Falling Stars by Loretta Chase Page A

you.”
    Seven years old. That seemed impossible. But it had been ten years since he’d last seen her, and she’d married soon thereafter—a mere three months thereafter, he recalled, with a sting of bitterness that startled him. He retreated another pace.
    “The children didn’t disturb me at all,” he lied. “I was just going down to breakfast.”
    “Then I mustn’t keep you.”
    She moved past him, a breath of scent teasing in her wake. Lavender.
    He’d known many other women who wore lavender. The scent should have conjured up recent memories. Instead, as he stood in the hall listening to her light step fade, the scene opening up in his mind rose from a decade ago.
    It had been late May, a fortnight before Julius’s wedding, and the first group of houseguests had arrived. Julius was taking them on a tour of Greymarch, and he’d nagged Marcus into going along.
    Though acutely aware of Penny’s beautiful friend, Marcus had kept his distance. He detested prim and proper Society, and above all loathed its featherbrained misses, with their virginal white gowns and twittering voices and mincing, mannered ways. The males weren’t much better: a lot of complacent hypocrites among whom not a single original thought could be found.
    While the guests explored the old gatehouse— the Greysons’ Picturesque Ruin, Julius called it— Marcus had gritted his teeth and kept his mouth shut, resolved for Julius’s sake to endure boredom and frustration in silence. Marcus had been leaning against a fir tree, softly whistling the melody of a bawdy song, when Penny’s friend had shyly approached.
    “What is the song?” Christina had asked in that foggy, beckoning voice.
    He had carefully avoided looking at her, because he’d seen what happened to other men who did. In less than twenty-four hours, this eighteen-year-old girl with her platinum hair and silver-blue eyes had effortlessly turned every unattached male at Greymarch into a dithering imbecile.
    Marcus had looked at the gatehouse, the rocks, the trees, and the blue, cloudless sky—anywhere but at her—while he answered acidly that the melody was beneath the notice of good little girls because its composer wasn’t anyone genteel like Haydn or even Rossini.
    “Oh,” she’d said. Only that, and she was just backing away—as he’d believed he wanted—when the spring breeze carried the lavender scent to his nostrils. It had swirled into his brain—and, dizzy, he’d looked down and watched her face slowly turning to profile, her eyes downcast so that the long lashes almost brushed her cheek. He’d watched her soft mouth turn downward ever so slightly, then saw his hand reaching to touch her muslin sleeve, while he heard his voice gentling as he said, “Shall I whistle Rossini instead?”
    She had turned back, lifting doubtful blue eyes to his. Then, in the space from one heartbeat to the next, the moment of her silver-blue gaze sweeping up to meet his, he’d tumbled headlong into love... and two weeks later, into heartbreak.
    Marcus recoiled from the memory as though it had been a physical blow. The present swung back sharply into focus.
    Christina Travers was nothing to him, he told himself as he headed for the stairs. He’d scarcely thought of her in years. Young men fell in love every day, and had their hearts broken, or else they got their hearts’ desire and wed. Some lived happily ever after—as Julius had—but more often they existed with their wives in a state of stultifying boredom or endless quarrel.
    Christina had wed wealth and comfort—as she’d been reared to do, Marcus was well aware. According to gossip, she’d lived in virtual seclusion in the Lake District ever since, while he’d spent seven of the last ten years abroad. Had he encountered her in the interim, today’s meeting wouldn’t have disconcerted him. His strong physical reaction and his mind’s reversion to the past were confused responses to the unexpected... and to her