no one understands the rules of chivalry more than a privateer.” His voice boomed around the chambers of her mind; thumped in with the answering table thumps from the fellow McQuoid-Smith sailors around them.

The same dashing gentleman who’d come ’round when Lord Culross courted Andromena’s sister, Linnie and dazzled her at the end of the dining table where they’d been seated next to one another.

Viscount Kerr.

“When you finally make your come-out, you would tempt even an old privateer like me to cast his anchors ashore…”

She swallowed. Or would have, had her throat not forgotten the reflex. She’d been a girl smitten at the ease with which he commanded an entire dinner party. But there was no word to describe how he made her feel as a woman.

His rogue’s eyes glittered with arrogance and approval; he knew her thoughts and reveled in them. This, then, was why ladies tossed away virtue and good names.

“Lord Kerr!” She gave him the coquette’s smile she’d been practicing in preparation for her Come Out. “It is so very good to see you.”

He released her quick—just as he let go all of the McQuoid-Smiths when Linnie chose another over his friend. After Lord Culross tricked Linnie into running off with him, there hadn’t been a mention of the gentleman, and by nature, anyone associated with him.

Hot with humiliation, she struggled to meet his eyes. “Why would they send you to,” retrieve. “save us?”

His eyes narrowed.