Duke Looks Like a Groomsman - Valerie Bowman Page 0,29
didn’t want to want to hear what she had to say, but he admitted to himself that he did. As for the breeches, he tried not to look.
Tried and failed because when she turned from him to tie Violet’s reins to the nearby fence post near Alabaster, Julianna’s backside was presented to him in its skin-tight kid leather, and he clenched his jaw. In addition to her breeches, she wore a white shirt buttoned up the front, with a wide gap at the throat that revealed her creamy skin and décolletage. Surely her mother didn’t know she was out riding astride on Clayton’s property. Had the other groomsmen seen her like this? They must have. He wanted to punch the other groomsmen.
“What do you want to ask me?” he said, clearing his throat.
As soon as Violet was secure, Julianna swiveled to face him, while he pretended as if his gaze had not just whipped up to her face the moment she’d turned.
“You know about my engagement?” she began, a bit breathlessly.
Ah, so that was it. She hadn’t liked their earlier discussion ending on that note any more than he had. “Doesn’t the entire ton know about it?” he ground out.
She took a deep breath. “Perhaps, but I specifically wondered if you did. I know the announcement was in the paper, but I couldn’t help but wonder if you had seen it or been told.”
He cleared his throat again and mimicked an overly proper voice. “Lady Julianna Montgomery, fresh from her failure with the Duke of Worthington, seems to have set her sights on the next most eligible bachelor in London, the Marquess of Murdock.” His eyes bore into her. “Wasn’t that what the Times wrote?”
Julianna swallowed and leaned back, closing her eyes. “You were…hurt by it?”
“Ha,” he scoffed.
She clenched her jaw. “I suppose it’s my fault, for not waiting around for a man who lied when he said he would return soon.”
Rhys’s nostrils flared. How dare she try to blame him. “And I suppose when one man is no longer available, any man will do for the most popular debutante of the Season.”
She tossed a hand in the air. “That was nothing more than gossip.”
He arched a brow. “What was?”
“Everything they printed in the Times.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Really? Seemed entirely believable to me.”
“The Times writes whatever will sell the most newspapers. You know that, Rhys. I’ve seen more than one story detailing your drunken nights at the gambling hells. Are you telling me those were all true?”
He scratched the back of his neck. So, she kept up with him through the paper, did she? Perhaps that’s how she’d known how eligible a bachelor he was. “Unfortunately, most of them probably were,” he admitted.
Still holding her riding crop, she put her hands on her hips. “You’re telling me that you’ve never been the target of the gossip columns’ maliciousness?”
He expelled his breath and tried not to notice how good her hips looked in those breeches. Her hips, her legs, and her— He forced himself to concentrate on what she’d just said.
“I suppose I have, a time or two,” he replied. Or two dozen. The rags were always pairing him off with some scandalous woman as his latest mistress or reporting that he’d lost far more money than he actually had. He bowed his head and kicked at the dirt with his boot. “Are you telling me you’re not really engaged to Murdock?”
Damn. Why was there a part of him that hoped she would answer ‘yes,’ even as he knew she wouldn’t?
“No,” she replied. “That part is true. But the part about me ‘setting my sights on the next most eligible bachelor in London’ was completely false. At least, that’s not at all how I recall it happening.”
“Ah, a shoddy memory,” he said, scorn audible in his voice. “Happens to the best of us, doesn’t it?” He lifted his head to face her again. “Perhaps that’s why I never came back. I forgot.”
“You left!” Her voice rose and color streamed into her cheeks. “You gave no explanation for it. That article in the Times didn’t come out until after you’d been gone for well over nine months. Nine months in which you wrote to me once and told me that you—let me see, how did you put it—you ‘hoped I hadn’t thought more of our acquaintance than you had.’”
“I just told you. It slipped my mind,” he ground out.
“You’re lying,” she shot back. “What was it? What was