AURELIA MARLOWE

Maisie helped me into the dress, and the silk settled against my body.

The front was modest enough, with a high neckline and fabric that skimmed down to the floor, but the back dropped almost to the base of my spine, and the cut-outs at my waist left even more skin uncovered.

I touched one of them with my fingertips. "Who chose this?"

"Mr Blackwell's stylist sent it over this afternoon."

"Of course they did."

The silk clung closely to my waist and hips, cool against my skin whenever I moved.

"Do I look ridiculous?"

"No," Maisie said quietly. "You look like the sort of woman people stop talking to look at."

I had no idea what to do with that, so I let her move on to my hair. She swept it loosely to one side, fastened a pair of heavy earrings at my ears and dabbed a little perfume onto my wrists. I kept finding myself touching the bare skin at my waist, my pulse skipping with an excitement I hadn't expected.

Once I was ready, Maisie walked me to the top of the stairs. I heard Ronan below almost at once, his shoes crossing the marble before stopping somewhere near the bottom.

The silence lasted long enough that my grip tightened around my cane.

"Ronan?"

He still said nothing, but a moment later his footsteps started up the stairs.

They stopped one step below mine. He was close enough that I could hear the slow rhythm of his breathing and catch the scent I was already beginning to know as his: cedar, clean musk and that faint spice that seemed to live in his skin.

"Give me your hand."

I hesitated before holding it out. His palm closed around mine, huge and warm, the roughness of his calluses scraping lightly over my skin as he steadied me. I had noticed his hands at the wedding, but I had never felt them properly before, not the width of his palm or the restrained strength in his fingers.

How had a man who owned half of Mayfair ended up with hands like a labourer?

His other hand found the exposed skin at my waist through the cut-out of the dress, and I sucked in a breath as his palm pressed against it.

I should not have reacted to him at all. Ronan was cold and rude, yet suddenly every nerve I owned seemed to have gathered beneath his hand.

His thumb moved once against my ribs as he guided me down.

The car carried the same suffocating silence as it had on our wedding day, and with nothing to distract me, I became far too conscious of the small distance between our knees and the way my bare back brushed the leather whenever we turned.

"What exactly is the gala for?" I asked.

"Charity."

"That much I gathered. Which one?"

"Children's hospital."

"And what's expected of me?"

He took a moment before answering. "Smile and look pretty. I'm sure you can manage both."

I turned towards the window before my temper got the better of me. If I had been able to see his face, I might have thrown my clutch at it.

"How kind of you to have such faith in my abilities."

Ronan said nothing, though the leather creaked as he shifted beside me, followed by a quiet exhale that sounded suspiciously close to amusement.

I turned towards him, but whatever I had caught was already gone, so I left him to his silence for the rest of the journey.

The cameras announced our arrival before the car had fully stopped, shutters snapping outside while people shouted Ronan's name from several directions.

"Stay close," he said.

My door opened moments later, and his hand found mine as the noise closed around us.

"Mr Blackwell! Over here!"

"Mrs Blackwell, this way, please!"

Hearing the name shouted by strangers for the first time sent a strange flutter through my stomach. Ronan's arm circled my waist and brought me firmly against his side, close enough that I could feel the solid line of him through our clothes.

"Gentlemen," he said, his voice changing into something smoother and far more public than anything he used at home. "My wife, Aurelia."

The cameras kept snapping while I smiled as instructed and tried not to pay attention to the slow movement of his thumb against my bare waist.

Once we were inside, the shouting gave way to music, laughter and the constant clink of glassware. Ronan guided me through a procession of introductions I tried to commit to memory: a lord, a dame, a banker whose handshake was unpleasantly damp and a woman who informed me with great sweetness that it was terribly brave of me to attend an event so soon after my wedding.

"I'm not sure bravery is required," I replied pleasantly. "It's only a party."

Ronan's fingers pressed a little more firmly against my waist, though whether in approval or warning, I couldn't tell.

After the fifth conversation, he bent towards me until his voice reached only my ear.

"Stay here. I need to speak to someone."

"Where is here?"

"Beside a pillar. It's directly behind you."

His hand left my waist, and I hated how quickly I felt its absence.

His footsteps vanished into the crowd, leaving me with one hand resting against cool marble while conversations moved around me without ever quite including me. One minute became five. A waiter offered champagne, which I declined, and although I could have used my cane to explore, I had no idea how the room was arranged and no desire to become the blind wife who walked into a fountain on her husband's first public outing.

I was beginning to feel remarkably foolish standing there alone when a familiar voice came through the crowd.

"Aurelia?"

Relief escaped me in a laugh. "Seb!"

"Thank God. I've been circling this room for five minutes trying to work out whether it was you."

His arms came around me, familiar enough that I hugged him back without hesitation.

Sebastian Harcourt had been part of my life for as long as I could remember. He was a family friend, a permanent fixture at Marlowe House dinners and one of the few people who had never lowered his voice around me or discussed me as if blindness had also made me deaf.

"You look incredible," he said near my ear before correcting himself a little too quickly. "Beautiful, I mean. Not that you didn't always."

I smiled. "Seb, are you blushing?"

"Absolutely not."

"You are. I can hear it."

He laughed and linked my arm through his, and within minutes the tension I had carried since leaving the house began to loosen.

"Right," he murmured. "Let me tell you who's here. At your two o'clock, Lady Pemberton, whose wig has apparently been migrating towards her left ear since six."

I clapped a hand over my mouth.

"At your ten, the Minister for something dreadful and his wife, who is pretending not to know he keeps staring at the waitress. And somewhere behind us is a man wearing a mustard waistcoat so offensive that I'm beginning to think the waistcoat is wearing him."

"A mustard waistcoat?"

"It's worse than you're imagining."

I was laughing properly by then, bent over his arm while he whispered increasingly ridiculous descriptions into my ear. For the first time all evening, I felt like myself.

A hand closed around my wrist hard enough to cut the laughter short.

"Aurelia."

Ronan's voice was calm, but there was nothing calm about his grip.

"Ronan," I said, still catching my breath. "This is Seb. He's a friend of—"

"Harcourt." Ronan's voice cooled further. "I know who he is."

"Blackwell." Sebastian remained polite, though I had never heard that edge in his voice before. "Congratulations. I was just keeping your wife company."

"So I see."

Sebastian's arm tensed beneath mine.

"If you'll excuse us," Ronan said.

"Ronan, we were—"

He started walking before I could finish, pulling me away from Sebastian so abruptly that I stumbled. His other hand came to my back then, steering me through the crowd while I struggled to keep up.

"Ronan."

He gave me no answer and kept moving.

"Slow down."

The crowd noise faded as he led me through a doorway and into a smaller room, where the music became muffled and the air felt noticeably cooler.

"What is going on?" I demanded. "Where are we? Ronan, let go of me."

The door closed behind us, followed by the sharp click of the lock.

"Ronan?"

He was on me before I could work out where he had gone, one hand catching my waist as he pushed me back against the wall hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs. His arms came down on either side of my head, boxing me in while his breathing turned rough and uneven above me.

I lifted my chin. "Would you care to explain what on earth you're doing?"

His mouth came so close to my ear that I felt every word against my skin.

"Who said you could laugh like that for him?"