The Taming of Ryder Cavanaugh (Cynster #20) - Stephanie Laurens Page 0,76

of a larger and consequently more formal event.

For Ryder, the only less than perfect note was struck by his stepmother, but his half siblings’ efforts to keep Lavinia both amused and out of his and Mary’s way warmed him and made him smile. Together, he and Mary circled the room, moving smoothly from group to group, confirming that their wedding would take place in just ten days, a week after Henrietta and James’s.

Then the musicians set bow to string, and the moment Ryder had been waiting for—the moment Mary had been so looking forward to—was upon them.

Smiling into her eyes, he bowed—with unrestricted grace now that Sanderson had removed his stitches and pronounced him fully healed. Straightening, he closed his fingers firmly about the hand she offered him—and felt something inside him tighten, lock. Her eyes were pools of blue-violet alight with expectation, with shimmering anticipation as he led her to the floor.

Without taking his eyes from hers, he swept her into his arms and stepped out, and took her with him, into their engagement waltz.

The music swelled and sent them swirling across the parquet floor as the crowd, smiling and delighted, fell back.

Leaving them whirling alone under the chandeliers, with crystal-fractured light glinting in their hair, in their eyes, as the world fell away and there was only them.

With his gaze locked with hers, with her eyes locked on his, they were caught and held captive by the moment.

He smiled intently, outwardly and inwardly. He’d heeded her words, had seen in them opportunity—the perfect moment in which to take the next step. To draw her closer yet, to stake his claim on her, on her senses, in a significantly more absolute way.

To move to the next stage and to capture her as his. As his bride-to-be, recognized and acknowledged not just by society, not just by their families, not just by him but by her. And not just by her rational mind but by the sensual, emotional, steely-tempered and iron-willed female every instinct he possessed assured him dwelled inside her.

That was his aim—to capture that fey creature—and he was highly experienced in that type of hunt.

As they whirled down the room, effortlessly revolving, his well-trained muscles without conscious direction sweeping them through the turns, as she followed his lead with even less thought, his focus never wavered. For them, for his intent and purpose, and for hers, too, they weren’t dancing in Mayfair.

They were waltzing in a world of their own.

Mary sensed the difference, not just the drawing in of her senses but their heightening. The ineluctable tension. It gripped her, and him, and resonated between them.

She’d been looking forward to this moment, to the waltz and all it meant, but when she’d originally imagined her first waltz with her betrothed, she’d assumed it would signal an end. That their courtship would be done, and that this dance would be an acknowledgment of their love, a love already owned to and owned by them both.

Instead, this waltz, their waltz, was a beginning. The first step down a path she’d never imagined treading—not without the confidence of love to bolster her.

Yet here she was, and here he was, whirling her about the floor in his arms, his gaze locked with hers, his awareness meshed with hers in a way that consumed all her senses, and as Lucilla had confirmed, this was where they—he and she—were supposed to be.

For them, this was the right way, the right path, even if it was so very different from the one she’d imagined. Fitting perhaps, given he was so very different from the man she’d imagined would be hers. She’d assumed her gentleman would be an easy man to tame . . . instead, trapped in his hazel eyes, she was waltzing her engagement waltz with the ton’s most untamable nobleman.

Challenge? Oh, yes.

It was there, inescapable, a subtle clash of fire in their gazes, but as they whirled again and at a distant remove she sensed others joining them on the floor, she had to wonder if he saw that challenge in the same way she did. If he recognized its basis, knew her fell intent.

Of his intent she harbored no doubt; she would have had to have been unconscious, her senses all blind, not to see, sense, feel the primal possessiveness that reached for her. To give him his due, his desire was screened by the veil of sophistication he so expertly wielded, yet immersed in the moment, so focused on him, she