The Importance of Being Wanton - Christi Caldwell Page 0,21
the air. A desire that defied logic and knew not of the distant activity unfolding in this room. Just like at the shore of the Serpentine more than two months ago, all she knew was a hungering for whatever promise he dangled with his nearness. “I would love to . . .” He shifted his mouth so it lingered closer to the shell of her ear; the sough of his breath tickled that sensitive flesh, and brought her eyes briefly shut.
I would love to . . . ?
What? Whaaat? Her lashes fluttered open, needing the remainder of that answer from him.
Charles’s lips curled in a taunting, knowing, confident grin, a smile that could be born only of a rogue’s knowledge of the subtleties of a woman’s quickened breath and rapidly beating heart. “Hear whatever opinions you’ve drawn about me, Emma,” he teased.
He may as well have dunked her in water to douse her desire.
Bloody hell. “No, you wouldn’t,” she said flatly. “Your ego couldn’t stand it.” When would she cease being captivated by him?
“I have an ego, do I?”
He did, but one deserved because of his Adonis-like looks and his effortless charm. And she’d sooner slice out her tongue than feed into his deserved esteem.
“The truth is, Emma, you know nothing of me.”
The casual way with which he said it struck her square in the chest. Charles couldn’t have hurt her more had he taken the end of the cue stick he’d applied chalk to and jammed it through her chest.
I know nothing about you because you never let me. Because you never wanted to learn anything about me, she screamed silently.
Emma gave a flounce of her head, hating the absolute absence of curls that would have added a flair of emphasis. Alas, she’d never been in possession of the luxuriant tresses of the women he preferred. “I’ve known you the whole of my life, Lord Scarsdale.” She infused her response with an impressive modicum of boredom, given he’d leveled a truth that had always caused the greatest of aches. “I know a good deal more about you than you credit.” The most distant memories she carried of him included someone who had been friendly enough to her . . . until the day of the mock wedding ceremony their families had held . . . when she had learned precisely how he felt about her.
His grin widened, and lifting his hands, he waggled four fingers of each. “All right. Out with it. Let’s hear it.”
The doors opened, and her brothers spilled into the room, studiously avoiding looking at Emma as they made a path to their best friend, Charles’s brother, Derek.
The moment Pierce and Morgan had moved past them, taking a wide berth, she proceeded to oblige him. “You don’t take anything seriously, Charles. Everything and everyone is a joke to you. You’re notoriously late.” From their betrothal on to every ball at which she’d ever been in attendance with him. “Should I keep going?”
The ghost of a smile grazed the corners of his lips. “Can you?”
He was amused? The lout. “You hunt!”
“And you . . . have a problem with hunting?”
She despised it. “It’s cruel,” she said flatly.
“It is the English way.”
Emma’s lips pulled. “Yes, domination is the English way, isn’t it?” she muttered. God spare her from men who conquered. “People don’t go about chasing you—” She stopped herself from completing the remainder of that wholly untrue thought.
He leaned in. “What was that, sweet?”
Sweet. And while the Lord was at it, let him save her from pretty words her former betrothed used on every woman.
“You drink too much,” she said bluntly, getting to the heart of the list she’d composed prior to sending ’round the note to break off their betrothal. “You’re a womanizer.” She’d been but a girl when she discovered he’d gotten a child on a woman who was decidedly not her, and the adoration she’d secretly carried for the free spirit that he’d been had died a swift death. “You wager too much.”
His golden lashes swept down, forming a hood that shielded the thoughts within. “And you pay too much attention to the scandal sheets, so I should say we’re both in possession of our own character deficits, Emma-love.”
Emma-love.
There’d once been a time she’d longed to hear such an endearment from this man’s lips, one that was intimate, reserved just for her. And she didn’t want the sound of her name tangled with that affectionate utterance to have any effect, and certainly not the