A Thoroughly Compromised Lady by Bronwyn Scott Page B

floor, able to strike again if he should uncover another link in the chain leading to the map.
    Jack re-entered the ballroom, scanning the floor for Dulci. He spotted Lord Gilmore leaning against a post alone and made his way to the young man’s side. ‘Have you lost her already, Gilmore?’ he said with an insouciance he didn’t feel.
    Gilmore looked shocked at the insinuation. ‘She needed a moment to herself, Wainsbridge. She went out on to the verandah.’
    Jack moved off, eager to reach the verandah. He was glad to see it fairly empty; spotting Dulci would be easy. Then he looked beyond the railing out into the garden. Good lord, Dulci was out there. With him.
    Suppositions raced through his mind. How much had Vasquez disclosed before he died? Had Vasquez given Ortiz a name? Did Ortiz know already that Dulci possessed the map? Jack prayed he did not. Damnation, ballrooms had become dangerous places.
    They’d also become confining. Jack chafed at the limitations his cir cum stance placed on him. The primal man in him wanted to rush out into the garden and drag Dulci away from Ortiz. But he could not do so without staking a public claim to Dulci, a claim he had no right to entertain. Dulci would not forgive him. And he had no wish to end up like Gladstone: a jilted, grieving suitor. It came as something of a shock to realise just how much the two days he’d spent with Dulci had affected him.
    It had started purely as a protective gambit to keepher out of the public eye. The diplomatic front would not go unmanned in his short absence. Gladstone was out there, after all. But reality had become distorted in Dulci’s arms, time a fluid, infinite entity, the concerns he lived with daily suspended and surreal in the wake of passion invoked by their love-making. There’d even been times he’d forgot about work entirely, an absolute first for him.
    A few couples strolled passed him on the verandah. Jack nodded, but did not encourage pro longed conversation. If the best he could do was play guardian from the steps, then he’d do it with diligence.
    A diligence that stung, Jack reflected. It was deuced hard to play the neutral watchdog. They were too far away for him to hear what they said, but he could see them. He could see Ortiz bend close to whisper something to Dulci. He could see Dulci give her head a coy toss.
    She stole his breath with the simplest of moves. How had she got under his skin so completely, so entirely? Really, the effect she was having on him was quite unprecedented in his experience with women.
    Now that he’d come up for air, had had time to think more objectively about what had transpired between them, he had to wonder—what in sweet heaven was he doing with her? Brandon would skewer him if he knew what his best friend was doing with his sister. But whatever Brandon would do to him for dallying with his sister, it would be far less than what Brandon would do if Jack ever tried to marry her and pull her into the murky in stability of his life. Brandon wanted more for his sister than being dragged from peril to peril in the New World, title or not.
    Of course Jack couldn’t marry her. He wasn’t a marrying man. His work for the king made any kind of real marriage impossible. Jack couldn’t imagine not being able to tell his wife where he went or what he did. The only option was to take a wife who wouldn’t care. Since he couldn’t fathom that cold arrangement, he was left with the last option: not marrying at all.
    And if he couldn’t marry her, he shouldn’t have done it at all. Certainly, Dulci had been adamant in her desires, but he was the one with all the experience. He knew the rules when it came to ladies and maidenheads. Surely he could have stopped their foray into passion’s realm if he’d wanted to. There was the rub.
    As good as it had been, he was plagued by a twinge of guilt. The bottom line was not pretty: