The Taming of Ryder Cavanaugh (Cynster #20) - Stephanie Laurens Page 0,31

want to dance with him; she didn’t have to think—her skin crawled at the very idea.

But how to decline without giving offense when she’d clearly been prepared to dance with others? Legarde was well known for his acid tongue.

“I’m desolated to have to inform you, Legarde, that Miss Cynster promised this waltz to me.” Ryder’s drawl was every bit as languid as Legarde’s, but somehow significantly less challengeable.

Mary felt such relief that she would have happily kissed Ryder; ridiculous, really, but she hadn’t wanted to even touch Legarde. When Ryder turned to her, she smiled and readily surrendered her hand. “Thank you—I hadn’t forgotten.”

His smile was all appreciation, on several levels. “I didn’t imagine you had.”

With a vague nod to the group, one she echoed, he turned her toward the floor.

As she moved away, she caught a last glimpse of Legarde’s face. The smug, almost delighted look in his eyes made her frown, but she kept the expression from her face as Ryder led her onto the floor.

But why had Legarde looked like that, reacted like that? As if he’d seen something, learned something, secret—even illicit. Something no one else knew.

But then Ryder swung her into his arms and stepped fluidly into the swirl of the dance, and she put Legarde and his reactions from her mind and gave herself up to the moment.

After several revolutions, she marshaled her wits enough to say, “Thank you for rescuing me. Mr. Legarde is definitely not on my list.”

“Thank God for that.” Ryder looked into her eyes, watched her lips curve in a confident smile, and used her words and tone, and that assured smile, to further placate his natural impulses, more intense where she was concerned than he’d expected, at least, not yet. But she somehow had, more or less from the first, connected directly with that primitive, instinctual side of him, and if anything that connection had only deepened over their recent meetings.

It had grown more distinct, more defined, on learning her purpose in attending this ball.

Still, he’d weathered the challenge thus far. The challenge of letting her run without pouncing and seizing and making off with her. Thus far, he felt, he could congratulate himself on his performance.

The waltz was uneventful; he kept it that way. No need to press his advantage just yet. Better to let her realize—as she eventually would—that no other gentleman could match her as he did, without the distraction of the sensual connection he knew would come to be. That connection was there, as yet nascent but potentially powerful, his to call upon when he wished, but she, he sensed, would be more swayed, and better convinced, by her own logic.

He was confident enough in his character, and in his prowess, to let her chart her own course. It would lead her to him in the end.

At the completion of the dance, both of them were smiling and in complete accord. She allowed him to steer her to a group of ladies and gentlemen closer to his age. He knew them all and introduced her; to his mind she could use a little contrast the better to compare him to the puppies she’d been assessing.

Lady Paynesville, a long-ago lover, turned to him with a smile. “My lord, my brother asked me, were I to see you, to inquire whether you’re inclined to come north to Scotland for the hunting this summer?”

Looking into Juliet’s eyes, Ryder understood perfectly that game wasn’t the only thing that would be on offer should he elect to accept her—and her brother’s—invitation. But it was just such interludes—enjoyable but essentially meaningless, with no long-term benefit—that he’d started to find wearisome; his hunter’s instincts had decreed they were no longer worth his time. “Thank John for me, but I’m not yet sure what I might be doing this summer.”

Juliet took the refusal in good heart. “Ah, well.” She smiled and her gaze traveled past him to Mary. “One never does know, I suppose.”

Ryder smiled, too, and followed Juliet’s gaze—and immediately had to suppress a frown. A scowl. An irritated growl.

While he’d been distracted—for only a few minutes—another gentleman had joined the circle, insinuating himself on Mary’s other side.

And that gentleman—assuming one used the term loosely—was Jack Francome. Handsome, debonair, and outwardly as easygoing as Ryder himself, courtesy of his excellent birth, Francome had the entree throughout the ton and was accepted in most drawing rooms, but he’d long been known as a man of dubious character and distinctly shady morals. He’d gambled