The Defiant Wife (The Three Mrs #2) - Jess Michaels Page 0,14

the first place. But slowly, he returned to himself.

And she saw the moment where reality dawned for him.

He backed away, far away, and stared at her. “Phillipa, I-I am so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

He wouldn’t meet her eyes. He’d always done so in the past, but now he refused, and her stomach turned. This moment, so powerful and so wonderful…had ruined everything between them. She could see that it had. That he would pull further away because of his sense of duty, because of the weight pressing down on his shoulders.

Kissing her had made it worse, not better.

“Emotions h-have been…high lately,” she stammered, searching for any explanation that would lower this wall he was clearly going to build between them. “And our friendship has become one I greatly value. This was a moment of weakness, of confusion. You needn’t apologize for it. I was as swept away as you were.”

“You are too kind,” he said with a bow, suddenly all formality. “Though I don’t deserve anything less than your censure. I assure you, this won’t happen again.”

The certainty of the words stung like he’d slapped her, and she turned her face so he wouldn’t be aware of the tears that suddenly tingled in her eyes. He wasn’t being unkind. He was being gentlemanly.

And yet he tore her heart out in ways that were too revealing, even to herself.

“I understand,” she said, wishing her voice didn’t have that slight waver to it.

“We should probably go back,” he said, shifting with discomfort. “The others will be ready by now, I think.”

“Of course,” she said, and moved toward the safety of others over the rise. “I’m anxious to reach our destination.”

He said nothing more, but followed her up the hill. She felt his eyes on her as they walked together across the field back toward the carriage. But he said nothing to her as she allowed the footman to help her into the rig for the final leg of their journey.

He said nothing, and that said it all.

Rhys had never wanted his half-brother’s things. All his life, it had been quite the opposite. While Erasmus was showy and bold, Rhys had been quiet, studious, careful. They’d never had the same taste in anything.

And now, as he rode along on this horse beside his carriage, winding down the miles taking him to Bath, all he could think about was how deeply he coveted Phillipa.

For hours he had only thought about the kiss. No, that wasn’t true. He’d thought about the kiss a great deal, of course. How could one not when it had been such a magnificent explosion of mouths and tongues and gripping hands? The kind of kiss that made a man want to forget everything else in the world, something Rhys didn’t often have occasion to do.

But he thought of more than that. He thought of all the places that kiss could have gone, there on the soft grass beside the lake. How if they’d been alone, if she hadn’t pulled away, if…if…if…

Then he might have given in to this dissolute part of himself that he so wanted to hide. He might have taken far more than a stolen kiss.

When he was honest with himself, this wasn’t the first time such fantasies had plagued his mind. Almost since the first moment he entered a room and Phillipa was there with her wild mop of curly hair and her bright green eyes with their flicker of defiance and self-assurance, he had wanted her. Deeply, desperately, wanted her. The kind of want that kept him awake at night, that woke him hard in the morning, that made him breathless when he saw her.

And it was fucking terrible. If he’d met her first, if there had been no Erasmus, it wouldn’t have been. It would have been something wonderful then, perhaps. But there was an Erasmus. And a marriage. And a scandal.

So nothing good could ever come of any of this now. Phillipa was largest on a pile of things he could not have, should not want.

“There, my lord!” the driver said as they came to a rise in the road.

Rhys blinked, pulled from his thoughts, and looked down at the city below. Bath. A bustling resort town, with unique terraced houses and columned buildings and, of course, the famous Roman baths that brought so many there each year.

It didn’t take them long to enter the outskirts of the city, where the bustle increased exponentially. Rhys had always liked the heartbeat