Page 43 of So Wild A Heart

Miranda could feel a blush spreading across her cheeks. “Oh.” She walked past him into the room to conceal her reaction.

It was a large room, with two tall windows that looked down on the rear gardens. There was a sitting area with sofa and chair in one quadrant of the room, and further along that wall stood a fireplace with an ornate marble mantel. Between the two stood a door. The room was furnished with heavy mahogany pieces, the most dominant of which was a large tester bed hung with dark-green velvet curtains. A large fading medieval tapestry hung on one wall. It was an impressive, formal room, one befitting a Countess and one in which Miranda could well imagine Lady Ravenscar having lived. It was not one that appealed overmuch to her.

“Of course, I expect you will want to change things,” Devin went on, coming into the room after her and closing the door behind him.

Miranda nodded faintly. It seemed odd to think that she was going to be living in this room from now on, except when they traveled to London or somewhere else. There was a permanence, a gravity, to the idea that almost took her breath away. She glanced over at Devin. She hardly knew him, she thought. She would be living in a strange house in a strange land. She wondered if all brides felt this same little spurt of panic, or if it was because of the businesslike circumstances of their marriage.

Partly to hide her sudden, unaccustomed fit of nerves, she wandered about the room, looking into the wardrobe and dressers. She opened the door that stood in the wall beside the fireplace. Beyond it lay another room, even larger than this one and obviously occupied by a man.

“My chamber,” Devin said, coming up behind her.

Miranda jumped, startled, and quickly shut the door. “Of course.”

She would have moved away then, but Devin was standing in front of her. He braced his hand on the door behind her, blocking off that direction, too, and leaned closer to her.

“I have been thinking the last two weeks. I’ve had a great deal of time to do so, you know. And it seems absurd for this to be a sham marriage.”

“It is no sham, my lord. I regard it as something quite real. It is just not…romantic.”

“There is no need for that, either,” he responded. “I am attracted to you. And you cannot deny that you are attracted to me. I have felt the desire in you. So why deny what we both feel?”

His face loomed closer. Miranda found it difficult to breathe—or even think coherently. His lips brushed across hers gently, sending a delightful tingle all through her.

“We have a connecting door,” he murmured. “It seems to me that we might as well make use of it.”

For an instant his mouth hovered over hers. She could feel his breath against her face, the warmth of his body. Her skin prickled. All she could think of, all she wanted, was his kiss.

Just before his lips touched hers, she jumped to the side. Her heart was racing so hard it was a wonder he couldn’t hear it, she thought, and her hands were trembling. But she managed to put on a calm face as she said, “I think not, my lord. It would seem foolish to introduce emotions into our arrangement. It will work so perfectly as it is.”

She gave him a perfunctory smile and reached back with one hand to turn the lock of the connecting door. “There. This room will do fine.”

11

Devin walked into the study and closed the door behind him with a resounding thud. Across the room Michael, Lord Westhampton, raised his eyes from the book he was reading and looked at Devin with a mildly questioning face.

“Bad day?”

Devin grimaced. “Oh. Hullo, Michael. Didn’t know you were here. I thought everyone else had gone to bed.”

It was almost midnight, and the house was dark. Devin, lying in his bedroom thinking about the locked door into Miranda’s room, had been unable to sleep and had gone prowling.

“Just a bit of reading before sleep,” Michael replied. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to invade your study. Shall I leave? Or does that look on your face mean you would prefer to have a listening ear?”

“I would prefer to change my life,” Devin said, disgruntled. He walked over to the teak cabinet beneath the windows and opened the door. “Whiskey? I have brandy if you’d prefer.”

“Whiskey’s fine,” Michael replied. “And what exactly would you change about your life?”

“Living it. I don’t know. Oh, Christ.” He poured two drinks into fine crystal glasses and handed his brother-in-law one, then drank half the other one in a single gulp. He sighed. “What am I doing marrying that woman? I must have been out of my mind to agree to it.”

“I was rather under the impression that you had no other choice,” Michael pointed out mildly. “Besides, I rather liked your bride-to-be. She’s quite…different.”

Devin grimaced. “That’s one way to put it.”

“Her theories about education for women certainly made for stimulating dinner conversation.”

A smile cracked Devin’s face as he remembered the look on his mother’s face at supper tonight when Miranda had advocated that women be allowed to attend university. “It was a livelier dinner than usual,” he admitted. “But you see my point—she has been here since four o’clock, not even half a day, and already she has stirred everything up. The woman is a menace.”

“If you feel that strongly about it, perhaps you should cry off.”