Lover Be Mine A Legendary Lovers Novel - By Nicole Jordan Page 0,24

linked them together. A bond, a connection, of tenderness, of intimacy.

A visible shiver ran down her spine, and Sophie shut her eyes for a moment, as if fighting herself.

Jack was fighting against the same craving. He badly wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her final resistance away. Even so, this was not the time or place. He would have his chance in two more days, he promised himself.

Reluctantly, he exhaled the breath that had caught in his lungs and lowered his hand from her mouth. “I will see you on Tuesday at your aunt’s country home in Berkshire. For now I must have a word with Skye and arrange for my cousin Traherne to handle some of my affairs while I am away.”

Then Jack stepped back and turned away, taking a measure of comfort in the disappointment he’d seen in Sophie’s eyes.

It had become a Wilde family tradition to gather for Sunday dinner as often as possible, a custom initially started the summer following the tragic loss of their parents. Lord Cornelius had hoped to drum civilized manners into the five hooligan youngsters, and they had complied in order to please their long-suffering, much-loved uncle. Over the years, however, the dinners had evolved into a way to remain involved in one anothers’ lives.

At the end of that long-ago summer, the cousins had gone their separate ways—Ash and Quinn to university, the girls to a boarding academy, while then-seventeen-year-old Jack had remained behind at Beauvoir with Uncle Cornelius for another year. But the bonds of love and family had never been broken, as Jack thought they might be. In fact, their ties had actually been made stronger, for their separation had only made them cherish one another more.

Normally Jack relished their clan gatherings—except when he was the prime focus of attention, as he knew he would be now. Thus, he’d delayed arriving at the Beaufort mansion in Grosvenor Square until the last minute. When he finally sauntered into the drawing room, he found three Wilde ladies assembled there, sipping sherry, along with his elderly, bespectacled uncle.

Of course Ash and his new wife Maura were absent, having retired to the Beaufort family seat in Kent in search of privacy as a blissfully wedded couple. Quinn was missing as well—no doubt off somewhere applying his brilliant mind to his latest scientific inventions. A boon, Jack decided, since cool-headed, cynical Quinn would rag him unmercifully about being bear-led by the girls and surrendering to their romanticism.

But the rest of the family was there. Skye looked fresh as a rose, her pale-blond fairness a contrast to the darker coloring of the others. Kate was an auburn-haired beauty who at four-and-twenty had attracted countless beaus, but who had never found the true love she’d sought since coming out of short skirts. Hence, her obsession with matchmaking for her kin.

Their aunt by marriage, Lady Isabella Wilde, had raven hair like Jack, the result of her Latin heritage. The daughter of a Spanish nobleman and an Englishwoman, Isabella had taken Cornelius’s younger brother Henry for her third husband. Now widowed once more, she was as vivacious as any of the Wildes, although she was in her middle forties—nearly the same age as the Duke of Dunmore, as it happened.

Aunt Bella divided her time between her homes in London, Cornwall, and the Isle of Cyrene in the Mediterranean, but had returned to London last month at Ash’s request to aid him in his courtship of Maura.

Jack bent and kissed Lady Isabella’s smooth cheek just as his Uncle Cornelius complained about his tardiness.

“You are late, my boy,” said the scholar, who valued punctuality.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he replied. “I had some unavoidable details to attend to.”

Bracing himself to be quizzed about his romance with Sophie by his female relatives, he crossed to the side table to pour himself a glass of sherry.

“Well?” Kate demanded before he could take his first swallow.

“Well, what, dear sister?”

“We want to know about Miss Fortin.”

“A gentleman never kisses and tells,” Jack quipped as he returned to settle in a wing chair.

“Then you have kissed her?”

“That, my sweet, is none of your business.”

“I should think it is very much my business, since I was the one who found your Juliet for you. The least you could do is report on your progress.”

Skye, looking every bit as curious, chimed in. “That is exactly what I told him, Kate.”

Jack shot his cousin an amused glance. “You soon won’t need my reports, Skye, since you