He passed several closed, locked doors before the hallway curved to the right, and he stopped in complete darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light. Once he could make out the doors down the long stretch of hall, he continued.
He should think himself the luckiest of men that he had avoided a terrible match with Juliana Fiori.
He should be down on his knees, thanking his Maker for a narrow miss.
Instead, he was following her into the darkness.
He did not like the metaphor.
She was a sorceress.
She’d seemed so fragile there in that small stall, brushing her horse, talking to herself in soft, self-deprecating tones.
What man could resist such a tableau?
Ralston might have thought Leighton the perpetrator, the years-older gentleman taking advantage of a barely out twenty-year-old. Certainly, Simon had played into the role . . . and he’d accepted the fists and the accusations, and he’d proposed.
And as much as he tried to convince himself that he did it out of a sense of what was right, the truth was that in the moment, he’d done it because he’d wanted her. Wanted to brand her as his and finish what they had started.
The kiss had felt like nothing he had ever experienced. The softness of her skin, the feel of her fingers in his hair, the way she turned him inside out with a little sigh, the way he grew hard and aching with the mere memory of the way she whispered his name, the way she begged him to taste her on those soft, pink . . .
He opened a door, looking into a dark room. Pausing, listening. She was not there. He closed the door with a curse.
He’d never felt this way. Never been so consumed with frustration or desire or . . .
Passion.
He froze at the word, shaking his head.
What was he doing?
This was the final moment before his engagement to Lady Penelope was made public . . . before the gates closed and locked on all other paths save this one—down which lay his future duchess and their life together. And he was following another woman down a dark hallway.
It was time for him to remember who he was.
Penelope would make a sound wife. And an excellent duchess.
A vision flashed—not Penelope. Nothing like Penelope. Ebony curls and eyes the color of the Aegean Sea. Full, ripe lips that whispered his name like a prayer. A laugh that carried on the wind as Juliana rode away from him in Hyde Park, teased him at dinner, on the streets of London, in her stables.
She lived with passion. And she would love with it as well.
He ignored the thought.
She was not for him.
He turned around. Resolute. Saw the light in the darkness, marking the corridor returning to the ballroom. Headed for it.
Just as she spoke from the shadows.
“Simon?”
His given name, in her lilting Italian, breathy with surprise, was a siren’s call.
He turned to her.
“What are you—”
He grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her into the first room he found, and closed the door behind them, quickly, sealing them inside a conservatory.
She backed up, toward the large bay window and a pool of silver moonlight, managing only a few steps before she kicked a cello. She cursed in a whisper of Italian that was too loud to even be called a whisper, as she lunged to keep it from crashing to the ground.
If he weren’t so furious with her for intruding on his space and his thoughts and his life, he might have laughed.
But he was too busy worrying that her brother might happily disembowel him if they were discovered in what would never be believed to be a coincidentally compromising position.
The woman was impossible.
And he was thrilled that she was there.
A problem, that.
“What are you doing following me down a darkened hallway?” she hissed.
“What are you doing heading down a darkened hallway?”
“I was attempting to find some peace!” She turned away, headed for the window, muttering in Italian. “In this entire city, is there a single place where I am not plagued with company?”
Simon did not move, taking perverse pleasure in her agitation. He should not be the only one to be rattled. “It is you who should not be here, not I.”
“Why, does the house come with the bride?” she snapped before switching to English. “And how is it that you speak Italian so well?”
“I find it is not worth doing anything if one does not do it well.”
She offered him a long-suffering look. “Of course you would say that.”
There was a long silence. “Dante.”
“What about him?”
One side of his mouth lifted at her peevishness. “I have a fondness for him. And so, I learned Italian.”
She turned to him, her black hair gleaming silver, the long column of her throat porcelain in the moonlight. “You learned Italian for Dante.”
“Yes.”
She returned her attention to the gardens beyond the window. “I suppose I should not be surprised. Sometimes I think the ton is a layer of hell.”
He laughed. He could not help it. She was magnificent sometimes. When she was not infuriating.
“Shouldn’t you be out there instead of here, sulking about in the darkness?”
“I think you mean skulking.” She need not know how close she was to the truth in her error.
She set the sheet music on the stand with a huff of irritation. “Fine. Skulking. It is a silly word, anyway.”
It was a silly word, but he found he liked the way she said it.
He liked the way she said many things.
Not that he had any right to.
“What are you doing in here?” he asked.
She sat on the piano bench, squinting into the darkness, trying to see him. “I wanted to be alone.”