The Importance of Being Wanton - Christi Caldwell Page 0,79
effortlessly saw to the shuffle, allowing Emma a chance to get her thoughts ordered. When he’d finished, he set them down, having Isla see to the cut. Collecting the deck, Emma distributed them, doling out thirteen for each . . . when a shadow fell over the table.
And she knew, implicitly, intuitively, born of her awareness of him.
She fumbled her deal, revealing the king of hearts.
How perfectly suited, she thought.
Emma forced herself to look up, and as one, she and her tablemates rose, dropping respective curtsies, and a reluctant bow from Owen.
Charles’s eyes, however—his gaze belonged to Emma. It was the manner of piercing stare that made a woman feel as if she were the only one in the room, and he was there to join her in that solitude, making the moment theirs. Which was utter romantic rot. They weren’t the only two, and there was an entire room of ton members gleefully watching the charming earl and the gangly Gately girl, who’d not been able to hold him. Even so, their gazes remained locked, the moment belonging to only them.
“Miss Gately,” he murmured in that smooth baritone that had likely brought many a woman to surrender and sin for him. “Would you join me in a turn about the room?” And not unlike that serpent who’d first tempted Eve, he offered his elbow as the apple it was.
“Shove off, Scarsdale,” Isla snapped. “We’re in the middle of something.”
To Charles’s credit, he displayed no outward shock or outrage at that greeting. “Miss Gately,” he said with a smile. “A pleasure, as always.”
“Only when you’re gone,” she said, returning that smile.
“Isla,” Emma warned.
And when presented with the possibility of having her friends flay Charles, and in a public way, or accept that invitation and take on the attention herself, she’d always choose the latter. Hastily placing her fingers atop his sleeve, she allowed him to escort her off, and start their journey around the perimeter of the parquet floor.
“Have a care with that one, Emma-love,” Charles said. “You’re going to break his heart.”
Puzzling her brow, she followed his pointed stare across the busy room, over to a glowering Owen.
“Owenn?” she asked, before lowering her voice. “He is a friend.” Charles steered them right out of Lady Rutland’s drawing room and onward to the other card room. The other empty card room. “Only you insist on making all matters between a man and a woman romantic,” she said, her voice echoing around the large, vacant drawing room. Because they’d all gathered to listen to this man and Lord Alvanley.
“That gent is eyeing you with romantic eyes,” he said bluntly as she slipped free of his arm and ventured deeper into the room. “Trust me as one who knows.”
Envy whipped through her, green like a snake unleashing its poison. “Because you’ve made so many romantic eyes?”
“Yes, because they’re my own these past months whenever I see you, Emma-love.”
His words, smooth and low, rumbled through the room, and Emma trembled. “Don’t call me that.” To give her fingers something to do, she picked up a deck from the nearby card table. “You are so practiced with your words. A rogue through and through.”
He strolled closer, his a languid glide, until he stopped on the other side of the table. “Not in this,” he said quietly. “Only with you, Emie.”
“Stop it,” she ordered, dampening her mouth. “That is what my father calls me.”
“Then Emma-love it shall be,” he murmured in that deep, rich baritone, steeped in warmth and sin. How was it possible for a voice to bring a woman’s body to tremble? Charles leaned across the table, and her breath quickened in her chest. “Never fear, I shall keep searching for the endearment you so choose.”
It implied his resolve—one that had annoyed her in the initial months, but after their meeting over billiards in her family’s household that not-so-long-ago day, had served only to . . . confuse her. “Why are you here?” she asked, gripping tightly the playing deck. All the while, she felt Charles’s gaze upon her. “You studiously avoid soirees.”
“You know that?”
Her fingers fumbled the shuffle, and she promptly righted the deck . . . and herself. “Of course I know that,” she said, her cheeks heating at how much she’d inadvertently revealed. Unlike him, she had paid attention to how he’d spent his evenings, and to the events he preferred attending. Which was how she could say with enough certainty that she’d wager freely at all the card tables